Pat Stuart

We’re off to the firing range, my grandson having just been qualified by the Boy Scouts with a .22 rifle.  At age 11, he’s talking about becoming a marksman and excited to start working with moving targets.  That’s a big step up from my own history with guns.  

It, too, began at 11 with an afternoon on the old Cody range (then at the base of Beacon Hill) learning to handle a shotgun.  

“Don’t tense up,” my father said.  An hour (or maybe less) of trying, a badly bruised shoulder, an even more bruised ego, and I was off guns until I began training with the CIA.  They sent me to Fort Myer where I discovered automatic weapons like the old UZI and the AK-47.  

Man ... .  Squeeze their triggers; the guns responded.  No bruising, and the targets quickly became paper mincemeat.  For me, it was a beginning, and I carried weapons through the rest of my career.   

That, plus Wyoming roots, makes me a card-carrying member of the American gun culture.  It also makes me particularly sensitive to the dreadful statistics that spring from our traditions and gun usage, i.e.  mass shootings so common here (314 so far this year alone) that they often seem barely newsworthy and are sometimes even referred to as the “American experience.”  

Who would have believed that foreigners would cancel trips to the United States because it’s “too dangerous?”  

Yet, that’s happening.  I have a Canadian relative who begged off plans to visit here, citing not the fact that mass shootings happen but that they happen so frequently on our side of the border.    

She’s right, of course.  But, we don’t expect it.  We close our minds to the possibility.  Yet, there’s no reason why we are any safer watching our parades than people in the Chicago area were in watching theirs.  Who is to say that the cowboys and tourists and locals thronging the brew houses in Park County aren’t a tempting target to some crazy with access to automatic weapons?

For that matter, who are those crazies that we allow to buy guns?  

Almost all are male.  The worst killers in the past five years were under 21.  Most are white, too, but none of the statistics are particularly reliable or help us narrow the problem down much.

Still, it’s a fact of life, everywhere, that men, especially young males with raging hormones, are more likely to have moments of wanting badly to kill other humans than is any women or are men of other ages.

It’s also a fact that a high percentage of mass shootings are committed with automatic weapons, ones specifically designed for one man to use to kill large numbers of two-legged targets in the minimum amount of time.

So, why do we let young males buy those specific weapons?

We all, no matter our views on weapons, know the answer.  It’s our gun culture.  It’s the desire of many to own those weapons themselves, to shoot them and to admire them on their walls and in their gun safes.  It’s fear, stoked by gun manufacturers and sellers (a multi-billion dollar industry), that the government will take away all privately held weapons if they’re allowed to ban even one.

Certainly, since we in Wyoming are part of the gun culture that created this situation, it’s easy to understand how we came to this moment when we, as average citizens, need to fear a crazy with easy access to a gun while feeling an imperative to protect our own right to own small arms.   

The question then is what kind of regulations will protect our families, neighbors, and friends while maintaining our right to bear arms as spelled out in the Constitution.  

Face it.  The time has come for sensible gun laws.  Not laws that would take from us the weapons of the type our ancestors carried, that the Founding Fathers knew about when they wrote the second amendment.  

No.  We need to be designing gun regulations that leave such weapons in our hands while protecting us from the unexpected but dreadful consequences of clinging to a culture that has incorporated modern military-grade firepower and a billion-dollar gun industry first.

I don’t have answers.  I do have two suggestions for starters.  First, to separate in our thinking and rhetoric the weapons actually meant by the Founding Fathers as our right to keep from those meant for the mass killing of humans.  Second, to raise the gun purchase age on automatic weapons to 22.

Neither will cure our gun culture of its current woes, but they would be steps in the right direction.