The way my father explained it...

When my father returned from WWII, he had spent a huge amount of time in combat with the 110^th infantry division, the Timberwolves. He was not in Europe for D-Day. In fact the ships carrying his division were the first to actually land and unload at a dock having gone direct from New York to France. But missing the Normandy invasion did in no way leave my father out of the action. For a time he was with the Red Ball Express running supplies to Patton’s rapidly advancing army. His next assignment was to fight through the lowlands of Holland, through dikes and marshes into Germany.

The Timberwolves were trained as specialists in night combat. During the Battle of the Bulge, my father and his dividion were right at the edge, holding a defensive position as the Germans swept through into France. When spring came they picked up stakes and pounded their way through Germany. Dad was among the first to cross the bridge at Remagen, and with his division liberated the concentration camp at Nordhausen. At the end of it all, my father was sick of two things (besides seeing so much death and destruction): Sleeping on the hard ground, and guns. He did not want to go camping and refused to have a gun in the house. The pearl handled Colt that my grandfather had given him to carry in a shoulder holster during the war was given away to get it out of the house.

As a young man getting my first BB gun, my father warned me, “do not point that at anything you do not want to kill.” And so I learned that guns, even as harmless as BB guns were to be taken seriously. And it irks me that there are so many who take them as a joke, or believe they can be taken lightly.

In Omaha, Nebraska, for a time as I was growing up, my Dad was the manager of a hardware store which was also the largest gun store in the region. The stories about the foolishness of gun owners as they brought loaded guns into the store, pointing and joking and having forgotten they were loaded went on and on. There was no end to it, and seeing how callous gun owners were irked my father who had seen so much death at the working end of a gun. Folks, mainly men, would stand at the gun counter, taking aim with rifles and pistols down the aisle of the store, and my father would turn to discover himself in their sites, just as he had known himself to be in the sites of snipers in WWII and ready to be killed in less than an instant.

I would not be troubled by firearms in the US, if I knew each father was one like mine. They are not. Children die from playing with their father’s guns. Young men and women buy guns without ever seeing the seriousness and caution that should be a pre-existing foundation for ownership of dangerous weapons. The costs of this imbalance are enormous. For each Newtown, each Aurora, each Columbine, there are hundreds of additional, smaller incidences of gun violence each week.

This said, I will allow comments if they actually address how we can have a society that tolerates guns and provides for the more absolute safety of kids. With the deaths in Newtown and the more regular incidences of gun violence in which children are affected in cities and towns across America, more must be done.

Did I suffer as a result of my father not allowing dangerous guns in the house. No. He bought me a ShopSmith for my 14th birthday. Before that time as I was growing up I was constantly involved with saws, hammers and the like, fixing and making with Dad. Folks think that guns are the manly wonderful thing to do with your kids. I would like folks to know that there is another direction that gives so much more.

Make, fix and create...