LETTER: Guns gone, problems solved right?

To the Editor:

In my late teens and early 20s I got to play with guns a lot. After I saw what a round did to the human body, when it starts tumbling as it goes through, I sort of lost interest. No, I don’t go deer hunting. When the deer can shoot back then I’ll go. And then we’ll see how good that Walmrt camouflage really is.

Every movie I rent, at the very beginning, the manufacturer has laid down a track showing that pirating of any kind is wrong and illegal. But what’s the message behind the message? If you want something bad enough, there’s always someone who will sell it to you. Want a special weapon, go to any major metro city and look in the want ads. ‘For sale, rarely used one of a kind.’ That’s your weapons man.

I’ve been listening to some of the politicians who are confident that the message in Washington will be heard and things done, yeah right. They want to create an insanity test before you can buy a weapon. The only problem is, not even the government employee psychiatrist devising the test could ever pass it. Besides, the Constitution guarantees the right to lie, so who would be denied?

So as a gun dealer, what are you supposed to do? You have a substantial investment you’re trying to push and the reason you’re at a gun show is because none of your buyers could ever pass the registration permit. And if you think the show is bad, try walking arounf the parking lot. It’s like walking through the local market in Saigon, Salisbury, or Baghdad.

One of the funniest things I couldn’t figure out during the Vietnam War, why did the NVA and VC send their women out in the middle of a fight to pick up all the weapons lying around? All they had to do is go down to Saigon and the CIA would sell them all they wanted. And you didn’t have to send the weapons back north, they could be used by the local VC guys, and were. Funny how the insanity of war comes home, isn’t it?

Tragedies will always happen. If it isn’t some nut with a hand gun, it might be a tornado landing on a school gym with the basketball team practicing inside. It could be a coal mine cave-in or a building collapsing after it’s been hit by a passenger plane, or a bridge collapse in San Francisco Bay, or any number of things. And yet, it’s only when the weapons come out that the government will, ‘step up,’ as they say and write new legislation for the one they canceled years ago.

Have you ever wondered if all the people in this country that own weapons went nuts at the same time, would there be anyone left alive? Is that even possible? You got to admit, no foreign country will invade another that lets nuts buy guns without a background check.

Robert Pike

New Richmond

Tags: letters to the editor, opinion