Remembering Tom

Tom Clements

I was on a cross country trip and a little out of the loop regarding national news. I heard scraps of news but nothing in detail. When I got home I realized that the shooting death of the Colorado Prisons Director, that I was only vaguely aware of, was a friend of mine from my time at the Missouri Department of Corrections. Tom Clements went to Colorado a couple years ago to be their prisons director but prior to that he worked here in Missouri.  I retired back in 2000 and only saw or spoke with him a few times since then but I had worked with Tom for maybe ten or twelve years before that. We both worked for the Board of Probation and Parole before jumping to the Department of Corrections. I think that's when I met him....he was in one of the St. Louis offices while I was in the central office in Jefferson City.

I am one of the most patient people around but Tom had me beat. He was able to express ideas and patiently work toward a distant goal or objective. He had an optimism that was rare in Corrections. I'm sure he was stressed out as much as everyone else but he managed to contain it and seemed to be a calming influence.

If you were a wrestler, Tom was the guy you would want on your tag-team.  We occasionally worked together and I never doubted that he would back me up.  He was a good friend, a dedicated professional and a caring family man.

I recall one odd occurrence years ago when my family and some friends went on a vacation in Colorado. We were driving home and stopped at a McDonald's restaurant in Limon, Colorado. While I was there I ran into Tom who was just starting a vacation trip to Colorado. It was a funny coincidence that we would both be there at the same time but Tom's reactions was just like it was a normal occurrence...of course we would run into each other eight hundred miles from home.

I don't know the details of his murder -- only that he was at home and someone came to the door and he was shot when he opened the front door.  In my imagination I can actually see him doing that without any misgiving or safety concern...somebody needed his attention and he went...that's the way he was.

War of 1812 Remembered

Lets hear it for the War of 1812!  We are well into the 150th anniversary of the Civil War but the good old War of 1812 is almost ignored during its 200th anniversary. I've been whining about the anniversary for a while and finally my daughter told me about a symposium at the university on the war and its impact.  

I decided to go and was surprised to see a pretty good turnout. There were supposed to be three speakers but one, the MU professor, cancelled due to the flu or some other health problem.  That left a military man from the Canadian war college and an author of a book on the naval aspect of the war.  Since the symposium only lasted two hours, this was sufficient for the time allowed. It was an interesting afternoon.

The War of 1812 was a four way conflict...the British, the Canadians, the Americans and the Indians.  Seems like all parties think they won...except the Indians. The Indians believed the promises of the British agents and fought against the Americans, for the most part. This was the time of Tecumseh and the Prophet and their efforts to unite the different tribes to resist the western expansion of the Americans.

Long story short...the Americans recall the battle of New Orleans, a few naval battles and the Star Spangled Banner and forget the rest. Canadians recall that they repelled a couple American attempts to invade Canada and remained loyal to Britain. The British were preoccupied with Napoleon and vaguely remember that they captured and burned Washington DC. The Indians got screwed, mostly. The biggest winner was probably Andrew Jackson who became a national hero and eventually president.



The war is said to be the second war of American independence and that is
probably true to some extent --- we maintained our independence and fought off the might of the British navy and invaders. The war deserves a little more respect and study. The problem is that looking back in history we are always blinded by the Civil War. The War of 1812 was fought mostly in the east or around the great lakes. Here in the Midwest it was mostly a series of Indian attacks planned or sponsored by British agents. Frontier settlements were few and far between and were sitting ducks waiting for attacks. The Indians were opportunists and extremely mobile and could cover a lot of ground in a short time. Some Illinois tribes sent warriors as far east as the mountains of Virginia and the Carolinas. There was an Indian attack on a local pioneer settlement just across the river from present day Jefferson City at Cote san Dessein. The settlement survived the attack and was later designated as a geographic reference for siting the future state capital.

By 1812, the United States had already fought the Barbary pirates and purchased Louisiana from the French. The country was huge by European standards and largely unoccupied. Sectionalism influenced everything that went on in government and there were large parts of the country that didn't support the war. The New England states actually considered secession for a while. Each region had its own war goals...naval security, overseas commerce, expansion into Canada, exterminating or punishing Indians, and securing slavery along the border with Spanish Florida.  Shortly after the war the United States took over Florida from Spain  . The US navy had some successes and, largely due to events in Europe, some of the commercial issues were resolved. The United States was unable to capture Canada from the British, which was one of the main goals of the war.

The actual Stat Spangled Banner, the garrison flag that flew over Fort McHenry during the British bombardment, is preserved and on display in the Smithsonian. What's left of it, anyway. It was a huge flag, 30 feet by 42 feet (yes, feet), and it made a good target because it is probably only 2/3 of it's original length. It was repeatedly snipped away and given as souvenirs or keepsakes until it reached the current size. Even one of the stars was cut out and given away. It probably took a stiff breeze to get over 1,200 square feet of cloth to fully extend but it would have been impressive. A few years back the Smithsonian spent almost ten years preserving and stabilizing the flag and it is now displayed with a background that shows it's original size. As recently as 2011 a small piece of the flag was sold at auction in Dallas Texas. This was one of the old keepsake snippets from the 1900s -- nobody is chopping off pieces now.

USS Constitution
under sail in 1997

Among the relics of the War of 1812 we still have the USS Constitution, a frigate that served in the navy from 1797 until finally retired in 1881. The ship is still commissioned and has a crew but serves mostly as a museum ship in Boston Harbor. She has been reconstructed and repaired several times over the years and sails on a "turn-around" cruise in the harbour each year.

The ship saw many battles and sailed around the world in the 1840s. The most famous sea battle was the defeat of the HMS Guerriere during the War of 1812. The ship sailed under her own power into Boston Harbour on August 19, 2012 on the 200th anniversary of the battle.




USS Constitution vs HMS Guerriere

Jack the Talking Crow and Other Tales

On Surviving School and Learning a Little Along the Way -- Pardon my self-indulgence. It’s Funny how things come back to you while you are doing something else. I was writing on an entirely different topic when I took a turn and ended up here. I guess sometimes things have to break out of your head and land on paper. This is a rambling autobiographical account of my early days in school back in the “Leave it to Beaver” era.

I was one of those students that, if in elementary school today, would be spending quality time with the school psychologist and probably diagnosed as having some degree of attention deficit disorder.  Somehow I learned that putting words on paper was fulfilling at this early age. Kids at this age are looking for something that they excelled at and I was a champion reader. I read early and often so I became familiar with how ideas were expressed on paper. Conversation was sporadic and disjointed but when an idea was committed to paper it had to be clear and complete. I can actually remember learning about the period and experiencing one of those light-bulb moments when it became clear that when someone was trying to communicate an idea they had to do it before the period showed up. Periods and commas did not just appear at random.  I also figured out that before you can really be a writer you need to have something to write about. Luckily, there was so much going on in my world that the normal school work of arithmetic and cursive writing were an intrusion.

In first grade we had Jack the talking crow who would come and sit on our class window sill and entertain the kids and aggravate the teacher. The windows were at ground level and Jack would just walk up, like crows do, and peer in the window. If it was warm and the windows were open he would hop in and walk up and down the window sill. Jack was wild and big and the girls were terrified -- which made his visits to first grade so much more enjoyable. The school legend was that Jack had been captured by a neighborhood ne'er-do-well and had his tongue split and somehow he learned to talk. We hung on every word but he wasn't much of a conversationalist.  My first grade teacher went nuts (literally) and had to leave about two-thirds of the way through the school year. Maybe Jack had something to do with it.  We could see it coming; she had been going downhill for a while and the Christmas vacation must have sent her over the edge. She hung on for a few weeks but eventually she “went to Chicago”.   As a result, we were parceled out to other classes like refugees for the last few months of the school year. Each classroom develops a culture after a few months so we were alien beings in our new surroundings and Jack the Crow couldn’t seem to find us. The other kids were crow-deprived and had no experiences with Jack and figured we were as crazy as our old teacher.  

In second grade my teacher was a rookie straight out of Little Rock, Arkansas. We only understood about half of what she said (I swan!). We liked her mostly due to the novelty of her approach to English. We all sounded like southern aristocracy after a couple months. She seemed very young even to us. She couldn’t have been over twenty-five.  We liked her a lot. Since we had more tenure at the school than she did we could stretch the rules and she didn't know any better.

The novelty of second grade got even better because my school caught fire and burned down during the Christmas vacation. The students were farmed out to local church basements where tables and a few salvaged desks were arranged around portable blackboards.  I actually had nothing to do with the fire but I recall having my picture taken in a triumphant pose next to the smoking ruins. I suspect that there were a lot of similar pictures of other kids. They said it was faulty wiring up in the attic that started the fire. The school was old and decrepit but it was better than the church basements we had to report to in January.  The teachers and students struggled to keep things moving ahead but conditions were terrible.

Those years spent in the church basements I count as my missing years.  I spent most of my time concealed behind the blackboard copying lessons that everyone else copied ten minutes earlier. I was too busy at the time but was expected to catch up and to this day I’m still running about ten minutes behind. Sometimes the blackboards flipped so I was back there trying to copy the lesson upside down. I was right side up…the lesson wasn’t.  Sometimes there were several of us back there and it was great fun until the teacher figured it out.

Third grade was a total loss. We were in the dungeon at the local Missionary Baptist Church. I didn't know churches had dungeons and if they did I was sure that mine, being a semi-rural, hard-rock Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, would have a doozy plus some torture equipment. But my experience among the Baptists was bleak and foreboding. I remember it as dark with bare light bulbs and no windows and I really needed windows. My third grade teacher was a hatchet-faced lady who was always in a bad mood. I have to give the teachers credit because the working conditions were terrible and I'm sure (now, being much older) that they tried very hard to keep us on track. Some of our text books were water damaged and smelled of smoke so no one even wanted to touch them. Everything was makeshift.  In third grade I don't even recall having recess. 

The sky opened in fourth grade. We were no longer in a church basement but were in a funny looking asbestos cardboard type of building. It had lots of windows and was full of all kinds of cool stuff like bird nests and hornet nests and fossils and some real stuffed animals…never mind the asbestos. We had class pets and terrariums and pen pals. This was heaven and the teacher was an angel. I have friends from that period who stayed in contact with that teacher well into adulthood. I was finally inspired to write what was bouncing around in my head and some of it was good. My life behind the blackboard ended and I was welcomed with open arms back into the society of fourth graders.

As luck would have it, they rebuilt the school and we finally moved back in at the start of fifth grade. This was my first male teacher. I didn’t know they came in that variety.  Up until this time I figured all teachers were women...except for the music teacher who was a little bit odd and peevish and was easily provoked into spasms of rage.  

The new school was a disappointment as it looked just like the old school. Our teacher was a part-time Baptist minister whose day job was trying to teach something, anything, to ten year olds. I was a little wary of the Baptist minister connection because I still had haunting memories of third grade. As it turned out, he mostly enjoyed having the little girls sit on his lap.  The boys were free to do anything that wasn't too disruptive. I was a budding scholar by this time and was beginning to get the idea that if I was going to learn anything useful I was going to have to teach myself. Unfortunately, my interests didn't always coincide with the classroom material. I would write letters and ask people to send me information. I wrote to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and got a large bundle of material on King Tut, Luxor and Giza. My parents had an old Crosley radio with a shortwave band that I used to listen to English language broadcasts from Paris and (God forbid!!) Moscow. I wrote off to the Paris broadcasters and received a bundle of information and ended up on their mailing list for several years. What they sent was very technical and way over my head but it was still cool getting mail from France. I had a pen pal in England and we sent letters back and forth for a couple years.    

This was 1957 and the floodgates had opened and we didn't have time for this mundane school stuff. Everything was cool. Cars had huge fins and soon the Edsel was introduced. Elvis was on the television...or at least his upper half. This was the International Geophysical Year for heaven's sake! Sputnik was flying around overhead. I managed to be sick (wink, wink) the day the USA tried to launch our Vanguard rocket in an attempt to catch up to the Soviets. I was tuned in on the old Crosley when they launched it and the sucker blew up on the launch pad. I was mortified because I was sure I could hear Sputnik’s little beep-beep on the shortwave laughing at us.    I remember when a kid smuggled the first transistor radio into school and we had to attach the wire aerial to a chain link fence in the schoolyard to pick up anything and then you could only barely hear it. We still had a classroom schedule but it was often interrupted by TB patch tests, fire drills, tornado drills and atomic bomb drills.  This was the year I joined the school band.

My band career was relatively short lived. I struggled with the clarinet for two years. We still had the same old music teacher and he served as our band director. He was even more high-strung when working with the school band. His nerves were shot and he was beginning to hold grudges. If you did something wrong you were on his list forever. We only performed one piece of music, "Our Director March" by F. E. Bigelow. We made no attempt to learn anything else and I can still hear it in my head. Even at the Christmas assembly we played the Our Director March. One day I managed to get tangled up in several music stands and caused a racket and the music teacher suffered a melt-down. I had apparently been on his list for some time already and this was the last straw. We were both yelling and somewhere along the way I told him what he could do with the clarinet. That was the end of my music career.

In my elementary school, sixth grade was the “senior” class. The teacher that year was a nice lady with hairy arms who meant well but had no idea what was going on in class…or should I say out of class.  All the boys seemed to have weak bladders that year and we tended to congregate, one by one, in the boys’ bathroom several times a day. Our classroom and the bathrooms were on the second floor. If one was so inclined, one could climb out the boys’ bathroom window and walk sideways on the ledge, flat against the brick wall of the building, and peek into the girls’ bathroom (much to the delight of any of the girls who happened to be there). One could also go the other direction and peek into the classroom window.  I’m not sure what the local neighbors thought about kids being on the second floor ledge during class time but they apparently never called the school to report it. At one point the teacher noticed that most of the boys were missing and had been gone for quite a while. She decided to investigate and stormed into the boys’ bathroom.  As eleven year olds, we were scandalized that she would dare to enter this male sanctuary. In spite of our protests, we were frog-marched back to class…all of us except for the kid out on the ledge.  It never occurred to her that someone would be out there. That episode put a damper on our ledge walking for a while.

The transition to what was then called “Junior High School” was a little stressful for everyone that had to go through it. Kids going into “middle school” today have similar experiences. The kids who were big fish in the little pond suddenly became average fish in a much larger pond in seventh grade. We all knew the kids from our local school….kids that had similar talking crow experiences and had spent time in Baptist church basements or on the ledge…but now there were kids from six other schools as well. It took some time to get this all sorted out and I was mostly a spectator. It turns out that there were some grudges between different schools and an apparent pecking order based on where you lived. We had to scamper from one class to another and there were gym classes and hallway lockers. Lockers were all we had as private space. That was where you stashed your copy of Lolita or Playboy or where you daily checked out that old banana until it turned into something else that defied description.

This was 1960 and it was an election year. Kennedy against Nixon and our school was split down the middle. Twelve year olds became highly partisan cheerleaders; a reflection of what was going on in society, and our school became a huge venue for political expression.  The school busses dumped us off in the morning and we came equipped with posters and signs promoting our favorite candidate and congregated in the gym until class started. We were two opposing camps waving signs and mouthing slogans.  I was a Kennedy man, partly because I just liked him but also because my Baptist missionary cousins flew home from Brazil and were tramping around the country telling everyone not to vote for a Catholic. We never saw those people before or since but they made a bee-line to our house that year to deliver the message. I figured that if Kennedy scared the Baptists that much he must be pretty good.

All during seventh grade we heard about the new junior high school that was going to open the following year. This was, of course, the baby boomer generation and we usually did things in huge groups. It was normal to have forty kids in a single class with one teacher (hence the ledge walking episodes in sixth grade). Apparently the district decided it couldn’t manage with only one junior high school anymore and built a new second facility to handle kids on the west side of the district. That was me and my friends – we, who had endured such hardships and deprivations, were going to be the first ones to inaugurate the new school that opened in eighth grade. Everything comes to those who wait. We were also shucking some of those no-account kids from the eastern provinces of the school district. Everything was hunky-dory…new school, new desks, new lockers, new gym, and new books. The place smelled new.  It was ours! I remember that they said that the school cost $2,000,000 to build so I looked around and took it all in. For a long time I used that as a yardstick of what $2,000,000 would buy. Unfortunately, this was in 1961 dollars and my yardstick became obsolete before too long. Eighth grade itself was fairly uneventful. Kennedy won the election so we were asking what we could do for our country. We had Civics class in seventh grade so now we knew all about how government worked. All of this was taking place during the Cold War and we were constantly having various drills. The school district had publicized plans of what they would do in case of a missile attack but these plans changed almost every year. We went from hiding under our desk to hiding in the windowless hallways and stairwells to, finally, being turned out of school to fend for ourselves. That was the last plan that I remember. All the kids would be “sent home” to be with their families…on foot. Since they estimated that we would have maybe twenty minutes advance warning and I lived about five miles from school I would be running five consecutive four-minute miles to reach my front door just as the bomb went off. I didn’t have much faith in that plan. 

Ninth grade…wow. I was in high school.  Talk about a crazy place!  Our high school was relatively new and was designed and built on a California campus model. We had eight or nine buildings with broad sunny sidewalks connecting the various buildings. This probably worked in California but in Missouri it was a living hell. One’s locker was probably in the 400 building while most of one’s classes were in the 200 building and one had only eight minutes between classes. One ended up carrying most of one’s books along with one’s coat and gym bag for most of the day because there was no way to make it to class if one had to visit one’s locker.  I learned to use “one” in ninth grade instead of the incorrect “you” (or the ubiquitous “yous”).

Ninth grade was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis…October, 1962. We would talk and think of nothing else for a couple weeks. I kept a cool head and was certain that it would all be OK in the end. I'm not sure why I was so confident and recent evidence suggests it was more serious than we thought at the time. I recall some girls who sat in class sobbing and the teachers were not much help. Some families were spooked so much that they took their kids out of school and sent them to live with relatives far from the city. In a couple weeks everything settled down but it was truly a scary time.

Our school had a smoking policy. Students could smoke only in designated areas. There was only one designated area and it was a fenced in space, maybe twenty feet square, out by the football field. Every morning, before class, students would shoe-horn themselves into that tiny corral so they could smoke a cigarette. It was very strange. Rain or shine…hot or cold…there would be a pall of smoke rising from the little fenced in smoking pit that was crammed with people. Not being a smoker, I never ventured into the pit but I’m not sure that smoking was the only thing that was going on but it was so crowded that no one could tell. As I said, we baby-boomers did things in groups.

Another curious feature at high school was a rocket ship planted on the front lawn of the school. Our team name was the Rams…not the Rockets…but we had a rocket perched like a hood ornament in front of the school. Apparently, a few years earlier, one of the students entered an essay contest to win a fully operational rocket ship simulator from Kraft foods. Well, she won. This sucker was as big as a small school bus and equipped with hydraulics and impressive 1959-era bells and whistles. It really worked and was mounted on sort of a moving launch pad. It was big enough inside to seat four or five people but the cost of installing and operating it made it impractical for the contest winner to keep it…..so she donated it to her high school. It was an easy target for graffiti from rival schools during football season. It was surrounded by a fence but that didn’t deter anyone dedicated enough to climb over and paste a sign on it.  It was still there in the 1970s and may still be there for all I know.

In high school we were all back together again. Things were better because we were focused on parading back and forth between buildings and didn’t have time to interact much outside of class.  We had real teams to cheer for and common goals. The school band could play more than one tune and we had a school choir…actually more than one. We also had interesting, almost legendary, teachers. One teacher had been there so long that they named a building after her…and yet she stayed.  She couldn’t take a hint. We had a Coach that would eat students alive…or at least we thought so. He was built like a wrestler and apparently won a state or NCAA wrestling title of some sort. Nobody messed with him. Besides being a PE Coach he was required to teach health class. I was in his health class when the news broke that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. This man was transformed before our eyes into a caring and sensitive human being.  He calmed everyone down and tried to make sense of what was happening. We had a public address system and the school piped the TV news audio into each classroom while we waited for the news.  There was absolute silence throughout the school while Walter Cronkite issued news bulletins. Everything was confused because no one knew if this was some kind of broader attack or who was left to be in charge. I don’t recall classes changing that afternoon and I’m sure we just sat there for a few hours trying to sort things out.

I recall another teacher…not her name but just the circumstances.  She was our English Literature teacher and we spent the first couple months of the term listening to Joan Baez and Buffy Sainte-Marie records while she went on and on about how relevant and important this all was.  She would almost swoon over Bob Dylan.  One day we came into class and she wasn’t there and no one knew where she was.  Her record player was missing along with her records.  One of the biology teachers was also missing and it turned out that they joined forces and ran off to California leaving his wife and kids to fend for themselves. This was a few years before the “Summer of Love” so I guess they were the advance party. By that time some of us were feeling pretty groovy ourselves after listening to Joan, Buffy and Bob every day.  We then had a series of substitutes who expected us to actually know something about literature. They were not groovy. 

I had a couple years of Spanish. This actually started in Junior High but I stayed with it. I recall the language lab where we sat in little cubicles with headphones on repeating recorded Spanish words or phrases. Sometimes we would record ourselves and play it back so we could hear what we sounded like. I swear that I was a regular Antonio Banderas in Spanish class. I missed my calling.

Generally speaking I would say that I did not have a wonderful high school experience. I was a little bookish and very quiet. Although I dabbled in it, dating was not my thing. I recall going to school dances and at least one basketball game…my least favorite sport...and occasional football games. I still excelled in those subjects that I liked and hated anything that had to do with math.  Happily, I finally found a math teacher who made some sense out of Algebra…the second time around.  My writing was better than most of the other students and would be used as an example of what they should be striving for. I had mixed feelings about this. I was happy that I was a good writer…it felt good and I knew it was good. On the other hand, I was mortified that maybe the teacher would reveal my name when she used my writing in class. She never did. 

I was not active in sports or clubs. The high school was eight miles from home and any after school activity meant that I had to walk for about two hours since there was no other way to get home. We had a few clubs that met during school hours and I participated in some of that but never became involved in organized sports…something that I regret a little.

We graduated in June of 1966. By the time we finished high school one of our classmates who had already dropped out of school joined the army. He was sent to Viet Nam and was already dead by the time we got our diploma.  Our class song was “Blowing in the Wind”.  Some of us were thinking about college, some were thinking about the military (both good and bad) and some were thinking about wearing flowers in their hair.

So, in the end I went on to two years at the local Junior College where most people played cards but I found education (at last) and a better understanding of myself (at last). I finished up at a state college (now a “University”) in Cape Girardeau. This was my introduction to small town America and I liked it.   I managed to miss military service due to what I still consider divine intervention.  I never actually wore flowers in my hair, or at least not for more than a few minutes…or maybe I did and don’t remember.  I tried to grow my hair long but I had so much that it piled up and I looked like Albert Einstein…not the image I was striving for.   

And so it went. I still wonder what ever happened to Jack the talking crow.

*     *     *

Guns, Guns, and More Guns!!!

Among people that know me, I am probably the last person they would think was a gun owner. I am not a hunter and I don't target shoot or skeet shoot. I am not obsessed with my personal safety or feel that my property is worth shooting someone over if involved in a confrontation, burglary or robbery. If somebody wants my stuff badly enough they will take it. I don't think that carrying a loaded gun serves as an deterrent to other folks who happen to be carrying a loaded gun, regardless of their intentions.

I am in favor of a ban on assault weapons and would not be opposed to a law that strictly bans sale or resale of assault weapons and requires registration of all assault weapons already in public possession.  We do something like that already with some cultural artifacts or elephant ivory. Will people still sell them on a black market? Yes.  Possession of an unregistered assault weapon should be illegal and subject to confiscation and a fine or jail time. Same for illegal sales of assault weapons whether registered or not. There is no excuse for average citizens (not police, military, national guard, etc.) to have access to assault weapons.

Okay, now that we have assault weapons taken care of, what about hand guns? It is a sad fact that there are so many hand guns in public possession that regulation or restriction beyond what we already have in place would be difficult. I think we should have a strict and reliable system for background checks. All hand guns should be registered and owners should have to carry the registration if they carry the weapon. Hand gun owners also should be required to complete a firearms safety class and also have a certificate of completion.  Any unregistered hand guns encountered by police should be confiscated and destroyed and possession of an unregistered hand gun should be a criminal offense that would bar that person from gun ownership. There are legitimate reasons to own a hand gun but if you are going to own one you should be required to comply with some basic registration and training requirements.  I don't see how these basic requirements would interfere with a citizen's legitimate ownership of a hand gun for protection or for sport. Hand guns are sometimes used in sport shooting competitions.  There are also gun collectors who should be allowed to pursue their hobbies as long as they comply with the requirements (assault weapons excluded).

Hunting, protection of livestock, pest or varmint control or target or skeet shooting are legitimate reasons to own a hunting rifle or shotgun. There are thousands of people in this country who rely on hunting for part of their family's food. There is a long tradition of hunting in this country and without some hunting we would be over run with deer or other wild animals. There was a recent hunt in Florida to eradicate Burmese Pythons from the Everglades. Thinning out the deer population is serious business in some areas. If the natural predators don't exist or can't control the population it is common to resort to hunting in some areas.

My own experience with guns is mixed. When I was a kid the neighbor across the street had a minor fender-bender on a local street and jumped out of his car waving a hand gun. He didn't shoot but he was armed and behaving erratically. Not long after this incident he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He was a sane and generally likable guy. No one knew he owned a gun, not even his wife. His illness is what sent him into an armed rage and if he didn't have the gun it would have been less serious.

I once owned a 20 gauge shotgun. I went through the NRA's hunter safety classes and got my "diploma". I don't recall why I wanted or needed a shotgun. It was a Christmas gift but I recall wanting it and going with my dad to buy it. I enjoyed going skeet shooting with it a few times when I was in Boy Scouts but I don't recall that being the reason why I got it. I went hunting once. Me and another guy my age, maybe 14 or 15, went out hunting in the forest down in southeast Missouri. We were looking for squirrels or rabbits. There were none to be found but we had these fine shotguns and nothing to shoot at -- a bad combination. So we ended up taking a shot at a bird that just happened to be unfortunate enough to be within range. It was a Yellow Billed Cuckoo, also called a Rain Crow. I remember my immediate remorse...it was a beautiful bird and one I had never seen before. It was much prettier alive than dead.

I had other mixed experiences with that shotgun that I won't go into. I finally loaned it to my brother who was living on a farm and needed a shotgun. He eventually moved away from the farm but the shotgun stayed behind. Good riddance as far as I was concerned.

When I was in college I had a friend who was an amateur gunsmith. He made replica guns such as flintlocks or percussion cap muskets for re-enactors or for black powder hunting. I ended up owning an English Belt Pistol, a 44 caliber flintlock replica similar to what was used in the time of the Revolution or the War of 1812. It is a real gun, not a simulated prop or decorative piece. I still own it, although I haven't fired it in thirty years. It is a deadly weapon but I could only get one shot off every two or three minutes. It is sort of a Rube Goldberg process when it is loaded and fired and the noise and smoke serves to give the shooter adequate cover to run away. Back in the day when I would take it out for target shooting I would be nearly deaf for about three days.  Hitting a target would be accidental but, since it fires a 44 caliber lead ball, it would do a lot of damage.

 

Before I moved recently, I lived about 400 yards from an outdoor shooting range. It was a sportsman's club that centered around sport shooing and occasionally archery competitions. They also did some dog training.  When we first moved there it took a little while to get used to the shooting but we hardly noticed it after a few weeks. They were close enough that we could hear the shooters call out for a clay pigeon to be released...followed by a blast from a shotgun. We never had any bad experiences...they were good neighbors. Things were fairly calm and predictable until the mid 1990s when we started hearing a lot of automatic weapons being fired. Something seemed to change following the first Gulf War, at least in our neighborhood. The shotguns and target shooting became automatic and semi-automatic rifle fire...sometimes rather early in the morning. They had one night a week where they would have night shooting under lights so on some days it was noisy well into the night. There really was no target shooting value to firing a burst of eight or ten rounds at a target. It seemed like we went from quality to quantity...not much sport left in it.

I was once a member of the NRA...back when I had that shotgun and went for hunter safety classes. The NRA was good at hunter safety and teaching gun owners how to be safe users. Today the NRA is controlled by a rabid faction of gun worshipers. They have some twisted view of the Second Amendment that eclipses all other aspects of the constitution or the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Will the NRA have to be destroyed to be saved? It has (had) a valid role to play in hunter and gun safety. If we are going to have public gun ownership we need something like the NRA to offer safety classes.  The NRA needs to reinvent itself to be a rational organization that supports hunters and sports shooters and advocates real control of assault weapons and handguns...or else it should sit down and shut up.

Even if the NRA manages to pull its head out of its ass, there are plenty of other idiots out there making fools of themselves. So called "Peace Officers" who advocate arming teachers, legislators and other public officials who want to require more guns as a remedy to too many guns already. We have a couple of local sheriffs who announced that they would refuse to enforce any stricter gun laws enacted by executive order or passed by Congress.  Sounds like grounds for removal from office to me.

Last but certainly not least -- the crackpots who are convinced that the "guvment" is coming to take their guns away. These people are so stupid that if there was an intelligence test for gun ownership, they would surely fail.  But...they do manage to find their way to the front of TV cameras and always have something helpful to say. Helpful because they are so off the wall that they scare the crap out of anyone with half a brain who realizes that these jerks are armed. They are a walking and talking argument for more gun control.

Guns are as American as Apple Pie. The second amendment authorizes regulated militias and citizen gun ownership in association with those militias. This amendment has been misinterpreted to mean that anyone can own whatever assault weapon they want. Well, why not rocket launchers, flame throwers and bazookas?  At one time, slavery was as American as Apple Pie and there were people with strong feelings on both sides of the issue but it was eliminated. Women's suffrage was debated for a long time but finally passed. We need a reasoned debate on gun control to finally resolve this issue as well. The Newtown school shootings seem to serve as a catalyst for this debate but I would not be surprised if we lose another few thousand innocent victims before anything gets done.