The Wild Wild West

When I was a kid, we ran and roamed all over our neighborhood. We had one corner lot for baseball, another for football, and woods for adventure games – cowboys and Indians, hide and go seek, and our imitation version of a popular tell-a-vision show, “The Wild Wild West” fantasy program, sort of James Bond goes back in history to the American frontier. The hero, James West, was the handsome 007-type, and his sidekick Artemus was both an inventor and master of disguise. The good guys always won.

In our neighborhood, one family forbade their seven children to play with toy guns. Another kid down the block had a flintlock pistol. Most of us made do with clothespins holding twigs. Some of my schoolmates had dads who hunted. A sensational murder occurred at a bank robbery several blocks away. But we never imagined kids getting shot down at school. Or worshippers in a church, or shoppers in a mall, or folks in a movie house or a nightclub. Our wild, wild west was make-believe. Parents were not afraid to let their kids play outside.

Not so anymore. I worry for my daughter the schoolteacher, my son, who takes a midnight ramble for his mandatory break from his all-night job. What if I go into Berryville Wal-Mart and some nut starts shooting?

Some of the pundit class want to categorize us as urban sophisticates who clash with gun-toting guys in the rural south. I ain’t buying it.

I live in the country; we hear gunshots all the time. People hunt, shoot varmints, do target practice. No one locks their doors, we never feel unsafe. Not so when I lived in New Orleans. One friend was car-jacked at gunpoint in broad daylight. My dad heard gunfire in the apartment next to his – a jealous husband shot at the guy in bed with his wife. We moved my dad out of there, to Hammond, Louisiana, the college town where we then lived. It wasn’t crime-free, but it was significantly safer than the safe New Orleans neighborhood where Dad lived. He could walk to the grocery, drugstore, post office, hardware store, eateries and bars.

We have since continued moving farther from “civilization.” We have few neighbors, but they are all good people. They help us out in crazy weather, give us produce from their gardens, help with big work when we need help. One neighbor does not allow hunting on his property, but my wife saw him put down an injured cow. One of his rodeo partners complained, “I know you got guns – shoot them armadillos!” Another neighbor does shoot them armadillos, and coyotes, and deer in season. Last year he had a friend visiting during turkey season. The friend shot his limit, but our neighbor chose not to fire.

Owning guns in the country makes sense, if you are protecting your garden, or your chickens, hunting food or shooting a wounded cow. Target practice, or collecting interesting guns – the way my wife and I collect stringed instruments – also makes sense.

Driving 650 miles to gun down people in an El Paso Wal-Mart is inexcusable. After the innumerable and copy-cat mass shootings of the late Obama years, officials offered their platitudes – “thoughts and prayers,” not “time to talk about guns,” or “it’s a mental health problem.”

My neighbors own guns. But they do not use them on people. If it is a mental health issue, let’s license people who are rational enough to use guns. Guns are tools, as are cars. We license people to demonstrate that they can use a car correctly. It isn’t failsafe, but few people intentionally kill others with their cars.

If we outlaw guns, it isn’t true that only outlaws will have guns. Maybe the population of nutcases with guns will be reduced. If we outlaw guns whose only purpose is killing other people, maybe we won’t see attacks in schools, church, synagogues, temples, Wal-Mart. Maybe the good guys won’t get shot down for some idiot’s version of death-by-cop.

Kirk Ashworth