Adele Ferguson-`Must do something' does not guarantee safety

I’VE LIVED around guns all my life.

My father was career Army, and when I was a kid, my brothers and sisters and I learned to hoist up a heavy service rifle, as well as a .22, and shoot cans off fence posts during the short times we lived in the country, rather than in barracks buildings where your neighbor wasn’t just next door, he was through the wall.

We were taught early that guns never came off the closet top shelf except in the hands of my father. Anyone who dared touch one otherwise risked being blown to smithereens because only he knew the secret of avoiding that.

My household today is probably typical of many, particularly in the western states, with a hunting rifle, a .22 rifle, a shotgun and a pistol. For years I have opposed the registration of guns, i.e., requiring all gun owners to hand over to the government a list of the types and serial numbers of the weapons they own. I believed then and now that registration of weapons is a move toward confiscation.

THE HORRIFIC slaughter of 20 first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Conn., preceded by the shooter’s slaying of his mother and followed by his own suicide, has kicked off a slew of calls for more restrictions on guns, in particular semi-automatics or assault rifles.

The last time I joined in a similar call I received over 100 letters from readers, mostly men, and mostly urging me to ceases and desist. Americans have a constitutional right to gun ownership, they said, given by their forefathers to enable them to resist their own government is need be.

I maintain today as I did then that anyone who needs a semi-automatic rifle to hunt game shouldn’t be granted a license. I don’t think a semi-automatic is the weapon for protection in the home either. The danger of spraying bullets inside a home is too great. Yet these school shootings have been occurring periodically for almost the last 50 years, beginning with the gunman who shot 16 people and wounded 31 from the clock towner at the University of Texas in 1966.

THE NEWTOWN shootings were the subject of every Sunday talk show with suggestions ranging from more gun control to requiring or allowing every school campus from elementary on up to have at least one armed personnel on board to allowing more than one to carry concealed weapons. Most schools are required by state laws to be gun free.

One man whose business is training law enforcement officials how to handle situations like Newtown said teachers should also receive such training. The principal at Newtown and one of the teachers lunged at the shooter, he said, which only got them killed and wasn’t what they could or should have done.

Some people say it’s not about guns but mental illness and a potential killer will just use some other means if guns are not available. Some critics blame Hollywood and its penchant for violence in movies with guns of all kinds. Others put the finger on violent video games.

I am inclined to believe too many parents of kids with mental problems don’t monitor them sufficiently to know how dangerous they could be, like how interested they are in ownership of guns or what bugs them. The mother of the Newtown shooter herself sounds as if she was as paranoid as her son.

I do know that we’ll hear an increased demand from people that “something” be done “so this won’t happen again.” But you know as well as I that it will.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, WA 98340.)