Mar 10, 2018 5 min read

Sometimes I feel like I am being hit on the head from both sides. The weather isn’t all that great and every day I am being warned that I am going to be attacked by an inanimate object at any second. As I write this, I must keep looking over my shoulder to make sure my hand gun hasn’t slipped out of its hiding place and is sneaking up on me ready to put lumps on my head. At least that is what the implication coming from the anti-gun movement among us is. I’m not making fun, I just think it’s driven by fear and not fact.

John Johnson of Johnson’s Sports Store in Eighty Four, said it best when he said I have been sitting here surrounded by guns for more than 20 years and not one of them has attacked me. Of course, to tell the truth, one of them slipped out of my hand in 1993 and fell on my toe. It broke my toe. Good thing it wasn’t a varmint rifle or it might have broken my foot.

It’s a terrible tragedy when anyone gets shot, let alone a child, and society needs to look in the right direction to find any hint of a cure to this mayhem. While it is impossible to eliminate completely the numbers can be lowered. First, one needs to look in the right direction and recognize the problem for what it is. More often than not, when the problem arises, there will be some who look east when the problem is located in the west. In plain English, one has to look in the right direction and face the problem directly to find an answer. First, to be honest, a firearm cannot be good nor can it be evil. In the same manner a firearm cannot attack you or your kin nor your friends. It can only lay on a table or lean in a corner. The last time I looked, good and or evil can only be baggage carried by humankind.

It’s odd, but at a sportsman’s club almost everyone is carrying a gun and I can leave expensive shooting equipment on the bench outside, go into the building for a gab session and nothing will be touched. My personal belongings and my well-being are safer at the club than anywhere. Would you do the same in a shopping center parking lot? I bet you would hide anything of value and still lock up. Most members of these gun clubs are the most motherhood-and-apple-pie persons you will ever meet. Most of us are conservative and believe that the constitution of this country is a great piece of paper. I witness it every day. At meetings, we say the pledge of allegiance and it is repeated at every event. They aren’t fanatics, just honest Americans who love their country. Believe me, I don’t say everyone who belongs to a gun club is mentally stable but I think the problem lies there not with the gun.

Is it possible for us to agree on this one thing? That match did not burn those southern churches on its own a long time ago. A rope did not drag a man from his cell and hang him from a tree. And a firearm did not attack those children in Florida. All three horrendous actions were done by a human being for only a man can be evil.

What happens in the aftermath of such shootings? There is a large group that instead of facing the reality of the situation focus their eyes away from the perpetrator and on an inanimate object. Perhaps they do not believe a human could perform such a calamity.

Unless we face the real issue, and do not let the blame fall in the right place, it will occur again. We live in an area where violence is the norm. Look at television and count how many violent movies our kids are watching. They are surrounded with violence so much that they become immune to it. We spend little time with children and so many are raised by an aunt or a hired person. What is said between the sitter and the child? Does anyone know? Does anyone care? We toss the mentally challenged out on the street and wonder why they act strange. We send children off to some foreign country and then we wonder why they don’t act right. Yes, they might be soldiers but they are also children when they first leave home to do their duty in some forsaken land.

Those who blame a piece of steel for our problems only clouds the real issues. They turn their eyes away from the wounds. These issues are mostly mental, suffered by the shooter, and they place a band-aid on it by blaming the gun. What pain brings us to act in such an unhuman like way? A friend said the next perpetrator is probably sulking right now and he will find a weapon somehow. We had better find him and find out why he is thinking of acting in this way against his fellow students and man, and do it soon. We need to concentrate in the right direction.

“Every man’s death diminishes me for I am involved in mankind. Do not come to me and ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” – John Donne

George Block writes a weekly outdoors column.