Posted on 08/04/2006 8:10:39 AM PDT by 2banana
John Grogan | Time to unload on gun stupidity
By John Grogan
Inquirer Columnist
The funeral, all these years later, sticks with me.
There had been an accident involving two boys and a loaded handgun, and I had arrived early for the service. Outside, the undertaker paced, waiting for the family to arrive, and a priest smoked a cigarette, ready to pray. Inside, I stood alone beside a small casket holding an 8-year-old boy, shot through the forehead by his best friend.
The details of the death should have been shocking, but they were numbingly familiar: yet another gun brought into a home for protection, only to be found by curious children.
The boy's name was Ronnie Diaz, and I stood over his simple pine box, thinking it was a school day and he should be in class, learning about rain forests and fractions.
The boy's teachers should have been in school, too, believing in the future. But here they were, arriving red-eyed to say goodbye.
That funeral was in Florida in 1996, but I have been thinking about it a lot these past couple of weeks as history repeated itself yet again, this time 30 miles east of Pittsburgh at the home of a popular state legislator.
Sen. Bob Regola (R., Westmoreland) was in Harrisburg with his family July 21 receiving the Legislator of the Year Award from the Pennsylvania Sheriff's Association.
A boy and a gun
He had left a key to the house with a 14-year-old neighbor boy who was pet-sitting. According to police, the boy found Regola's unsecured 9mm pistol. The boy's body was found the next morning in a woods behind the house, a single gunshot wound to the head, the gun beside him.
Investigators still have not determined whether the death was an accident, suicide or homicide, a state police spokesman said yesterday. District Attorney John Peck has said Regola will not likely face criminal charges.
This much is certain: Another child found another gun. And the drumbeat of senseless loss goes on, resonating across the American landscape.
Regola, a member of the National Rifle Association, surely is asking himself painful questions in the aftermath of the death. What if he had kept the gun in a locked case? What if he had secured it with a trigger lock? What if he had removed it from the house for the weekend, knowing an unsupervised teenager would be there?
What if the father of three simply had decided a home with children is no place for lethal weapons?
Perhaps Louis A.J. Farrell would be alive today instead of a statistic.
Is the right to bear arms really worth this price? The price of our children's blood? Blood on the streets of North Philadelphia? Blood in the woods behind the home of a respected member of the legislature?
Someone tell me, please, what right are we protecting? The right to bear unbearable grief? What freedom? The freedom to place ourselves and our loved ones in needless peril?
A national embarrassment
When it comes to controlling guns, Pennsylvania is a national embarrassment. Our legislature proudly refuses to place even the most superficial of restraints on gun buyers and owners.
After a suicidal man bought a shotgun at a Horsham Wal-Mart in 2003 and shot up his former workplace before killing himself, I tried an experiment. I walked into a Bucks County Wal-Mart and tried to buy a shotgun. By answering a few rudimentary questions and submitting to an instant background check, I had my gun - or would have had I agreed to pay. The entire process had taken 27 minutes.
No required safety courses, no cooling-off periods. No trigger locks. Not even a limit on how many guns one person can buy in a month. Insanity.
I know I will hear from the gun nuts and firepower freaks, and they will scream the same old bellicose rant. I'm tired of hearing it.
I'm tired of standing over coffins. Of seeing schoolchildren caught in the crossfire and little boys killing playmates. Of teenage pet-sitters found with bullet holes in their heads.
This state has a problem its political leaders are happy to ignore. Now, that problem has come home to roost, right at the doorstep of a gun-supporting lawmaker. How many more wake-up calls will it take?
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Post a question or comment for John Grogan at http://go.philly.com/askgrogan. Or by e-mail: jgrogan@phillynews.com.
ping to myself for later read.
Don't you know that Eddie the Eagle turns kids into gun toting thugs and causes all sorts of accidents and shootings? But teaching the fundamentals of condom use prevents pregnancies while (barely) teaching kids how to drive a car and sending them onto American highway carnage is just fine.
Correct you are. And THAT is the REAL crux of the problem. If the kid's parents or the kid's school had actually taught the rudiments of GUN SAFETY, then there would more than likely have been no problem, and the kid would be alive today.
Why should gun owners be responsible for the failures of others???
Philly had fewer murders last year than it did in '94 before shall issue CC permit requirements were extended to the city by Harrisburg.
Yup! ;0)
Indeed. All kids need to go through the Eddie Eagle program.
Down here in Alabama last spring, we had a middle school boy who was shot and killed with a pellet rifle; he and some friends found his father's pellet rifle in the garage and were fooling around with it. He was shot in the chest at close range. Very sad.
Seems like a lot of children fall out of windows these days. Evil Gravity?
"I figured there would be photographers and I wanted to get there before all the good backdrops were too crowded."
Outside, the undertaker paced, waiting for the family to arrive, and a priest smoked a cigarette, ready to pray.
"I waited inside where the lighting favored my complexion. I had to turn off a couple of the overheads, because they were throwing unflattering shadows."
Inside, I stood alone beside a small casket holding an 8-year-old boy, shot through the forehead by his best friend.
"I think it made for a dramatic pose, even though the family wouldn't let me take the body out of the casket and carry it around with me. But I think I come off looking pretty sympathetic. In one shot, the light hits my eyes and it looks like I'm crying. I've still got the pictures, wanna see?"
Yes.
</discussion>
Should have brought up the higher numbers with autos.
And just why was this trusted 14 YO rumaging and ransaking the house?
"Unsecured" is meant to imply laying on the kitchen table, next to the can opener used to open the dog food.
More likely, it was in either a desk or bedside drawer; perhaps even in a box on a closet shelf.
or
Time to unload on people lacking common sense
Apparently there is a Gary Mauser too. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Gary_Mauser
Makes one hell of a rifle, also.
"I guess that will be the last book of his I'll buy. (Marley and Me)"
Have you ever read such a more narcissistic and pedantic book?
Not to mention the laughable inconsistencies from page one:
St. Shaun was a) from a puppy mill b) an unwanted (read "rescue") dog.
Sheesh.
That IS a great book!
Until he recognizes the REAL root cause of the problems in Philly ... it will never be fixed
Guns have been around for thousands of years .. but many parts of Philly haven't always been the hell hole it is today
I guess I'm not that deep.
"“You know,” she said, looking up. “I tried so hard and look what happened. I can’t even keep a stupid houseplant alive. I mean, how hard is that? All you need to do is water the damn thing. ”
Then she got to the real issue: “If I can’t even keep a plant alive, how am I ever going to keep a baby alive?” She looked like she might start crying.
The Baby Thing, as I called it, had become a constant in Jenny’s life and was getting bigger by the day..."
Yep. That's deep all right.
Chacune son goo, I guess.
If this simple jimgle were allowed to replace the "guns bad, no guns good" mantra, how many lives could be saved every year?
Rudimentary firearms safety education at the elementary level is readily available from the NRA.
These people don't care about safety, they only care about eliminating guns, so they'd be damned first before they would actually teach anyone how to be safe around firearms.
Now, didn't anyone tell that boy not to go messing with other people's stuff? A smidgin of 'home training' might have saved his life, too.
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