Congress could stop it, but mesmerized by the cobra’s darting tongue, Congress freezes in the face of danger.
In a recent article in the New York Daily News, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) traces the Senate’s gun paralysis to April 17, “one of the most deeply disappointing days of my short time in the Senate.”
That was the day, Gillibrand writes, when the Senate “turned its back on the families of Aurora, Newtown, and the more than 30 people who die at the hands of gun violence every day when common-sense gun safety laws were filibustered by a minority of senators.”
Gillibrand uses the term “iron pipeline” to describe the flow of illegal guns across the country. Recently, New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said 250 weapons from states along the pipeline were seized on city streets.
According to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, 90 percent of the firearms used in gun crimes in New York City came from out of state in 2011, compared with 85 percent in 2009, and at least 90 percent of these guns are bought through the black market run by traffickers.
“While Congress fails to act on a federal statute making gun trafficking a crime, criminal networks continue to brazenly act like it’s business as usual,” Gillibrand writes.
I suspect some politicians who favor the free flow of guns believe they are courting the segment of society in which I was born, the yokel class Garrison Keillor calls the "Yahootude."
These politicians must have poll numbers showing their largesse will make us Yahoos all weak-kneed with appreciation and maybe even fire a few celebratory rounds in the air. But as an erstwhile hunter, marksman and card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association, I wonder if they're right.
By way of full disclosure, my father - a WWII infantry lieutenant with an Army marksman's badge - was ambivalent about guns. A veteran of the bloody Papua New Guinea campaign, Dad had little patience with gunplay, imaginary or real.
One Christmas when my brother Larry and I were very young, he bought us cowboy hats and Roy Rogers cap pistols, but he insisted that we not point them at each other. (Dude! What else can you do with a cap pistol?)
Later, in a real-life prologue to Jean Shepherd's A Christmas Story, Dad gave me a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200 shot range model air rifle. I did not put my eye out. Dad carefully designed a BB range in the cellar, with side-guards and padded backdrops so we could safely shoot at targets. That didn't last long, because my little brother accidently shot one of his friends with a BB and gave him a redundant nipple. That must have been quite a conversation piece when the kid started dating. I never saw the air rifle again.
As I grew into early teen-dom, Dad and I had our share of father-son disputes, but the only thing he absolutely forbade was my participation in an organized war game in the woods between Cedar and North streets. (There were a lot of woods and few streets in Morrisville, N.Y.) The game was harmless enough, actually a 1950s precursor to paintball, without the paintballs. About 20 of us teenagers would divide into two warring teams. You knew you were dead when a soldier on the opposing team saw you hiding in the trees and shouted, "Pow! Phil!" The rules required that you lay in the pine needles among the spiders until the war was over. For some reason that eludes me now, I thought it was fun.
The very idea of a war game gave Dad a chill, and in unequivocal terms he declared me a conscientious objector. Later, when I learned some of the details of his combat experiences in the New Guinea jungle, I understood, but at the time I thought he was being arbitrary and unreasonable.
Even so, guns were not a problem to Dad's way of thinking - only the frivolous and stupid use of them. When I turned 14 and expressed an interest in hunting, he didn't flinch. He pulled out the .22 rifle his father had given him and said it would be perfect for target practice and small game. Then he went to the local chapter of the National Rifle Association and got himself credentialed as a gun safety instructor. He took me up to the woods and set up paper targets, all of them mounted on thick trees that the rounds could not penetrate.
Then before he gave me the rifle he presented me with my first NRA card and told me to read the gun safety instructions on the back. The rules included logical precautions like keeping the gun unloaded when it wasn't in use, and -loaded or unloaded - never pointing it at anything you didn't intend to shoot.
The NRA also insisted that you keep your finger off the trigger when you weren't about to shoot, to know your target and what was beyond it, and - vital in our neck of the woods - to never climb a fence with the gun in your arms. Modern updates to the rules include wearing goggles and ear protection when you fire a gun, but that never occurred to us in 1960.
As time went on, Dad offered the same training to all my brothers and my sister. I took the .22, and later a 20-gauge shotgun, into the woods a few times, originally for fun and later because wandering in the woods without a gun looked a bit effete. I rarely shot an animal, not because I didn't shoot at them but because rabbits and pheasants (and rats at the dump) are very good at eluding your aim. On the rare occasion that I shot something, even a rat, I found it a nauseating experience and I quickly lost interest in the whole gun thing.
Dad's training did serve me well when I joined the Air Force. I was comfortable around the M-1 carbine and could shoot it accurately enough to earn the Air Force expert marksmen's ribbon, the only decoration I earned for doing something other than showing up. But by the time I had spent hundreds of lonely hours on guard duty on a USAFE base in England, my interest in firearms ebbed.
During my time in England, I once sat next to a major's wife on a bus trip to London. I regarded officer's wives as an inaccessibly superior species, but she was also a beautiful young woman with a seductive Alabama accent. She may have sensed the crush I had on her because she talked constantly about her husband, an F4C fighter pilot. "He's just mah AH-ll," she said, batting her eyelashes as I tried to look pleased. A few weeks later, the major accidentally shot and killed her while cleaning his pistol (or so he claimed). But I didn't blame the gun. I blamed the damn fool for not following simple NRA guidelines.
Growing up in Madison County, New York, was certainly a gun-intensive experience. In the 18 years I spent there, I learned that guns were fun when used right, and bad when used stupidly. And they were used stupidly at times. During hunting season, you'd hear stories of errant rounds whizzing past people's heads or into their laundry because distant hunters weren't following NRA rules. And Uncle Bob (the deer hunter in my family) would warn us with widening eyes not to shoot a gun straight into the air no matter what we were celebrating, because the damn bullets tended to come back in the same direction. He never told us how he knew that.
But those of us who grew up in the sticks - in the Yahootude - understand that guns were an essential tool in the building of the nation, and continue to be a wholesome and enjoyable instrument for recreational activities like hunting, skeet shooting and target practice.
We may not be able to argue the legal nuances of the Second Amendment with Congressional experts. But don't be fooled by the way we wear our baseball caps backward or smear oil on our noses when we lube our cars. We're not dumb.
And most folks I know will tell you: allowing an unrestricted flow of illegal guns along the iron pipeline is a dumbass idea.
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