When did we lose our minds?

We witness mass shooting after mass shooting, followed by talk, talk, talk

We had a copy of the Bill of Rights on the classroom wall when I was in the fourth grade. One day, our teacher took us through it, explaining what each amendment meant. When she came to the Second Amendment, she explained that our country had once been wilder and woolier than it was now. That didn’t mean you could own a tommy gun, and the boys should stop making tommy gun noises now.

We had a neighbor who owned an elephant gun. I never saw him fire it. I don’t think I ever saw the gun. His wife got it for him as a gag gift. He kept it in a closet or an attic someplace, because there aren’t that many elephants in Pittsburgh’s East End. But if a rogue bull had come charging down Shady Avenue, he would have been prepared.

I suppose other people on our street owned hunting rifles or handguns, but I never saw or heard of them.

We took reasonable precautions against crime. Doors were looked at night. The number for the police was posted near the phone. (911 hadn’t been invented yet.) People kept watch dogs that would bark if intruders came. (We hadpodles.) That was enough.

Both my parents could shoot. (Dad always said Mom was the better marksman.) But they never owned guns. They didn’t think it was safe to have a gun in the house.. This was back when the Cold War was raging and Nikita Khrushchev had promised to bury us. There was talk of fallout shelters, but not much talk of guns.

This time of year, there were ads for BB Guns on the kid shows. Lots of kids asked for BB Guns for Christmas. No parent I knew would have bought one for a child. He’dshoot his eye out!

Now, if you turn on the right cable station, you can see a homey little ad showing a father and daughter in matching camouflage out in the woods with their matching semi-automatic rifles. I’m not sure what they’re doing: Hunting? Patrolling the perimeter? But the premise of the ad is that people need semi-automatic rifles, and the this company’s brand is the best.

If your semi-automatic isn’t enough firepower, you can still, in most states, buy a bump stock, which can turn it into an automatic, much like Bonnie and Clyde’s.

You also can go to a gun show and buy yourself just about any kind of firearm you want. All you needis money.

Some years back, I was looking for a car on Craigslist. I found that one of my neighbors was trying to trade his old Chevy for “guns and weapons.” (I forwarded the ad to the police.) I’m sure if you looked on Craiglsist now, you’d find similar offers.

When I started writing this, there had just been the mass shooting in Texas. Twenty-six people in a small-town Baptist church were killed by a man who should not have been allowed to owna gun.

Then there was a mass shooting in California, perpetrated by another shooter who wasn’t supposed to own firearms, but did. His neighbors had been complaining about him for months. The only good news, is that he wasn’t able to shoot schoolchildren, because the staff at the local school knew what to do. Do children today have mass-shooting drills, the way we used to have air-raid drills duringthe Cold War?

Of course, back then the threat came from the other side of the world,not the other side of town.

The Texas shooter was allowed to buy guns despite a domestic-violence conviction and a dishonorable discharge from the Air Force — and not just any gun, a semi-automatic!

People interviewed after the shooting are telling us we need more people carrying more guns, especially to church — like pilgrims in an old picture, marching on their way to the meeting house with paterfamilias carrying his firelock on his shoulder in case of Native American marauders. Except we aren’t threatened by hostile Native Americans with bows and arrows. We are in danger from our fellow Americans in general who carry guns that can kill a dozenpeople in a few minutes

Heaven help the politician who even suggests that we outlaw semi-automatic weapons. He’s trampling on our Second Amendment rights! He’s setting us on the road to tyranny! If government authorities take our guns away, we won’t be able to fight them if wehad to.

I remember Lyndon Johnson. I remember Richard Nixon. I remember neither of them being well-liked, but I don’t remember anyone saying that we needed guns to protect ourselves from theirminions.

Gun sales soared after Barack Obama was elected. People were certain that this quiet, moderate, cerebral man was a potential tyrant hatching evil schemes in his wife’svegetable garden.

Wehave gone insane.

Seriously, we have gone stark raving mad. A man in Las Vegas kills more than 50 people at an outdoor concert, and politicians are actually debating whether or not to ban the device he used to turn his semi-automatic rifle into a more efficient killing machne. We are not even discussing whether people should be allowed to own semi-automatic weapons. At present, if you can afford one, you can buyone.

Twenty-six people, 20 of them children, were killed in Newtown, Conn., five years ago and we talked about gun rights. Mostly old women in Charleston, S.C., were shot down at a prayer meeting, and we talked about gun rights. Twenty-six people were murdered in a church in Texas by a man with a domestic-violence convictionand a dishonorable discharge, then more people, in California, were killed by a deranged shooter, yet still we talk about gun rights — when we’re not being advised to be aware of our surroundings.

When my sister and I were deemed old enough to go to the movies on our own, Mom warned us to be careful where we sat. She didn’t want us sitting near some man who might try to put his hands where he wasn’t supposed to. She didn’t warn us about looking for exits, watching for a shooter and, if one showed up, first run, then hide, then fight. Whywould she?

When we went to church, Mom’s chief concerns were that we were properly attired and properly behaved. (That second one was a real challenge.) It was a giventhat we would be safe there.

I’m not sure that it’s a given that anyone is safe anywhere anymore.

We’ve all gone crazy, crazy with fear, crazy for guns.

Within a few more weeks, there will be another mass shooting, and there will be more talk of gun rights, of the right and need for ordinary Americans to own private arsenals. Will we ever get sane again?