Golarz: Gun are like poisonous snakes: We can't allow them to slither about killing people
“All ready on the right. All ready on the left. All ready on the firing line. Shooters watch your targets.”
It was another day of boot camp. We were being trained to become proficient with the M1 rifle. Simply put, they were training us to kill. A handful of our company didn’t get it. We called them “cowboys.” Weapons to them were simply big boy toys. The rest of us understood.
Some days later one of our squad, having a question, stood up from his firing line position and with his rifle in hand turned to ask the marine drill sergeant a question. He never got to utter the first word. In one swift motion the drill sergeant grabbed the kid’s weapon and with its butt cracked him across the jaw. He went down and wasn’t getting up.
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Then the sergeant shouted out. “I warned you ladies. Never point your weapon at someone unless you intend to shoot to kill. You’re here to learn to kill.”
It was clear.
Before my military days, my Godfather, Uncle Andy, survived day-one on Omaha Beach and then fought his way through France and Germany. He was discharged at war’s end, came home and became a cop. He always respected his weapon and never had to fire it on duty during his entire career. What he did enjoy was hunting. Yet he would have given up, in a heartbeat, the right to that pleasure of gun ownership and hunting if there was the slimmest chance that it would somehow save the lives of his neighbors and their children.
After performing surgeries under fire in Iraq, my son came home, assuming a degree of state-side civility. Instead for the last four years he has spent no end of hours performing emergency surgeries — most caused by gun battles on the streets of Philadelphia.
I, like many, have a solid understanding of a gun’s non-discriminatory viciousness. I grew up with adults who always expressed to me their danger and limited purpose. I was trained well in the military service to respect their threat. Then also by my own work for 20 years with law enforcement, the cautions were reaffirmed and finally, with my own son, who spent countless hours tending to the severe wounds they inflict.
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I have come to understand that to have guns coexist in a society with human beings is like owning a caged poisonous snake. You owe them immense respect and you never put your hand in their cage, nor do you allow them to simply crawl about, for they will kill. If you own two snakes the danger is doubled. How about three? How about 400 million, the number of guns in our America.
Is there some massive impediment that we cannot overcome that defies logic, human sensitivity, and reason? As I said earlier, a small number of those I served with were what we called “cowboys.” They were enamored with the power of the weapons. To them these awesome weapons were simply big boy toys.
Tragically, we have now clearly let the snakes out of the cages and they predictably are indiscriminately killing our loved ones throughout our country in greater numbers every year. But there is resolution if we have the courage and the grit.
Reason dictates that we close the children’s sandboxes, melt down and then cast the toys into open-hearth furnaces and kill all of the slithering snakes. There can be no other viable course of action, for the cowboys aren’t listening and the killing continues.
The time of searching for compromising solutions is over.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Columnist compares gun ownership in America to caged poisonous snakes
