So, just what is the Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle that was used to slaughter 20 grade school children and six of their female teachers and administrators in Newtown, Connecticut? To begin with, it’s actually a version of the deadly M-16 rifle I carried around in the jungles of Vietnam. It’s lightweight, doesn’t have much of a recoil, and its makers officially call it a “modern sporting rifle”. Apparently one of its best-selling points is that it is set up to handle high-capacity magazines (ten or more rounds) which give the shooter the ability to fire off dozens of bullets without having to take a bunch of time out to reload.
According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, it is also one of the most popular rifles in the country, with more than 2 million of them having been sold in the last decade alone. They usually cost anywhere from $900 to $2000, although I hear there are some really nice sales going on right now that will make you the proud owner of one for as little as $799.
In addition to being very popular with target practice enthusiasts (like Adam Lanza’s mother, who was the first of her son’s 27 victims), they have become wildly popular with mass murderers. It was the weapon of choice for the two killers who came to be known as the Beltway Snipers back in the early 2000’s who terrorized much of the Washington, D.C. area and left 15 people dead before they were caught, and an AR-15 (with a 100-round barrel magazine) was also one of the weapons used to shoot up an Aurora, Colorado theater not that long ago, leaving 12 dead and 58 wounded. It was the weapon another crazed killer used in the very recent Clackamas, Oregon shopping mall shooting that left three dead (including the gunman) and many people in that community too scared to finish their Christmas shopping.
So, as any sane person should finally get around to asking, why in the hell is such a weapon allowed to be in the hands of any American other than a soldier or police officer? Well, apparently it has something to do with the American gun culture, which now has our nation afloat in somewhere between 270 and 350 million guns. No one really knows the exact number, but whatever it is, it’s almost half of all the guns in the world.
According to the National Rifle Association (NRA), it also has something to do with the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, which as I understand it, the Founding Fathers set up to make sure that we could all have our own musket (the kind that takes about a minute to reload) and a well-regulated militia in case the British ever got back on their ships and tried to reclaim their American colonies again.
It’s one thing for a hunter to have a properly registered rifle and shotgun, and for citizens who feel the need a handgun to protect their family and possessions to own one, but to keep accepting close to 20,000-gun deaths every year in this country as simply part of the price we all have to pay for our Second Amendment rights is nothing less than madness.
The NRA, which can apparently make or break some of our most cowardly politicians, also says that we don’t have a gun problem in this country, just a crazy people problem, and that if we want to effectively deal with gun violence in America, all we really need to do is get off our butts and buy more guns (that really is what their organization is mostly about – selling more guns so they can continue to get more than half of their yearly multi-million dollar lobbying budget from gun manufacturers).
When talking to the NRA and these knee-jerk supporters, they will give lip service to everything from violent video games and movies to our inadequate mental healthcare system (all of which, by the way, should indeed be part of any serious discussion about gun violence in this country). But in their first news conference since that bloody Friday morning in Newtown, their only answer to making sure it doesn’t happen again is to put heavily armed police officers into all our schools, effectively moving future OK Corral’s from the dusty streets of the old Wild West into our nation’s classrooms.
On the day I was wounded in Vietnam, 21 of the 28 members of my Aero Rifle Platoon were also hit, and two of them were killed. The scene was unimaginable, with blood and guts everywhere and with trained soldiers in shock from what they had just witnessed and somehow lived through. It was the most deadly and terrifying ambush I experienced during my year in Vietnam and yet it was nothing compared to what those poor little kids and their teachers and administrators had to face at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Twenty kindergarten and first grade students shot dead, with each of their little bodies having been hit at least three times (some as many as 11). Six brave female teachers and administrators also shot dead while trying to keep their precious students out of harm’s way. And as someone who has seen up-close-and-personal the way a rifle like the Bushmaster AR-15 does its terrible thing, I can tell you that those poor little kids weren’t simply killed – they were blown away!
So, will meaningful gun control laws turn all the bad guys into good guys? Of course not. But all-important journeys begin with the first step, and it’s way beyond time that our country and its politicians manned-up and started getting these god-awful weapons and their high-capacity magazines off our nation’s streets and out of our neighborhoods.
Charlotte, Daniel, Olivia, Josephine, Ana, Dylan, Madeleine, Catherine, Chase, Jesse, Grace, James, Emilie, Jack, Noah, Caroline, Jessica, Avielle, Benjamin, and Allison could have been any of our kids and grandkids, and they all should have been home opening their Christmas presents this week, not being buried in some lonely cemetery by the completely shattered families who adored them. And each of their lovely, innocent souls deserves so much better from this nation that now mourns them.