Friday, April 27, 2007
Fewer, not more guns
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Harry F. Hambrick Jr.
Hambrick lives in Roanoke.
Do you want to live in an America where you feel you have to provide a handgun to your sons or daughters for them to be safe in college or high school classrooms? Would you want to carry a firearm every time you go to the grocery store, to the shopping mall, to church or to any public place? If not everywhere you go, how will you know when the armed madman or criminal might appear?
Would you and your family be willing to practice handling and shooting a gun so that you might have some realistic chance of defending yourself against an armed criminal? Will you need a 9 mm handgun with a 15-round clip so you won't be outgunned by an armed criminal? Will you need a bulletproof vest, or armor-piercing bullets in case the criminal is wearing a vest?
Or would you feel content to rely on gun enthusiasts like those who write to this newspaper, hoping that they will be there and that they will be as good with a gun as they think they are?
If the opportunity to carry firearms in public places is such a valuable right, why aren't more of us actually doing it?
The tragedy at Virginia Tech is so sad and personal that it feels wrong to talk about anything other than the overwhelming fact that people lost their lives. But perhaps it is more wrong now not to talk about guns in America.
I believe the answer is fewer guns, not more guns. The idea of an armed citizenry may have made some sense in Colonial times. Today, it is madness.
I also believe that America is on an irreversible path to stricter gun control similar to the paths that every other civilized nation has followed. Demographic changes and advances in technology are altering rural lifestyles. The mere passage of time distances us from the overly romanticized, Wild West attitudes that produce these self-professed rugged individualists who believe in self-help by gun, instead of relying on our trained police forces as the rest of us, collectively, democratically, have chosen.
Effective gun control will be extreme gun control, and it may very well require the repeal of the Second Amendment and the reconstitution of the current Supreme Court. If it is to happen sooner rather than later, it will require that wives and mothers and young people have the strength of will and conviction to oppose and stand up to those mostly old men who are not going to change their minds about guns.
It won't happen in my lifetime, probably not in my children's lifetimes. But it will happen, and America will be a better place when it does.
