My Stake in the Ground About Assault Rifles

To get right to the point:  It’s time for assault rifles to come off the shelves of America’s sporting goods store and gun shops. It’s time for America to leave military  style weapons to the military, and for the rest of us to get along with rifles developed for hunting four-legged mammals, not rifles specifically designed for waging war against other humans. If I haven’t yet lost you, here’s why I’m putting my personal stake in the ground on this issue.

Point 1: I support the 2^nd Amendment that protects my right to own firearms. And I do own several of them: a deer rifle, two shotguns, a 22 caliber plinker rifle, and several black powder weapons. Only the 22 is semi-automatic and I own two 8-round clips for it.  I got guns.

Point 2: I served as the principal of small town public high school for nine years. I was an assistant principal in a large urban public high school for five years. I was one of those for whom the mass murders at Columbine High School in 1999 was a deeply troubling event that we feared foretold a horrifying new aspect of school management—Dealing with a shooter loose in the building who is intent on murdering our children.

To be clear: When I am the principal of a school, all the students there are MY children, no less so than my sons and my precious grandchildren. In loco parentis—in the place of parents.

Point 3: If, God forbid, a crazed person is roaming the halls of MY school trying to run up a body count of MY students—my children, the very last weapon I want the murdering sonofabitch to use is a military-style automatic or semi-automatic rifle with high-velocity ammunition and large fast-change clips.

Why? Because the AR-AK styles are easy to aim, quick to reload after spewing out a 30-round clip in just seconds. The murdering school terrorists want to fire the most lead possible in the shortest amount of time to reach the highest possible body count.

To be sure, AR’s and AK’s are beautiful firearms, well designed to do their job of inflicting the most possible enemy casualties in the shortest amount of time. That's why they are the last weapon I want a mass-murderer to use.

Point 5: I want the school shooter to carry a 5-foot-tall muzzle-loading Civil War musket. Too long to aim quickly, and very slow to reload after just one shot. But that’s not likely, is it? No, the murdering sonofabitch is going to have a high-velocity, semi-auto or full-auto military-style rifle, like the last three back-to-back mass-murderers have used in the past six months, causing the deaths of over 100 innocents.

Point 6: No serious deer hunter in America uses those weapons. Hunters are marksmen who want a heavy stock and barrel, a steadying sling, and a good scope to fire a single well-placed bullet to take down their prey. Bird hunters do nicely with three shells before the prey flies out of range.

Point 7: Those serious about self-protection at home do not depend on  AR or AK style rifles. A shotgun or pistol is a better choice. The high-velocity rifle bullets zip through wall after wall, maybe even reaching into the house next door. In a car or truck, a rifle is too long to manipulate quickly for defense. 

I know the arguments for open access to AR and AK style rifles. My head is not in the sand on this deal. Still and all, after considering all the arguments for anyone legally owning an AR/AK style rifle, I simply do not see a credible reason for that ownership. There are better hunting alternatives, there are better self-defense alternatives, there are better target shooting alternatives.

Point 8: The AR/AK is not the firearm of choice for any civilian purpose except mass murders. Unless maybe you choose to live in a mountain-top bunker and expect to repel a large number of home invaders launching a banzai charge.

Point 9: We cannot prevent mass murderers from committing their violent acts of terrorism. But we can and should take away their most preferred murder tool, a weapon which serves no valid civilian purpose other than committing mass murders. If we cannot prevent the mass murders, we can at least lower the body count. It ain’t rocket science to figure that one out.

Point 10: Sporting goods stores do not sell machine guns or rocket propelled grenade launchers. It’s time to add assault rifles to that list.

 

 

Vikings & Rangers & A Writer Named Nelson

Is there somebody who you have read about, or even personally met, who makes you mutter to yourself, “I want to be him or her.” Not just because that person may be rich and beautiful/handsome. Maybe he/she is attractive, but more important, he is smart, plus creative, maybe athletic, and is engaged in a career built on his gifts, and must be having a great time every day. Granted, nobody is all that. But every now and then, someone checks a lot more of those boxes than I do, and I sort of yearn to be him or her. The back half of this blog is about a writer who seems to fill that bill for me.

In my life I’ve been a compulsive serial consumer of a progression of pop fiction authors. In junior high school, young adult novelist Jim Kjelgaard was my man. He wrote young adult books like Big Red about an Irish setter and other doggie and outdoor tales.

Then in high school it was Ian Fleming’s James Bond spy books, and John D MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. And of course, Robert Heinlein’s treasure trove of science fiction drew me like a moth to a light bulb.

As an adult, I have overdosed on questionable fictional heroes like Nero Wolf--the obese private eye of the 1930’s in NYC, Horatio Hornblower--the British navy officer of the Napoleonic Wars, Richard Sharpe--the green-coated British rifleman, George Smiley—the modern day English spy, and a bunch of  others.

My newest go-to historical fiction writer is American, not British. His name is James L. Nelson. He lives in Maine with his wife and four kids, and writes a delightful series of novels about Viking raiders in Ireland in the dark ages—the 800’s.

I’m a fan of the series for the normal reasons like pacing and likable characters. Beyond that, I admire Nelson’s Viking saga for an odd reason: The Vikings raided Ireland, murdering, raping, and plundering pretty much just because they could. At least our Native American Indians were doing the same thing to slow the inexorable advance of the white settlers. Whereas with the Vikings, the unprovoked terrible violence was just their way of doing things. The Irish certainly were not threatening to displace the Vikings from their homelands on the other side of the North Sea.

I’ve learned through writing my own novels that it is a big challenge to create and maintain a sympathetic character when he is leading a tiny army of soldiers to wreak havoc in another land. I struggled to keep my most recent novel’s main character a likable and honorable guy, given the context of the real Texas Rangers’ raid into Mexico that was the foundation of my plot.

Nelson builds sympathy for his primary Viking character by making him a father and in his way a compassionate man. He also sidesteps many of the violent particulars of the Vikings’ raids, making the books suitable Young Adult literature. Nelson even manages to make Thorgrim’s pet beserker warrior, Starri, a likable wacko who time and again leaps mindlessly into battle wacking Irishmen with his two axes.

Speaking of axes, here is Mr. Nelson on a replica Viking ship. Notice that he's wearing what is almost a cowboy hat! Maybe he is a closet Texan.

I also admire Mr. Nelson because, according to his website, as a school kid he built a wooden boat and a wooden canoe and both floated. As a young man he crewed for some years on big sailing ships, including the HMS Rose, the centerpiece real sailing ship used as the primary set for Master and Commander, Russell Crowe’s best film. Nelson even wrote his first novel while working as ship’s crewman.

I very much like that James L Nelson learned through personal experience that which he went on to write about. Not that he ran around in chain mail terrorizing the good folks in Maine, but he has climbed the rigging, quite literally, sailing old military ships, and he nicely embeds that background into his stories without overly dwelling on the mechanics of sailing. I tried to do that in my Captain McBee Honor trilogy in regards to Civil War infantrymen, relying on what I learned about being a musket toting citizen-soldier during my twenty years as a reenactor. And like Mr. Nelson, I’ve tried not to overly dwell on the details.

Another plus is that Mr. Nelson self-publishes some of his novels, as I do, and he appears to make a full-time living writing and doing historical programs related to his writing, which I do not. But I would love to be that good.

Find James L Nelson’s books on Amazon and try one of them. They are good stuff.