Column by Hal Walter
Guns – May 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
IT’S NEVER TALKED ABOUT in my family, but there was an accident involving a firearm when I was not yet a teenager. Luckily, nobody was hurt.
As I recall, my mother had recently remarried, and my new dad had returned home from a hunting trip. Gleeful at his return, I helped him unpack and carry the gear from the truck in the driveway to the house. There were sleeping bags and other camping gear; the rifles and shotguns were in their cases. And there was a .22-caliber revolver in its holster, with the leather belt wrapped around it. I picked up a long-gun case in my left hand and the revolver in my right.
As I trod up the walkway toward the house, my hand almost instinctively wrapped around the grip, and my index finger curled into the trigger guard. My new father walked a ways ahead. My finger was on the trigger and to this day I cannot explain how or why it contracted. Perhaps it was some primitive reflex, but the revolver went off, and the gunshot echoed from the walls of the house.
I’d had the gun pointed mostly downward, though slightly ahead. The bullet ricocheted off the cement. And when I looked up my dad was inspecting a hole and slightly splintered doorframe to the right of where he had been walking. The smell of gunpowder rose in the air and my legs were shaking.
Nary a word was said about the incident. It really wasn’t necessary. Guns are loaded. They are always loaded. Think, and think hard, before you pull the trigger.
We never repaired the door’s trim, and until we moved from that house the bullet hole gave me a daily reminder of just how dangerous guns can be.
I recently was reminded of this by a couple of incidents in the news involving children and guns. A 9-year-old girl died in a gun accident in Pueblo. And, shades of Columbine, a teenager in Minnesota killed his grandfather, the grandfather’s girlfriend, a teacher, a school security guard, five students, and himself.
In the Pueblo incident, the girl and her 6-year-old brother had found the handgun and were tussling over it when it went off and struck her in the chest. Her father, a convicted felon who should not have been in possession of a firearm, may be charged in the incident. In the days following the shooting the father was interviewed in the Pueblo Chieftain, pleading with gun owners to take responsibility to keep firearms out of children’s hands. He said that no matter what authorities decide in terms of charging him with a crime, he faces the life sentence of knowing he could have prevented his daughter’s death.
Chieftain columnist Juan Espinosa later wrote a column urging gun owners to lock up their weapons and ammunition. He recalled a childhood incident in which his uncle’s handgun is believed to have fallen from a closet shelf into a toy box. His young cousin found the gun and shot his aunt in the head, blinding her for life.
The Minnesota incident reminded me of another story from my childhood. Before my mother remarried we lived in a racially mixed rural area of Northern Nevada. One day three friends, two of whom were brothers, were at my house and we were unsupervised by adults. I knew nothing about racial strife until that day. But some neighbor kids were playing football and the game extended into our yard, and then the garden. The third kid in my house yelled a racial slur out the window, and suddenly we were under siege.
They actually came to the door and asked that we turn over the boy who had yelled out the window. We refused. We waited. They waited. When the coast looked to be clear, the two brothers made a run for their house but were caught. In the ensuing fight, the skinnier brother was badly beaten but the burlier brother broke free and ran for his house where no adults were home and where a rifle always stood in the corner.
HIS UNCLE, who lived in the trailer next door, caught him leaving in a fit of rage with a loaded .22-caliber semiautomatic. I know without a doubt that my friend, a young hothead, would have shot those kids who had beaten his brother had this uncle not happened to catch him on his way down the front steps.
Perhaps these stories are extraordinary, but I wonder how many other people have similar tales. How many others were not so lucky?
Despite these near misses involving firearms, when I was 12 and had completed a Hunter Safety course, I was given my first gun. It was a .22-caliber lever-action Marlin “39A Golden Mounty” with a gold trigger. I clearly remember the Marlin catalog, which depicted a man dressed in Canadian Mounty garb with one of these rifles, stalking rabbits through the snow in the great white north.
I had a wooden gunrack in my bedroom, and this rifle was always in the top rungs, where it rested in clean and tip-top firing condition. I had a box of 100 CCI “Mini-Mag” shells for my rifle. Often I would remove the firearm from the rack and just look at it. I’d inspect the individual .22 bullets in their plastic case. And my thoughts would wander into daydreams of those times when we would go hunting or camping and I would be allowed to wander the hills alone with my rifle. Today some anti-gun ninnies would probably say that I had some sort of mental problem involving my masculinity or somesuch. But I think the romance of the gun is much more deeply embedded in our culture than in any one boy’s psyche.
I still have my first rifle, but lately it has become a concern. You see, I have a baby boy and some day he’ll be old enough to be curious about this weapon, and others.
What I need to do — what everybody who owns a firearm needs to do — is find a way to safely store all weapons out of the reach of children. There are already laws requiring you to do this. For example, one of the charges the Pueblo father could possibly face is providing a firearm to a minor.
But laws could become more stringent. For example, in our 51st state, Great Britain, here’s how it works, according to a British visitor to the Walter Ranch. Basically, all firearms must be kept at hunting clubs. When you go hunting, you can check out your firearm. Of course, only the very wealthy can afford membership in a hunting club. If you are a farmer, as was the visitor, you may keep a shotgun at your residence. This resident explained the shotgun is mainly used for defending his farmland from a strange small exotic deerlike creature. However, you must keep the ammo for the shotgun separately under lock and key. To make sure you do this, the authorities on a random basis stop by to check your shotgun and shotshells. You don’t know when they’re coming and sometimes the knock comes late at night when you are in bed asleep.
UNDER THESE CONDITIONS, I think I’d rather just not own a firearm. And, true to form, most people in Great Britain don’t. Or can’t. But I will say there are parts of these rules that make perfectly good sense.
But you shouldn’t need people knocking at your door in the middle of the night to make sure you follow some simple rules. If you own firearms, secure your guns and your ammunition so that they cannot be accessed by children. There are many ways to do this: trigger guards, locking gun cases and cabinets, and, most safe of all, gun vaults or safes.
If you have children, even if you don’t have guns, talk to them about firearms. Tell them how dangerous they are. Tell them that they are not to handle firearms unless they are supervised by adults and have your permission.
This is not to say that children are more irresponsible with firearms than adults. Clearly they are not, as the statistics reveal that adults commit many more crimes with firearms and have many more accidents. I’ve seen adults who should know better do things with guns that defy common sense.
But when a child is involved in an accident or other incident with a firearm it is much more tragic. Make it a priority to prevent such a tragedy from happening.
Hal Walter writes from 35 acres, most of it devoted to burros, in the Sierra Mojada of Custer County.
