I grew up around guns. So why am I anti-NRA?
I am preoccupied with the two mass shooting tragedies in El Paso and Dayton. My own family is split right down the middle about gun laws, especially about private ownership of automatic weapons. One son is pro-gun, one is anti-gun and one is in the middle. We usually avoid the issue, which brings me to the question of why am I so anti-NRA and automatic weapons when I grew up with responsible gun owners, guns and hunting all around me?
I grew up in Kentucky, where most of the men I knew were sport hunters and fishermen. My family did eat the game and fish that my older brother brought home, but I could never get over seeing the poor dead rabbits hanging from his belt and I refused to come to the table when one was being served. Fish were a little different for me because I never had fish as pets. I remember my brother teaching me how to shoot a BB gun and I also remember a couple of times being coached to fire his shotgun and the hard kick in the shoulder by the recoil. Mostly, though I enjoyed the times with my brother and the woods and streams that we tramped through together. I remember one time when he was teaching me to cast with a rod and reel, I accidentally threw his rod in the lake where it quickly sank to the bottom.
My next memory of guns is the pistol my father kept in his chifforobe drawer with a sock full of bullets. I don’t know anything about pistols and all I can say about the one he had was that it had a rotating cylinder which becomes important long after I had grown and married and moved away from home. My father taught me to respect the pistol and to leave it alone in his drawer. I don’t think he ever used it.
Later, when my father was in a nursing home and my 90-year-old mother was living alone in our family home in Kentucky, I visited her with my four young children. She was still hard-headed, independent and spent much of her time in bed reading. I recognized my father’s pistol and the sock with the bullets on her bedside table and, being alarmed because I knew she didn’t know how to use it plus the fact that she was sometimes disoriented, I slipped the pistol out of her room. I didn’t know how to check the cylinder to see if it was loaded, so I gingerly took it to my brother to have him look at it. There were no bullets in it! I quietly returned it to her bedside table, without the sock and bullets, thinking she could do no harm with it and, maybe, it gave her some comfort while living alone. At least she couldn’t shoot herself or the servants.
I have lived alone for many years and despite my house having been robbed a couple of times, I have never wanted to have a gun around, especially for the safety of my young grandchildren. After reviewing my mixed and limited experience with guns, I find that I am still on the side of much tougher gun laws and universal background checks before purchase. I believe that access to militarystyle weapons is as important a factor in the mass shootings as is mental health.