In a strange sort of way, some who may suffer most over America’s “gun thing,” may be the harmless hobbyists, hunters, and enthusiasts.

Although I am not one, I have no great bone to pick with these folks. Some probably don’t collect banjos. To each his own I say, as I down my morning glass of buttermilk and listen to Schubert.

I view it this way. There will come a time when mothers get fed up with seeing the cold corpses of their children spread across the schoolyard. Then they will act. It won’t be because of the killing that happened this week. It won’t be the one after, nor the next one, perhaps not even the one after. The NRA won’t allow it as long as its coffers overflow and some politicians have deep hands.

But it will happen someday. Just wait and see. There will come a day when the “butcher’s bill” gets too great. And those who read history, in states where it is still revered and taught, will remember what happens when mothers get mad enough against something.

Then what will happen? There won’t be a discussion then. It will be too late for one, not too soon as the “auto-response” button puts it. Grab a history book and look up the Volstead Act of 1919, then tell me Americans won’t go to extremes when it suits them.

When that happens, as the scriptures tell us, the rain will fall on the just and the unjust. Good, decent people, of whom I am blessed to know many, will suffer along with the thugs who run the National Rifle Association, the manufacturers who own them, and the once-majority of politicians. It won’t be pretty.

What happened? How did we get into this mess? I believe good people were sold a bad bill of goods. Moreover, they failed to sense the betrayal from what once was a benign organization that taught young kids—I was one—the value of safe and sane firearms usage. Too many stayed in its ranks until it has become the tool of the purveyors of death.  Good people make bad decisions. Why?

Things change, sometimes so gradually that we don’t notice. Who can pinpoint the exact date when that benign organization became the evil, blood-soaked empire that it is today? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that innocent owners of firearms, who simply wanted to collect, hunt, compete, or protect their homes, stayed latched onto the NRA like it was the Pied Piper. And, as in that cautionary tale, blind followers may ultimately face the same end.

It will be a shame, for many going over that cliff will be, as I say, kind, generous, good-hearted people, but last seen holding hands with the imbeciles that carry loaded assault rifles into Walmart, our schools, churches, or other gatherings of the innocent.

I have said it before, and I’ll say it again. I don’t want your firearms. I already have some that I have inherited and don’t know what to do with. I don’t want to take any away from you, and I don’t recall right off hearing anyone else with half a brain proposing to. I simply don’t care what you do inside your home, the deep woods, or in a spot designated for discharging weapons of destruction.

If you simply can’t abide the thought, yeah there may be some, of not using your firearm to kill another human, be aware that the military is scraping the bottom of the barrel in its recruitment efforts. Your enlistment might postpone the ultimate return of the draft one more day. (Full disclosure: the animals hunted by the military do shoot back).

I just want to talk to you about not elevating your gun to the status of a religious icon. Religious icons have wreaked havoc on our planet for eons, from the fate of the Midianites to the destruction of the Twin Towers. It’s time we put those aside.

I just want reasonable people with different points of view to sit and discuss ways to prevent the carnage, and don’t say it won’t work. It works in other countries. Don’t say our “founding fathers” were infallible when they wrote the Constitution. If they were, many of my friends would still be counted as three-fifths of a human and my wife couldn’t vote at all. And let us all bear in mind that if it had been the “founding mothers” we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Imagine reasonable people sitting down to discuss a solution to a festering sore that is slaughtering our innocents. I think it could happen. Call me a dreamer if you wish, but “I’m not the only one.”

And it’s not to soon. Just a few more slaughterings, however, and it will be too late.

Grandmothers get mad too.
Best not risk it.