"My Son Died by Gunfire, But I Bought a Gun"

Okay, so I read this thread & the linked article on Sunday. It has been kind of rolling around in my head off & on since then. I'm not going to reread it so I can find the exact quote but he said that it occurred to him that he & another person were looking at things 180 degrees from each other. I think he believes that the government can take care of him, that simply by passing laws we can take away the ability of evil people to harm us. I suspect the majority of us here do not believe that.
As far as his issues with not being able to give the teachers enough training to be able to be effective. I tend to believe that untrained people have been using firearms to defend themselves for many years & many of them have done quite a good job of it. I'm not knocking training I believe anything we can do to better prepare ourselves is good. I don't believe that a person without formal training should be written considered ineffective either.
It is almost like the difference between people in urban areas & those that live in rural areas. The people in urban areas are used to goods & services being readily available. Those that live in more rural circumstances tend know they need to take steps to take care of themselves because they are on their own. In short he is unwilling to accept the fact that there was nothing that anyone could do to stop what happened to his son.
Sorry if I rambled.

When I was 12 years old my 11 year old brother was shot and killed by his friend. You see, his friend, also 11, had just passed his Pennsylvania hunting course and gotten a used Marlin 336 30-30 as a gift to use on his first hunt with his father. He wanted to show my brother how cool it was and how the rounds ejected when cycling the lever. He loaded the gun, he levered a round into the chamber and then the phone rang. He answered, talked to his brother for a minute or two and as he was hanging up the phone he banged the buttstock into the stair bannister. The gun fired and the bullet struck my brother in the left temple. He died instantly. My brother’s friend was never the same after that. The poor kid spent many years in therapy and in and out of mental facilities.

It was determined that the rifle had “a hair trigger” and that the bump against the bannister was all that was needed to release the hammer.

The boy had access to the gun and the ammo. His Mom had left him and my brother home alone to run a quick errand. He knew he wasn’t allowed to touch the gun or the ammo but Mom wasn’t home, what would be the harm? She’d never find me out...

Myself, I lost my brother, my best friend, that day. I never blamed the gun. For a while I blamed my brother’s friend and his family. After a little while I forgave him. He was a kid being a kid. The whole thing was a perfect storm of tragedy. No one thing resulted in my brother’s death but a series of things all intertwined.

My parents hated guns after that. My Dad was a hunter and liked plinking. He got rid of his guns. After a few years he started buying guns again, but very much against my mother’s wishes. For a long time my parents hated the family that took their son. My Dad thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t hate them.

I had a fascination with guns from the first time I saw one as a little boy. My fascination never waned but after my brother’s death I had a deep respect for guns. I never feared them as I saw them as a tool, a mechanism, a deadly implement that could be used for good or bad.

Like someone said before, do people hate the airplane because terrorists used it for destruction? Hating an inanimate objects for the actions of humans is immature, stupid and ignorant. In my opinion.

It fascinates me that supposedly educated people hate guns because of crimes committed, but then I think there is something more sinister in their hate. I think it’s not so much hate as it is manipulation. If they can manipulate others it feeds their ego and their faux outrage builds support to further their manipulation and egoism.

EDIT: I am not referring to the man in the article in regards to my last statements. I am talking about political and media types.

Hooda Thunkit said:

It wants me to purchase a subscription to read the article.

I'm not giving money to the NYT.

Click to expand...

All sites put cookies in a folder on your computer. You can go to that folder and delete all of the NYT cookies . Every time you go to the NYT`s web site they look there to see how many articles you have read for free. After 5 or 10 you are cut off.

If the carpenters building your house did a poor job you would not blame the tools.

GAF said:

If the carpenters building your house did a poor job you would not blame the tools.

Click to expand...

GAF, Excellent point and very well said. I plan to remember this statement and use it, and give you credit, of course. Thank you.

Insignificant bill said:

You can't have a rational discussion with people who don't know what they are talking about.

Click to expand...

I told an anti gun friend I'd been reading more and more about the flat Earth theory and was starting to see their point. How easy it is to photoshop pictures to look round, how they whole space thing was probably faked. They started using real logic about how wrong I was. I stayed adamant. For about 10 minutes. Then I said "We'll just have to agree to disagree." quoting her last comment to me a few months ago when I was telling her facts about guns and gun legislation. She continued trying to "educate me". I finally said, "Oh, I know, I just wanted to demonstrate how frustrating it is to try to present facts to someone who refuses to listen."
Did it do any good? <shrug> Still can't get her to agree to go to the range.

DeepSouth said:

I find that interesting mainly because I am likely that guy. The guy that doesn’t see the connection between my enjoyment of guns and the “gun violence” of which he speaks, for better or worse that’s probably me.

Click to expand...

Very much me as well. I see no connection to my enjoying a beer or a couple of fingers of sourmash after work and the wino on the corner. They tried banning alcohol once upon a time and it made a lot of (without naming names or groups) rumrunners rich and powerful. People either obeyed the law or not, as was their wont. The only good thing to come out of prohibition was women got the right to vote. But I digress.

To think that guns can't be smuggled across our borders somehow is naive in the extreme. There are always folks quite willing to step up and fill a want regardless of the legality of the thing wanted. It amazes me that no one on the anti side is calling for better application and implementation of our existing laws.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chicag...n-weekend-fueled-by-gang-disputes-police-say/

More than one murderer so no attention paid?

Seems the writers confidence has received a point of frustration. Like all of us he is interested in reducing the violence. Now that he has found a small amount of enjoyment from gun ownership he has reached a new understanding. Further pushing his anti agenda just became much more difficult.

FlSwampRat said:

Very much me as well. I see no connection to my enjoying a beer or a couple of fingers of sourmash after work and the wino on the corner. They tried banning alcohol once upon a time and it made a lot of (without naming names or groups) rumrunners rich and powerful. People either obeyed the law or not, as was their wont. The only good thing to come out of prohibition was women got the right to vote. But I digress.

To think that guns can't be smuggled across our borders somehow is naive in the extreme. There are always folks quite willing to step up and fill a want regardless of the legality of the thing wanted. It amazes me that no one on the anti side is calling for better application and implementation of our existing laws.

Click to expand...

because their goal is no guns.

Ttrl

Being so intimately involved with such a tragedy can cloud someones judgement, and just because someone can sling lead on target doesn't make them right. I didn't read the article, so I'm not making any assumptions on what was said, my statement can apply to anything.