I remember as a kid growing up on the Oak Park farm I was surrounded by guns. My father and brother, avid hunters, had .22 calibre rifles, 12 and 16-guage shotguns and the more powerful rifles for deer hunting, which they did each autumn while I stayed home, fed the calves, milked the cows and used the various barn forks.

 

I was okay with that. At least I wasn’t expected to stand on a cold deerstand and explain why I had taken 12 shots but hadn’t taken down a buck.

 

My dad and brother had that explaining to do, but they usually produced a deer.

 

Earlier in my teens, my dad bestowed on me his very old Mossberg .22 calibre rifle, which I used for plinking around the farm. Perhaps a squirrel, nothing more.

 

Then, I “transported” a 410-guage single shot shotgun while pheasant hunting with the group. But very few pheasants nor grouse ever wound up with my pellets in their butts.

 

Dad and Chuck were excellent shots. I believe in the early 1960’s when our farm was teeming with pheasants, they each brought 50 or 60 to the dinner table.

 

(To think there was so much pheasant to eat - and we did, two or three times a week - got me tired of it. Nowdays, we’d pay $50 for a nice pheasant dinner.)

 

But the pheasant days ended by the late ‘60’s. And the shotgun and .22 went away - and by the time I was in college, I was gunless.

 

Been that way ever since.

 

I realize I am in the minority of American males, because especially here in Central Minnesota, we are in the midst of great hunting and target shooting territory - and men and women are granted a constitutional right to bear arms.

 

To hunt. To target practice. To protect themselves and their loved ones.

 

There was a report this week there is a gun (in the cupboards - or on the street) for every American citizen.

 

That’s a lot of shooting that could go on.

 

A lot of shooting does go on. A third of the pages of our metropolitan newspapers are about people using guns on each other - not squirrels or pheasants.

 

So, how do we rationalize this avalanche of people shootings - including the massacre of a dozen and a half college people in Oregon this week?

 

Do we strengthen our gun laws?

 

Do we continue to protect the constitutional rights of people to carry arms?

 

The healthy gun lobby will fight against every proposed contraction of gun rights.

 

There needs to be more control - with measures aimed at taking the civil liberties away from those who can’t pass the tests.

 

Those who “can’t pass the tests” are those who are killing our citizens.

 

There needs to be serious discussion - led by the legitimate gun toters.