To take up arms
Ferguson case seems inevitable
If my Army documents from 196768 still exist in a Pentagon file somewhere, they should record my exemplary skill as a marksman.
During basic training at Fort Knox, Ky., I qualified as “expert” with an M-14 rifle on the shooting test required to graduate. That was the highest of three rankings.
At the time my skill seemed startling, because I had never before fired a weapon with live ammunition. And I haven’t done so again since I was honorably discharged 46 years ago, having blessedly never been shipped to Vietnam.
Now I live in a state where possessing and using weapons is ingrained in everyday life. If you have any doubt, check out the photos in this newspaper’s Sunday editions of smiling boys and girls proudly posing with the deer they’ve shot.
The pleasure derived from killing an unarmed animal escapes me. But I am certainly a hypocrite in that regard. My wife and I regularly consume the beef and pork hacked from cows and pigs slaughtered in crueler fashion than any hunter could devise.
—————— So what, you may be asking, does any of this have to do with Monday’s decision by a grand jury in Missouri? The jurors chose not to indict a white Ferguson police officer for shooting an unarmed young black man earlier this year in a widely trumpeted case.
To my mind, when officer Darren Wilson fired a volley of fatal shots at Michael Brown, his reaction reflected a prudent law-enforcement mindset in a nation armed to the teeth. Brown was brandishing no weapon, but who knows what he might have pulled out of his pocket at any second?
This is not to excuse the shooting. Had I been on the grand jury, based on my very limited knowledge of the circumstances, I quite possibly would have voted to indict. Then a trial jury could have decided the matter beyond a reasonable doubt.
If I aim to make a provocative point here, it is my belief that this case reflects the stretching of the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment to a point of near-lunacy. I’m talking about the perspective, relentlessly propagated by the National Rifle Association, that the virtually unlimited right to bear arms trumps everything else.
In a nation with close to 300 million registered firearms (roughly 90 weapons for every 100 people), a policeman has a very good reason to expect that anyone he confronts will be lethally armed.
The policeman, of course, is also lethally armed. Every now and then, as in the Ferguson case, fatal gunplay will ensue.
But, hey, this is the American way of life—purportedly guaranteed by the founding fathers. And how out of proportion is it anyway to have a country so thoroughly blanketed with weapons?
In fact, figures posted on Wikipedia indicate that the U.S. ratio of 90 guns for each 100 residents leads the world by several furlongs.
No. 2 is Serbia, at 58 per 100 residents. No. 3 is Yemen, at 55. Now there are a couple of nations to emulate.
No. 4 is Switzerland, at 46. But the vast majority of its weapons are in the hands of adult males who form its virtually universal militia—which may well have been the original point of our Second Amendment.
In some other prominent nations, here are the guns-to-people figures: France, 31 per 100 residents. Canada, 31. Germany, 30. Australia, 15. Italy, 12. Russia, 9. Israel, 7. England, 6. The Netherlands, 4.
Were I inclined to seek public office in Arkansas, the fact that I have rarely if ever voted for a Republican over the past 50 years would be a towering barrier.
Even worse, if asked to prove my fitness to serve the people of this gun-packing state, my Fort Knox sharpshooting skills would long since have deserted me. I’d be lucky to hit the side of a chicken shed.
To switch metaphors, as with my views on gun ownership, I’d be spitting into a gale-force wind.