Three lessons I learned about guns

My father was a policeman, so I grew up with guns in the house and after his death my mother did not think twice about letting me and my brothers wander the nearby hills carrying a .22 rifle which we would use to shoot at squirrels, rabbits and tin cans and lucky for the area’s squirrel, rabbit and tin-can population, we rarely hit anything.

Looking back it’s kind of amazing we didn’t shoot each other and I’ve got no clue what my mom was thinking except maybe if things went exceedingly wrong she’d have one less mouth to feed.

OK, so Lesson One: It’s harder than you think to shoot a gun accurately, even though Hollywood makes it look easy.

Years later a neighborhood kid had a BB gun that looked just like a .45 automatic and he let me borrow it and I brought it home and my mom said she didn’t want it in the house and I said don’t worry, I had the safety on and to prove just how safe it was I pulled the trigger…and shot a hole in her bathroom window.

Lesson Two: It’s easier than you think to screw up and shoot something or someone accidentally.

(BTW: It just occurred to me that my mom was just fine and dandy with us kids walking around shooting a .22 rifle up in the hills, but didn’t want a damn BB gun anywhere near her, so next time I go home, Mom’s got some ‘splainin’ to do.)  

Moving on and at this point in the story I’m married and we’ve bought a house.

One spring evening we had the windows open and in the middle of the night, had one of those Midwest thunderstorms that sound like a reenactment of the Battle of the Bulge is being staged on your lawn and a giant boom woke me up while a flash of lightning revealed someone climbing in our bedroom window.

A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do and apparently that occasionally includes me.

So I got up and charged the intruder, but unfortunately (or as it turned out, maybe it was actually fortunately) caught my foot in a bedsheet, fell forward and slammed my head into Charles Manson Jr.’s ass, but instead of a blood-thirsty intruder it turned out to be my wife closing the window and my flying tackle slammed her head into the window frame which is probably why I didn’t get more credit for defending my family, even though I pointed out that while my attack left something to be desired (like proficiency) at the very least I was headed in the right direction.

Hey, I could have run away from the perceived threat, but didn’t and in my confused and hyperactive state, I have no doubt that if I kept a loaded gun next to my bed, I would have used it.

Lesson Three: It’s easy to get confused and make bad decisions when you’ve got adrenaline shooting out your ears. Now go back and re-read lesson two.

Despite my best efforts, I develop opinions

I became a political cartoonist because I wanted to draw funny pictures and get paid for it; not because I had political opinions that the world needed to hear.

But it turns out reading the news day after day after day will lead you to some conclusions whether you want it to or not and it seemed to me I read a lot more stories about accidental shootings or suicides or family arguments gone bad, than stories about gun-toting home owners protecting their semi-loved ones against armed intruders.

In fact, I read that if you got shot the odds were you’d be shot with your own gun in your own home by someone you know.

Now here’s a 2017 article from the Scientific American (you know… the same kind of dumbbells that think you should get vaccinated during a pandemic) that says studies have shown having more guns does not stop crime and gun-ownership does not make you safer.

Just in case you don’t read the article, here’s a quote:

“In 2015 a combined analysis of 15 different studies found that people who had access to firearms at home were nearly twice as likely to be murdered as people who did not.”

Here’s another:

“They found that a gun in the home was associated with a nearly threefold increase in the odds that someone would be killed at home by a family member or intimate acquaintance.”

And another:

“So they went on to publish other studies confirming the link between guns and more violence. In one, they found that a gun in the home was tied to a nearly fivefold increase in the odds of suicide. (More Americans die from gun suicides every year than gun homicides.) In another, published in 1998, they reported that guns at home were four times more likely to cause an accidental shooting, seven times more likely to be used in assault or homicide, and 11 times more likely to be used in a suicide than they were to be used for self-defense.”

So it turns out owning a gun makes it more likely that someone will get shot and the odds say that someone probably won’t be Ted Bundy.

(Geez, for just a second I thought, “Wasn’t Ted Bundy on Modern Family?” But it turns out it was Al Bundy on Married…with Children and Al seemed like a guy who definitely should not have access to guns or Katey Sagal would not have lived long enough to be in Sons of Anarchy.)

Here’s the link to the Scientific American article just in case you want to read it:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/more-guns-do-not-stop-more-crimes-evidence-shows/

One more thing to think about: according to the article, since the mid-1990s the CDC has been blocked from supporting gun violence research because the NRA didn’t like what that research was showing and got Congress to put pressure on the CDC to knock it off and meanwhile the NRA has emphasized a handful of studies that support gun ownership and if you want to know how different studies could reach such different conclusions, read the article.

OK, one more quote from the article and one more family story

“There's also the fact that where there are more guns, more opportunities exist for people to steal them and use them nefariously.” 

I inherited two things from my father: his .357 Smith & Wesson service revolver and asthma and I gotta say the asthma has done a lot more to change my life.

At some point in my political awakening I decided I could not draw cartoons saying people shouldn’t keep a gun around the house while owning one myself, even though it was never loaded and I considered it a keepsake, not a weapon. So I gave it to one of my brothers and almost immediately his house got burglarized and the thief took the .357, two leather jackets, a pair of high heels and a ham. (I’m not sure if this guy was a thief or on a scavenger hunt.)

The eclectic list of stolen items led my brother to tell the police if they saw a guy running down the street, wearing high heels and a leather jacket while waving a gun in the air and simultaneously eating a ham sandwich, they had found their man.

If you buy a gun, odds are it will be used in some way you never intended.

And just in case you don’t trust the Scientific American (I mean the word “science” is right there in the title and we all know the best information actually comes from politicians who get money from the gun lobby) here’s another article from the Harvard University School of Public Health, which says pretty much the same thing:

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use-2/

Turns out a gun in the home is way more likely to be used to threaten a family member than it is to be used in self-defense and when a gun is used – even by someone with a gun permit – the use is usually illegal and criminals who get shot tend to get shot by other criminals, not law-abiding citizens despite a debunked study that said law-abiding citizens are shooting more bad guys than Rambo.

And as one of my sons pointed out: if guns make you safe from bad guys, why don’t prison guards carry them?

(Possibly because a bad guy might take it away from you and shove it up your ass while wearing high heels and eating a ham sandwich.)

The NBA and gun control

Steve Kerr is the head coach of the Golden State Warriors and in 1984 his father was shot and killed at the American University of Beirut and I’m guessing Steve doesn’t think more guns would have made his dad safer because here’s what he said in a press conference after the latest mass shooting:

"When are we going to do something? I am tired. I am so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to the devastated families out there. I'm tired of the moments of silence. Enough. ... So I ask you, Mitch McConnell and all of you senators who refuse to do anything about the violence and the school shootings and the supermarkets shootings -- I ask you, are you going to put your own desire for power ahead of the lives of our children and our elderly and our church-goers? Because that's what it looks like. That's what we do every week. I'm fed up. I've had enough. We can't get numb to this. We can't sit here and just read about it and say let's have a moment of silence."

My son and I were talking about the NBA playoffs and we both wondered why we had to hear this impassioned statement from an NBA coach and not a politician and maybe it’s because at least half the politicians don’t really want to do anything about this and like to blame mental illness instead, but as Democratic Senator Chris Murphy pointed out, blaming mental illness is bullshit because the United States doesn’t have any more mental illness than anybody else, what we have is more guns.

And they don’t make you safer and you shouldn’t have to hear that from a cartoonist.