“For all they who take up the sword shall perish with the sword.”—Jesus, Mathew 26:52, from The Bible.

Billy: “Where’s King? Where’s Bobby and Jack Kennedy?”

Jean: “They’re dead.”

Billy: “No, not dead.  Their brains blown out because your people won’t even put the same controls on their guns as they do their dogs, their bicycles, their cats or their automobiles.”—from the Movie Billy Jack, 1971.

“We came in last night (and). . .my little son Donny. . .got to make his own AR-15.”—Donald Trump, Jr., describing how his 12-year-old son assembled a semi-automatic rifle in Texas, January 2022.

“I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children/And it’s a hard rain’s ‘a gonna fall.”—Bob Dylan, from the song Hard Rain, 1963.

I’m going to talk about guns.  And I may say some things that might be upsetting.  This is an incredibly painful topic.  But we are in a national crisis.  I have friends who’ve lost family members to murder.  I have friends who’ve lost family to suicide.  I have friends who’ve lost loved ones to firearm accidents.

People sometimes ask if I‘m a liberal or a conservative.  I tell them, neither.  I’m a moderate.

What do you mean, they say?  Explain yourself.

I describe it this way.  A moderate is someone who was told by everyone back in the 60’s and 70’s what a conservative they were, and now they’re told they’re a liberal.

My views haven’t changed.  But apparently everyone else has.

I’m not against people owning guns.  I’m not against people using guns for hunting or target shooting.  Just saying that used to get me labeled a conservative.

But I also believe that owning a gun carries responsibility.  And that means at least registering a gun so that law enforcement knows that you have it, not carrying concealed weapons in public, and not wandering around the country acting like having a loaded firearm is no different from a talking on a cell phone.

Holding those opinions now, it seems, somehow makes me a liberal.

Like most rural midwestern kids, I grew up around guns.  We had a .22 long rifle as well as a single barrel shotgun.  The latter was propped up in the corner of my grandparents’ house.  I don’t think it had been fired in years.

But I’d sometimes take the .22 squirrel hunting with friends.  I don’t think I ever hit anything.

So knowing how to use a gun was no big deal (cleaning them, on the other hand, was a pain).  But what no one even thought about doing was bringing them to school, carrying one that was concealed, walking down the street with one, or feeling that they somehow just weren’t “safe” unless they could immediately reach out and grab one.

Years ago, doing any of those things wouldn’t make you a “patriot.”  It would have made you sound like some kind of dangerous nutjob.

Of course, none of that’s true today.  Largely because of a self-enriching gun lobby, an ignorance of American history, a convoluted Supreme Court decision that perverted the true meaning of the second amendment, and most of all, the promotion of Fear as a marketable product, this country is now swimming guns.

Not just in homes.  In churches, restaurants, bars, and schools.  Mass shootings have skyrocketed.  Accidental deaths have accelerated.  Suicide rates—falling in the rest of the world—are climbing significantly in the U.S.  And the solution for all of this, according to the gun lobby?  Just buy more guns.

Let me lay it on the line.  Carrying a gun will not make you safer.  It will make it more likely you will kill yourself or someone you care about.  It will make it more likely that in a moment of panic, depression, anger, rage, or frustration, you will use it in a moment you and others will regret for the rest of your lives.

Guns don’t make you safer.  They just make you feel safer.

We’ve heard the statement a million times.  “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”  Gun manufacturers and their promoters in the National Rifle Association have been saying this for years.  And it’s made them millions.  Fear sells.

The problem is, no one can decide on how you separate good guys from bad guys.  I’ve dealt with thousands of people all over the world, and I can tell you that there’s far more blurring than clarity between “good guys” and “bad.”

I’ve seen people I swore were bad guys do some incredibly generous things.  I’ve seen people who seemed to be textbook good guys do incredibly stupid and horrible things.  I’ve seen the roles reverse in an instant.

And if you’re honest, you have, too.

A good guy gets cut off in traffic, middle fingers shoot up, insults get hurled, and finally, a road rage shooting.  A father hears a noise in the closet when no one else is supposed to be home, takes his gun to investigate, opens the door suddenly and shoots the intruder.

It turns out to be his young daughter, playing a trick on her Dad.  She dies in his arms.

Gun related “accidents” have been around for as long as there have been guns.  But increasing the number of guns, while increasing the Fear Factor (“everyone else out there’s a bad guy, and I have to be ready to use my weapon at a moment’s notice”) is a recipe for disaster.

Let me explain.  I’ve known people who’ve purchased a handgun.  It made them feel safer.  Fine.  They started out storing the weapon responsibly.  They lock it up, unloaded, away from the kids, with ammunition also locked up in a separate location.

But the Fear starts to gradually return.  What if an intruder comes in before they can get to the gun and the ammo?  Maybe I’ll keep the gun and the ammo locked in the same place.  No, maybe I should keep the gun loaded, and locked.

But what if I misplace the key?  How’s it going to protect me from the bad guys then?  So the good guy starts keeping the loaded gun out in the open.  One day his child finds it.  Or he suspects his wife has been cheating.  Or he’s just had a really, really bad day.  Maybe he gets fired from his job. . .

You know the rest of the story.  It happens thousands of times each year in this country.

Every hour of every day, an American child is shot.  Some are “accidental,” some are intentional, some are suicides.  And no, they don’t all die.  Some are “just” maimed or crippled.  Some are “just” emotionally scarred for life.  Some are just lucky.

When I was a Family Doc in a small Missouri town, a panicked Mother ran into our office carrying her 3-year-old son.  “Help him, he’s shot,” she cried.

We got him back to our treatment room.  He had a superficial wound to his lower leg where the bullet had simply torn and burned his skin.  Antibiotic ointment and a dressing were all that was needed.

“How’d this happen?” I asked the Mother.

She was breathing heavily.  “I had my gun on the seat, and it just went off.  I must have hit a bump or something, I don’t know.  I just heard the shot and then he was crying.

I was taken aback.  “Maybe you shouldn’t be carrying a loaded gun in your car like that,” I suggested.

Her expression changed, and she stepped back.  “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people!” she stammered.

I was shocked.  Those of you who know me won’t be surprised that I was pretty blunt in my response.  “Well, Ma’am,” I said slowly.  “All I can say is that gun almost killed this kid.  You need to think about that.”

I never saw her nor the child again.  I’m sure the Mother had her own Fears that let her rationalize that what had just happened was no big deal.

It’s just one story of one child and one parent and one gun.  People like Dr. Jane Knapp, my medical school classmate and for many years the Medical Director of the Emergency Department at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City could tell you many, many more that are far more heartbreaking.

But the story is often the same.  Fear drives people to buy guns.  Lots of guns.  And lots of ammunition.  And by whipping up that fear, gunmakers and their allies in the National Rifle Association (NRA), have become incredibly rich.

So maybe we should talk about the NRA for a moment.  It’s a much different organization than when I was a kid.  Founded in the 1870’s by two Union Army veterans, it was meant to teach firearm safety and accuracy.  The veterans felt that the reason the Civil War had lasted so long was because most of the Army’s inductees frankly couldn’t shoot worth a damn.  They believed that in a future war, the Army could be more effective in defending against the enemy if recruits came in with better skills.

The pair had no interest in large capacity magazines, night vision goggles, or body armor.  Instead, it was basic firearm instruction.  In addition, hunting also became a focus.

And into the first part of the twentieth century, that remained true.  Many of the laws restricting the carry of handguns, as well as laws against owning automatic weapons, were written with the help of the NRA.

But by the latter half of the twentieth century, the organization began to mutate.  New leadership in the organization (led by a former border agent who, it was later learned, had been convicted of murder) sought to portray any gun legislation as a secret plot to steal private guns.  Suddenly, the NRA was no longer an organization that was focused on building shooting skills to defend our government from enemies, it was an organization that preached that our government now was the enemy.

Donations poured in.  Gun sales skyrocketed.  And one by one, decades-old laws intended to keep Americans safe were overturned.

Ultimately, a right-wing Supreme Court ruled that the second amendment to the American Constitution, which linked “a well-regulated militia” to firearms, somehow guaranteed Americans the right to carry firearms practically anywhere.

I won’t go into the details, but to my nonlegal mind (and the minds of a lot of legal folks who know way more than me) the Court’s decision was downright goofy, and driven more by a right-wing agenda than by fair and sound analysis.  But hey, I guess that’s why I’m not a lawyer.

In the meantime, Americans are killing themselves and one another in numbers that are practically unthinkable in the rest of the world.

Some of you may be hopping mad by now.  Some because I don’t think all guns should be outlawed.  Others, because you think I’m somehow anti-gun.

And if you fall into this latter group, you may be thinking two things.  First, weren’t guns everywhere in the old west, and without them wouldn’t the west be ruled by bad guys?

And second, why aren’t you talking about Switzerland?  They have guns everywhere, and no crime whatsoever, right?

Actually, I have plenty to say about both of those statements (they’re both wrong, by the way).  But we’ve run out of space. 

See you next time.