I'm for stricter gun controls if it stops stuff like Newtown, CT

It would be hard for me to say that I favor gun control coming from a background where guns were prevalent and shooting them was a sporting activity. Whether it was target shooting, shooting skeet, or just plain old plunking, it seems that shooting and firearms in general have been part of my life since I was very young.

I remember clearly getting up early on fall mornings and walking through the “woods” with my father, an avid small game hunter. The time we spent together in the fields near our upstate New York home are memories I will always treasure.

When I joined the Army in 1974, I was trained in using an M-16 and a .45 caliber automatic pistol. My service record shows I earned the Expert Marksman badge with both weapons. While in Germany, my unit cross-trained with a German paratrooper unit during which time I earned the Schutzenshnur, or German marksmanship award. To earn the award, a shooter has to qualify with a pistol, rifle, and machine gun. It was not a particularly easy ribbon to win, and many American soldiers don’t get the opportunity to attempt it.

All of that had made my position on gun control pretty easy. At the bottom, I know that guns aren’t so much the problem as the people using them are. But that’s too easy of a response, in light of the events that took place Friday December 14^th in Newtown, CT. I can’t for the life of me imagine trying to deal with that kind of senseless, insane murdering of innocents.

I still believe that people who are bent on doing the indescribable and unthinkable will find a way to do so. Adam Lanza, and those of his ilk, will always be able to conjure up a means to put their plans into action. There are dozens of examples.

On the other hand, perhaps it is time to look at locking down weapon sales. In this country, we will never be able to keep deranged people from getting access to weapons of all sorts. Think Timothy McVeigh, and you can kind of get the idea.

But if there is a chance that tightening gun laws can stop the next school shooting incident, or mall or theater or anything, then it may be time to impose stricter regulations. The whys and the wherefores have won out with me.

It’s hard enough to endure the loss of loved ones when they come to the fulfillment of their lives. Suffering the pain of losing a parent, a friend, or a sibling, even when you expect it, is difficult enough to endure. But the loss of a child? How hard that must be on an individual basis. It’s one thing if there are medical reasons for such a loss, but for so many to be killed like this?

Something has to be done to attempt to stop or hinder people from doing these things. While I still fully believe that someone bent on doing such evil will find a way to do it, perhaps making such devastating weapons harder to get is the answer.

All in all, something must be done. It’s not just stricter gun regulations, which may or may not help, but in almost all of these senseless killings people had an inkling about the evil. Adam Lanza used weapons that his mother owned and she was aware of his mental instability; a school psychologist knew James Holmes, the Colorado movie theater killer, was on the edge and capable of doing great evil; and Seung-Hui Cho was known to be dangerous and violent. So what does it take? How can we stop such events?

While I suspect that stricter gun laws will have little change on shooting like this, I think anything we can do to try to stop them should, and ought to be, on the table. If that includes tightening up guns laws, then so be it. Anything we can do to keep from living with the prospect of another of these atrocities needs to be employed.