September, 1970
Let me tell you a story.
We call it, “going back to the world.” Home in the USA. And I’ve arrived in one piece. My new orders direct me to report to the Army’s Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. I know the place well. It’s where I was trained and Commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant. Then, it was on to Airborne and Ranger schools, followed by a fun-filled couple of years in the highlands of Vietnam. Now, back in the world, I’m a Captain with a family and a new job, which is to help train the next bunch of happy warriors. So, Marilyn and I make the long drive from Massachusetts to Georgia and settle into the house at 3660 Plantation Road in the sun-baked city of Columbus. It’s a nice neighborhood.
A few months after moving in, a new civilian worker shows up at my office in the Infantry School. His name’s Bob. He’s a GS12 research analyst, and I have no idea why he’s here, but he has a disability that makes it hard for him to walk or move even moderately weighted stuff. He’s rented a house in Columbus and is trying to figure out how to move his junk in. Marilyn and I offer to help.
So, on a sunny Saturday morning in the deep south, we get into Marilyn’s red Corvair Corsa convertible with the turbocharged engine and dual carburetors, show up at Bob’s new place, and find a UHaul truck in his driveway packed with everything he owns. We get to work toting box after box into the house and putting it all where Bob wants it to go. It’s taken us all morning, but around noon, we’re done, and we sit down on Bob’s new furniture to celebrate the end of Bob’s beginning. Marilyn’s never met Bob, whom I’ve charitably described as being “a little strange.” So, being a curious person, she nicely asks about his life. This goes on for a while until the big moment.
The big moment is when Bob says to Marilyn, “Wanna see my hair-trigger Colt 45s?”
It’s like an E. F. Hutton commercial. Everything stops. I freeze for a second and then say, “Bob, do you really have hair-trigger Colt 45s?” He says, “Sure do. Two of ’em. They’re pearl-handled, too. Want to see?”
He’s asking a guy who’s just finished two years dodging bullets and other bad things in a spot where serious people really wanted to kill him and his men. To say I have developed a healthy respect for any kind of gun is not giving that phrase the value it needs. Having seen up close what they can do, the accidents that can happen, actually did happen, makes me scared to death of them. I’m not scared when they’re in my hands, but in somebody else’s who might not know what he’s doing?
I’m not scared yet, though, because Bob has yet to produce the firepower, but my tension level rises like a Goddard Rocket.
I look Bob dead in the eye and say, “Bob, please don’t get the 45s. Leave em’ right where they are. Marilyn and I have to be going now. Hope you like your new place.” And with that, we leave.
We get back into the red Corvair Corsa convertible with the turbocharged engine and dual carburetors and drive home. When we get to the house on Plantation Road, I pay the babysitter and look at Tammy, the two-year-old daughter I’m just getting to know. And I think about the pearl-handled, hair-trigger Colt 45s in Bob’s house.
February, 2025
In 1970, slightly more than 50% of Americans, mostly men, owned a firearm. Bob was one of them, and he owned two (that I knew of). Since then, although the population has grown, the percentage of ownership has declined to about 40%. Still, Small Arms Survey researchers conclude there are now more than 400 million handguns and rifles in the country. Three percent of gun owners, super owners, own more than 50% of all firearms in the U.S. For the other 97%, the average ownership is three firearms, mostly handguns.
Femicide, abusive men killing their intimate partners, is five times more likely if the abuser has a handgun and lives with the victim. Research shows the number one contributing factor to femicide is unemployment. Potential femicide victims who do not live with their abuser and own a handgun are significantly less likely to be killed by their abuser.
In 70% of workplace shooting deaths, the perpetrator used a handgun. Despite the nation’s number of handguns doubling since the mid-1990s, workplace shootings have declined significantly since then, but the 70% figure still holds. In the last 50 years, there have been 50 workplace mass shootings with an average death count of six per event. According to Jillian Peterson and James Densley, who study mass shootings for a project funded by the National Institute of Justice:
The perpetrators were almost exclusively men (94 percent) with an average age of 38 (the youngest was 19, the oldest was 66). More than three-quarters (77 percent) were blue-collar workers, and 53 percent had experienced a recent or traumatic change in work status before the shooting.
A University of Washington 2022 study discovered six million Americans carry a loaded handgun daily; nine million do so at least once a month.
In mass public shootings, the weapon du jour is the assault rifle. The National Shooting Sports Foundation has estimated approximately 5 million to 10 million AR-15-style rifles exist in the U.S.
Regarding assault rifles, I know a thing or two. And I can say with complete certainty and a good deal of experiential credibility that there is not a single reason on God’s lovely earth why anyone other than police and my military brothers and sisters should have one, especially one with automatic fire capability. Anybody who tells you differently is chock full up to their eyeballs with what makes the grass grow green and tall.
The National Center for Health Statistics, a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, annually publishes National Vital Statistics Reports. One of those reports is about how we die. In Deaths: Final Data for 2019, (most recently analyzed data collection year), we note 38,355 deaths caused by firearms. Of those deaths, 23,941 were by suicide, 14,414 by homicide. Despite comprising 13.7% of the US population, non-Hispanic Black people were homicide victims in 57% of the cases.
Unfortunately, all the CDC can do is report the numbers. Why? Because a 1996 appropriations act contained something that has come to be known as the Dickey Amendment. That amendment prohibits the CDC from doing any research into gun violence. The amendment says federal funding cannot be used to “advocate or promote gun control.”
Until Donald Trump’s re-election, I believed that since more than 38,000 people die by gun violence per year, it wouldn’t be too much to ask the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to spend a few million of its $5 billion budget on research to analyze gun violence. Seemed a modest proposal to me. However, since Trump’s inauguration, that has become fairy-tale thinking. I now believe it likely Trump will prevent his unqualified Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., from reporting on deaths by firearms even if he wants to. Perhaps, if we ever again have an honest, thoughtful, Democracy-loving, compassionate person occupying the White House, this will change. At this point, a big “if.”
Now, I would not be an unhappy guy to wake up one morning to discover all firearms in the hands of civilians have gone *poof* in the night. We all know that will never happen. But as Peterson and Densley argue:
One step needs to be depriving potential shooters of the means to carry out their plans. Potential shooting sites can be made less accessible with visible security measures such as metal detectors and police officers. And weapons need to be better controlled, through age restrictions, permit-to-purchase licensing, universal background checks, safe storage campaigns, and red-flag laws — measures that help control firearm access for vulnerable individuals or people in crisis.
Regarding Bob and his pearl-handled, hair-trigger Colt 45s? One evening in 1975, a bullet from one of them went straight through his head. Police labeled it an accident.
Knowing Bob, I did not believe that for one second.
