THERE ARE NO ANSWERS

       Please think about this… the men who added amendments to our constitution knew only of muzzle-loading rifles that could fire only one bullet before a reloading process.  A militia they wanted to protect fought a war against armies which also had ONLY muzzle-loaders.  I have shotguns and rifles that I hunt with. None have the ability to load more than 5 rounds into the magazines. They provide a quite adequate defense of my home and no credible assault on hunting guns is even considered today.  Loaded with five rounds of buckshot, a short barreled, open-choke shotgun is a formidable defensive weapon, and I keep two of them loaded, safely away from anyone but me.

        I need no assault rifles!!! I never owned one! I abhor them.  I would not hunt with or associate with anyone who does. But there isn’t any possible way to rid our country of them.  Having multiple round clips or magazines is akin to owning hand grenades, bazookas etc. If one is legal, then why aren’t they all.  Each is a killing machine… meant to kill people.

       BUT…if we would outlaw any magazine or clip which holds more than five rounds, and make it illegal to own more than one clip, you can chip away at the killing potential of those horrible firearms.  Right now I cannot see any chance of reducing innocent deaths in public places such as schools, churches and large gatherings of people. We should at least try that first.  But we won’t.  Therefore, talk of ending the slaughter is useless.  We cannot stop an avalanche until it stops itself.  When a garbage truck comes down a hill out of gear and gaining momentum, talking about stopping it is ridiculous… you can’t.  We had the chance once to do something about the mess this nation is in, but we didn’t.  Now we talk about guns and mental illness and family structure.  Today those things are beyond our control.

 

       If you do not permit prayer in school, or the teaching of morals, ethics and the Bible, “thoughts and prayers” afterward do no good.  Again, we could begin by the simple restriction of the number of bullets the assault rifle can hold and restricting the number of clips in anyones possession!!!  Make it so that anyone possessing multi-round clips faces a prison sentence and follow up on it.  Then those misguided people who love their AR-15’s could keep them, and the NRA, (no longer a shadow of what it was fifty years ago when I taught hunter safety programs for them,) could remain the political power it still is.  Only ammunition companies will lose anything and maybe the government can subsidize their losses with some new taxes on churches!

       Otherwise, without that limitation, we might as well legalize the hand-grenades and the pipe bombs too. The carnage isn’t going to stop, it will increase now. Everyone knows that. It isn’t a result of mental illness or guns.  It is the ugly extention of evil.  It is something involving much more than those two obvious problems, and when we could have stopped the evil which is here and coming, we let our enemies talk us into being tolerant… embracing diversity., and abortion and homosexuality, letting drugs become a part of our culture, welcoming those who bring drugs and evil into our country.

      

       You can find peace far into the woods or on a distant gravel bar, today.  It is a world I live in and love.  But in the places when humans live in great herds like cattle, get use to seeing awful things happen, and being a part of it if you live there.  Peace and contentment and common sense does not abide where men live in herds. Marijuana and alcohol helps, I suppose.

       Somewhere, in some book it says, “You will reap what you sow.”  When we could have sown something different, we listened to Hollywood, television commentators and the left wing politics of casting aside what our ancestors believed and taught us, and making common sense a bad by product of another era. The founders of the constitution and its amendments didn’t see the day coming when we would see such horrible weapons in our schools and churches and everywhere that evil can snake itself into. Ben Franklin, John Adams, George Washington… those men with single shot muzzle-loaders didn’t mean for us to embrace assault rifles.  You couldn’t have made them believe this culture was to come!

       So let us forget what we were and celebrate what we are becoming, before the long limb our society bends low.  If it breaks-- in the wake of the horror that may lay ahead of us, in fires and floods and droughts and volcanoes and earthquakes, --and perhaps nuclear devestation-- we will not be clinging to assault rifles.