The Supreme Court's decision that each of us has an individual right to bear arms guaranteed by the second amendment to the Constitution is only the first of many decisions to follow. Some of those decisions will be made by legislatures and courts as they struggle with the implications of this historic ruling for public safety and such.
But the vast majority of those choices will be made by individuals, like you and me, in the privacy of our hearts and homes. We have our own personal decision to make: should I exercise my new right and keep a gun, or not?
Dick Anthony Heller, the plaintiff in the case before the Supremes that successfully challenged the Washington, D. C., ban on private hand gun ownership, has of course decided that he needs a gun to defend home and family. Many will join him, but none of us has to do so.
What we do depends in part on our unique histories. Mine began one Christmas morning when I was twelve. A long narrow box under the tree caused my pulse to pound in anticipation. Under its holiday wrappings just might be a Red Ryder air rifle, my weapon of choice lo these many years of comic book ads ago.
"John, what's that?" my mother asked sharply. "You didn't buy him that BB thing?
"No," my father replied, smiling rather sheepishly as I tore the box open. Inside in two parts ready to assemble was a real rifle, caliber 22. Red Rider move over!
"I had my first rifle at twelve," he said. "I hunted jack rabbits in California. It's time he learned how to handle a gun, how to keep it safe and clean." I couldn't help but agree.
But even in Oklahoma in the war year of 1942 there were few places in the nearby country where a boy and his dad could freely shoot tin cans off a fence post. Nor could the boy blithely ride his bike alone, with the rifle over the handlebars, out of the city to where jack rabbits might roam, as his father once could.
Years slipped by while the rifle mostly languished in the closet, safe if seldom clean. It disappeared along with the bike and much else when I went away to college.
My next encounter with firearms was as a draftee during the Korean unpleasantness. Bulls eyes on the basic training firing range were as elusive as tin cans on a post, but I did score an M-1 thumb. In those days the army's ritual of arms inspection required you to put your right thumb into the open breech to release the gun bolt, then very quickly remove your thumb or get a nasty pinch and several demerits. Eventually I grew a new thumb nail with a visible dent that took a decade to fade.
On the next occasion my youngest son, full of meth and remorse over a failed romance, put his mother's pistol, kept for protection, beneath his chin and pulled the trigger. A large measure of innocense died that day as well. As I said to his mother at the funeral, and she tearfully agreed, "It wasn't supposed to end this way."
Years later, going through my late wife's California safety deposit box I found a different pistol and a few rounds to go with it. Her brother had provided the smallish, but still lethal looking "piece," also for protection, during a long ago time when I was traveling on business and she was frequently alone. Fearing that I was the most probable intruder to be shot, I had wished it gone and thought she had agreed.
What to do with it? An east coast relative volunteered to take it off my hands, but you can't legally mail a firearm. However commercial airlines are up to the job. They handle it much like duty free liquor. So a visiting east coast daughter undertook to escort it to him.
"I have a pistol in my purse," she explained to the airline supervisor she asked to speak to and was treated surprisingly well. Weapon and bullets are packed separately and checked via a strict chain of custody. I was happy to see it gone on any terms.
You can see where this tale takes me. Personally I am a Gun Not. I would just rather not have them around. Your choice may be different. Each of us has the freedom -- and the responsibility -- for either choice.
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