Former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, right, in Cedar Rapids in 2016. (Liz Zabel/The Gazette)
When my brother committed suicide, he left a note for me to deliver to the clerk at the Minneapolis Courthouse who helped him with his application for a pistol. No one asked, maybe were forbidden, why a 78-year-old man who lived in an eminently safe area wanted one. After we buried him at Fort Snelling military cemetery, I found a different clerk in the police department to ask that the gun that killed him be destroyed.
Today, as Fred did, 25,000 Americans, including 1,200 children, use a gun to kill themselves every year. That is about 70 per day, most deaths barely noted beyond distraught family and close friends. For those who grieve the death, it is something they rarely talk about, yet it is something that never goes away.
I have had a second experience, at a distance, with the effects of a handgun fired in rage and derangement. In the fall of 2010, I stuffed envelopes for a woman running for Congress. Gabby Giffords was bright, charming and charismatic. She had a bright future in public service, and she certainly might have been elected to the U.S. Senate from Arizona. Beyond that, some admirers thought she could even be a presidential candidate someday. As I talked to her that first day, she was like an old, close friend.
A couple of months later outside a supermarket where she greeted and was surrounded by about 20 shoppers, a 22-year-old paranoid-schizophrenic guy carrying a Glock pistol (hey were developed for military and police use) with a 33-bullet chamber shot her in the head at close range. She miraculously survived, but six others died, including a 12-year-old girl.
We probably shouldn’t be surprised at the easy availability of guns for both men who pulled a trigger. We are the most heavily armed nation in the world. No country, large or small, developed or not, is close in percentage of ownership in its population. There were 4,277,971 handguns, 2,846,759 rifles, and 535,994 shotguns in private hands in a recent count. Some are never fired, of course, considered safely tucked away, but others aren’t. In schools alone, there have seen several hundred shootings since 2013, 17 in 2018 alone. The worst are inscribed on a national gravestone: Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland.
After Parkland where 17 people, mostly kids, died, Gov. Kim Reynolds recognized the need for serious background checks. She was clear and unequivocal. That commitment, ostensibly heartfelt has disappeared. The Iowa Legislature has recently passed, and the governor signed, a bill that makes it easier to purchase guns. Purchase is easier, carrying almost casual as a back pocket handkerchief.
Legislators and Kim Reynolds cannot be charged as accessories to murder, but in effect, they are. Guns kill, as we saw in Cedar Rapids recently when a 20-year-old took the lives of his mother, father and sister, shot himself in the foot, and claimed an intruder did it all. The 2nd Amendment shouldn’t cover murder, as it does daily.
Some historians have said that a significant part of the effort to pass it was the fear of slaves rising up to seek freedom. Today, we are all slaves to gun manufacturers, the gun lobby, and craven public officials. It is time for an uprising.
Norman Sherman of Coralville has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary, and authored a memoir “From Nowhere to Somewhere.”
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The right to bear arms, the right to kill - The Gazette
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