About four miles south of this house is a major highway. It is called Highway 22. If one were to leave this house and turn left upon reaching Highway 22, it would eventually lead to the Holland Tunnel and New York City. If, on the other hand, the driver were to elect to make a right turn, he would find himself eventually in Pennsylvania and Ohio and environs further west. In recent years, a new highway has been constructed that leads to the Holland Tunnel which was supposed to relieve the high-density traffic on Highway 22. That to a large extent has been accomplished, but Highway 22 still carries a major amount of traffic and it proceeds at high speeds.
On each side of Highway 22, there are small business establishments, set back about 50 feet from the highway. Generally speaking, those business establishments have graveled driveways on which parked cars may be placed. As a general proposition, I believe it is fair to conclude that these are the places for mid-to-low-level retail commercial establishments. Along Highway 22 you will find none of the high class stores that are on Fifth Avenue or Park Avenue in New York City. Because of the speed of passing automobiles, when one wishes to enter Highway 22 from one of these business establishments, it is a matter of proceeding to 50 or 60 miles an hour in a very short period of time. Because of the graveled driveways, this results in gravel being strewn behind the departing cars.
The business establishments along Highway 22 on this stretch of New York City suburbs are not of an elite character. There are pawn shops, stores that deal in pornography, discount tire manufacturers, and stores of a similar nature. About the only saving grace is that Highway 22 is the home of one car dealership selling BMW cars. That dealership is the jewel of the Highway 22 business empire.
Now you realize that for better or worse, my eyesight is completely and irretrievably gone. Nonetheless, if I were to conclude – as I probably never will – that I needed a fire arm to protect myself and my loved ones, I would head for the business establishments along Highway 22 because that is where I am sure there are dealers who will sell guns and ammunition. Upon reaching the parking lot of such a dealer in guns and ammunition, my wife would park the car and I would alight wearing my sunglasses and using my sturdy white cane. The sunglasses and the white cane are used to announce to the world that there is a blind man in their midst. I do not do this as a means of seeking pity. Of course not. I do it as a courtesy to people who can see, so that they will know that there is a non-sighted person in their midst. If I wanted pity, I would not go to a gun dealership on Highway 22 to find it.
Once the car is parked, my wife would come to the right side and I would extend the walking cane into the walking position. We would then enter the place that sold ammunition and guns. When we reached the inside of the gun dealership, we would attempt to find a clerk to help us.
Now as a general proposition, very often the clerks ignore me and speak to my wife as though I did not exist. The clerk, seeing the sunglasses and the white cane, might very well say to my wife, “Is this man mentally sane?”
Inevitably my wife would say to the man, “Talk to him. He can talk.” And so it would be that the clerk would ask me if I had ever been committed to a mental institution. I would tell him that of course that had not been part of my background. I would assure the clerk that I am not insane and that insanity is not a characteristic of the Carr family.
Then I would ask the clerk for a Glock automatic handgun and an extended ammunition clip of bullets to go with it. If I understand correctly, the Glock has ten bullets in the chamber plus one in the firing position. But the extended ammunition clip provides 20 or 30 more bullets to shoot. Now that we have established that I am not a recent graduate of a mental institution, the clerk and I might make a bit of small talk. He might ask me what use I intend to make of the Glock handgun. I would tell him that I intended to protect my wife and myself and more often than not would shoot at cans in the back yard for target practice. Now mind you, if I understand the law correctly, and I believe I do, that is the only question the gun dealership clerks can ask before selling a weapon and ammunition to customers. Whether the clerk believes that I can hit a can for target shooting is beside the point. I contend that I am not insane and the clerk is obliged to sell the gun as well as the extended ammunition clip to me.
That is the state of the record in every state in this great and glorious union. In the state of Virginia, which is not far from here, I conclude that people who sell guns with ammunition are not even obliged to ask the questions about insanity.
Obviously what precedes the subject of this essay is the ease with which Americans are able to buy guns. Some of those Americans are mentally incompetent. But that is not the concern of people who make ammunition and guns. Their intent is to sell as many guns as possible, even to the drug cartels in Mexico, because it looks a lot better on their bottom line.
As you are aware, last Saturday, January 8, there was a shooting in Tucson, Arizona. Six people were killed and a number of others were gravely wounded. Among those killed was a nine-year-old girl named Christina Taylor Green as well as a federal judge. Among those wounded was an Arizona Congresswoman named Gabrielle Giffords. But this mentally unbalanced gunman was shooting without rhyme or reason and if he hit a nine-year-old girl or a 70-year-old jurist, so be it.
On Wednesday, January 12, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, went to Tucson to participate in a memorial service for those who were slain and those who were injured. Mr. Obama made a speech that was well received by observers covering the entire political spectrum. I listened to that speech and came away wondering why Obama did not mention the thought that an insane man or a mentally imbalanced person could buy a gun with an extended ammunition clip. As I have said, his speech was well received by all factions in the political spectrum but not so much by this old soldier.
The obvious fact is that a gunman used a Glock semi-automatic weapon to shoot his victims. But there was not a single mention of taking those guns away from the mentally incompetent, even from cowboys who love to “pack heat.” There is a very good reason why Obama left this out of his speech. He knows, as do most all other politicians, that to criticize gun ownership is to criticize the National Rifle Association. If such criticism occurs, the NRA strikes back and uses its enormous resources to defeat any such politician who has the intent to step out of line. Let me state this a little more clearly. The NRA is, in my estimation, a sinister force. According to the NRA, citizens may carry fire arms concealed or in the open. If the NRA had its way, every citizen of this country and perhaps the non-citizens as well would be armed. Any move by a politician to impose sensible limits on the use of guns arouses antagonism from the NRA. They will convert that antagonism into votes at the next election. To criticize the NRA is to jeopardize the source of your income.
Look at it this way. The past few years that the gun restrictions have been largely removed from legislation, there have been dozens of incidents in which people who are unbalanced mentally or who have a political agenda such as those who advocate jihadist thoughts, have committed mass killings. Here is a very very partial list.
You may remember Major Akbar at Fort Wood, Texas in 2005 who was blamed for the deaths of 13 killed and 31 wounded. In 2005 at a church service in Field, Wisconsin seven people were killed by a gunman. In Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania on October 2, 2006 a truck driver killed five school girls execution style in an Amish community. There were also six wounded in that attack. In Blacksburg, Virginia in April 2007 at Virginia Tech, there was a gunman who shot 47 people, killing 32. In Omaha, Nebraska in December 2007, there was a gunman who killed nine people and injured five during an attack at a shopping center in the mall.
This is only a tiny slice of the killings that have taken place in this country in recent years. Yet no politician known to me is willing to take on the NRA. This is left to a widow from Long Island named Carolyn McCarthy. Her husband was killed on the Long Island Railroad and her son was gravely wounded by an attack about ten years ago. Mrs. McCarthy has now become a Representative in Congress and has a bill that would make some very minor improvements in restricting the sale of extended ammunition clips. Peter King, a Representative also from Long Island, has proposed a bill barring the use of firearms within 1,000 feet of a federal official. As of this writing, the NRA had no comment. But when there is an election to be held, you may be sure that the NRA uses political muscle to defeat any politician who opposes its agenda.
And so it is that I mourn for the victims of the shootings in Tucson. But I must conclude that that is only the latest tragedy that we must deal with. We look at the killings in the United States and wonder what has happened to this democracy. And I too wonder. As a former soldier, I know a little bit about guns. I never owned one before I joined the army and I have never owned a firearm of any sort since leaving the army 65 years ago. There are those such as former Vice President Cheney and the Supreme Court Justice Scalia who consider it sport to murder an innocent bird. In this category, I have always been guided by the admonition of my father. When I was five or six years old, he told me that he would never kill a bird because “He loves his life as much as you love yours.”
Ah, but it will keep happening until a politician has the spine to oppose the NRA. Unfortunately the memorial speech at Tucson the other night by the President of the United States made no mention of the gun that killed Christina Taylor Green. We all knew that it was a gun that killed her but that was not mentioned in the tributes to the dead and injured. And so I conclude with four lines from the Australian composer Eric Bogel who wrote the anti-war song known as “The Green Fields of France.” It is also known as “No Man’s Land” and more popularly is called “Private Willie McBride.” Unfortunately these four lines summarize my view at this time.

Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain.
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

I suppose that I could play the recording of the song about Willie McBride to the fellow who wants to sell me a gun down on Highway 22. But I suspect that all he wants to do is ring up a sale in his cash register and not worry about what a blind person is going to do with the Glock semi-automatic that he sold me. And that, my friends, is the state of the record in this gorgeous country. Until we deal with the NRA, we will continue to find that the killings will go on, “Again and again, and again and again.”
E. E. CARR
January 15, 2011
~~~
Yeah, pretty much. I could date this essay as 2017 and freshen up the list of recent horrific shootings and nobody would be the wiser. Nothing meaningful has changed. Other first world countries do not struggle nearly so much with this.