On Guns and Their Control ~ A Gun Tale

Greetings Dear Reader,

If you read my writings regularly you know that I grew up in Georgia.  I am proud of most of my southern heritage.  We are not the ignorant sloths that we are sometimes depicted as.  It is also true that stereotypes spring from something.

When I was a boy my Grandfather, a retired police officer, taught me to shoot.  He taught me how to respect and handle guns.  I had to learn to clean and store them before I ever learned to load and shoot.  There were rules and I knew to obey them.  I practiced for hours shooting clothes pins from a wire with my BB gun.  I graduated to a .22 when I could hit 22 clothes pins from twenty yards away without breaking any of them.  The trick was to hit them at the bottom so that they would spin around the wire. 

After a summer of practice and hard work I was taken hunting.  I used a .410/.22 Savage.  Later in the fall I graduated to a bolt action .410 with a five-round capacity and a .22 semi-automatic which held ten 22-long rounds.  After the day’s hunting, if I had obeyed all of the gun rules I was allowed to fire my Grandfather’s 30/30 Winchester and his 20-gauge shotgun at the targets behind the farm house.

I was seven years old.  That same year I took shooting classes in my elementary school.  I also learned to shoot a bow and how to hunt with one.  There really were gun racks in pickup trucks and people did hunt before and after school.  My story of learning and shooting is not an uncommon one. 

There were not school shootings.  We were somehow different.  I am not saying that there is not a problem to be addressed.  I will not, however, blame the presence of guns.  It does not scan.  We can rant and rave all we want about the presence of guns being the problem but the truth is that this is not the problem. 

If we do not deal with the truth then nothing will get solved.  We need to remember how to teach discipline and respect to our children.  We must embrace the idea the we have changed as a society in some ways that are not good.

I must deal in truth not conjecture.  The truth is that we have lost a level of respect for each other, for authority, and for life.  I am not sure what the answer is but removing the medium of our expression of our own failings is never the problem.  Prohibition does not stop a thing from existing.  It does drive that thing into the shadows where it becomes aligned with other problems. 

Until we realize that the problem of violence is in us we will not change.  Until we embrace that we do not treat each other the way we should things will only get worse.  I long for the day when no one causes harm to another human.  That is the problem that exists daily whether there are guns present or not.

Wishing you joy in the journey,

Aramis Thorn

Mat 13:52 So Jesus said to them, "That is why every writer who has become a disciple of Christ’s rule of the universe is like a home owner. He liberally hands out new and old things from his great treasure store.”

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