(Accessories available for the Bushmaster AR-15 similar to the one carried by the shooter in the Sandy Hook shootings. Barrels under 15” require approval by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and are not legal in all states. Photo Bushmaster.com)

I wonder what is going to happen in the wake of the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut.

I mean, this is beyond horror. I served the Nation nearly thirty years with the intent of protecting the helpless from the depredations of those who would do us harm, and now there is one of us, a sick sick young man whose own death is of little consequence, had he just had the simple courtesy to keep his pain to himself.

So, as I watched the President last night I tried to think through what will happen when he applies all the powers of his office to the solution.

I am in favor of the mentally ill being prohibited fro the ownership of guns. Aren’t you? Isn’t any empathetic citizen going to agree? Airen’t they already?

I was listening to Meg Griffin, the afternoon jock on Sirius satellite radio, and possibly a distant relative through my Irish side. I was coming back up from the farm yesterday afternoon. It was gray and spritzing rain and chill when I had the window down. The heated seats in the Panzer are a treat- if Mercedes had built such conveniences into the real panzerkampfwagens, I am reasonably confident the Germans could have taken Moscow with comfort to spare.

But I digress.

Anyway, Megless (her on-air nickname) spins a mean platter and her eclectic selection spans most of the pop genres and gets me rolling. She is in the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame for her tuneful selections. Yesterday though, she linked the songs with rants about guns. She is a Mom, I think, since Tom Petty once stopped an on-air interview to gawk at her radiant and fulsome pregnancy.

I think I understand the visceral nature of her revulsion with the crime that took those innocent little kids. I can’t even begin to imagine the other side of the fierce parental instinct to protect your child. Can’t.

Megless was right there. “Guns are too easy to get at the shopping mall,” she declared with her voice dripping in contempt. “This is madness,” she said in another bridge between segments of roots music.

I can’t say that I disagree in principle. We appear to be in the midst of a collective arms race. A woman I know who lives out in the Mild West, Mormon-country, wrote me eloquently about the role of guns in her life.

She grew up in Denver, Colorado, a charter member of the original baby-boom cohort born in the wake of the second installment of the Great War. She remembers that a natural part of every year’s rhythm were the annual hunts for pheasant and elk, in which her father and every man she knew, participated.

Every year, she recalled, these men would take out their rifles, ammunition, tent, sleeping bag, Coleman lanterns, cook-stove and ice chest, load up the station wagons and head for the mountains.
They would stay out there a week or more, camping at night and hunting during the day. The elk they brought down were hauled on their backs up and down the mountains of the Front Range, dressed out at the campsite and then hung up to age when they returned home. The packaged meat provided food through the Colorado winter for the families.

I recall being Up North as a kid, and seeing the deer lashed to the fenders of the cars, headed back down below during the season. Those animals were the first experience with the real death I saw, rolling by the windows of the family station wagon.

In my friend’s experience, the possession of guns was “a natural part of life, not a religion.  People didn’t worship the gun.” Her father had only two long guns that were kept locked away, out of sight.  “No way did my brother or I have access to them, or to ammunition. The guns were merely a means to providing food for the table.”

She views what had happened over the last couple decades as a sort of civilian arms race. She says: “No man I ever knew continually upgraded their hunting rifle.  There were no repeating guns then.  There were no assault weapons.  While there were pistols, no man in my extended family or among my friends owned a pistol.  The guns they owned were to hunt large game for food.  Not for sport.  Not for a hobby. Not for carrying as a concealed weapon.  Not for sporting around on the back of a pick-up truck’s window…Guns were just a part of life that came into play only during hunting season, when people hunted the hard, old fashioned way, for their game.”
Like her, I am sad beyond words at what has become of our society today.  She believes that gun laws must be changed. The President believes that, too. Enough is enough!”

So there is one call. I got another one from a pal who is a mother in Alaska. No concealed carry permit is needed in that state. The Constitution itself, and its Second Amendment is deemed sufficient authority for citizens to go about armed. Quite the contrary to my somewhat sardonic quip that “an armed society is a polite society,” she observes that people just settle their differences on a higher velocity level out on the trail, or in the few urban enclaves. “Not that polite,” she says.

So, the spectrum of opinion in the wake of the tragedy ranges from an outright ban on guns, favored by Megless, to respect for hunting tradition from another, though with significant modification, to the observation that guns don’t make people more polite, just more deadly.

My pal in Utah thinks that the right to own high-capacity automatic weapons should be restricted. “There can only be one purpose for the guns with magazines that allow 100 bullets to be fired without reloading…. And I don’t think that purpose has anything to do with the Framer’s intent when they wrote the Second Amendment.”

I respect that view completely. I also think the sensationalism about the hundred-round magazine is a media hype. They tend to jam, just as the one that psychopath in Aurora tried to use did, enabling Law Enforcement to take him down.

The Second Amendment is not about hunting. That would have gone without comment back then- not even a topic of discussion. The issue was about King George.

We will have to explore that tomorrow, and the whole “well-regulated militia” part of that awkward parsed phrase. The Constitution and its amendments pre-dates the establishment of the United States Army, after all.

Maybe it is time to talk about what it means, and whether the People can be trusted. Obviously, not all of them can.

So what do we do?

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com