Barry Farber
Monday, March 12, 2001

In this more prosperous but less felicitous America the forecast has become, "School shootings, followed by endless debate over gun control and ignored warnings."

America is like a nation of alcoholics who wake up with terrible headaches and spend the rest of the day arguing whether to blame the soda or the ice.

America needs to be grabbed by the collar, shaken and told: "Look, big guy. You've had some epic innings. You saved the world from everything from fascism and communism clear over to polio, small breasts and noisy windshield wipers. You've given the world the incandescent light bulb, the telephone, the movies, the moon landing and too much else to remember, much less recite. You've given the world every communications device from the improved megaphone to instant e-mail.

"But somewhere, somehow, your genius got ahead of your goodness. Your population got trashy. As a people, you are not as good as you used to be. And you're getting worse."

The patriot hates to admit his beloved countrymen have gone trashy around him, but the honest American patriot today has no choice.

I'm tired of hearing gun-control advocates prattle about how hard it is to own a gun in Europe and that's why Norwegians, Swedes, Swiss, Finns and Danes don't kill each other the way we do. True, they don't, but it's not because they don't have guns and can't get guns. Their populations are simply more civilized, educated, disciplined and humanized than ours. If you were to parachute fully loaded handguns without safety locks down upon all those countries – one for each man, woman and child – you still wouldn't see an upward squiggle in their homicide rates.

In fact, in Switzerland every home HAS to have a firearm by law – part of its traditional national defense. In Israel uniformed boys and girls packing loaded Uzis are all over the place. People feel safer when they see them.

But let's prove the point with America. I ask you to return; not to the beginning of our nationhood, not even to the beginning of the 20th century. Go back with me just to my own high school days in the mid-1950s.

A higher percentage of families in my North Carolina home town had guns than do today: the South, you see, before so many Northerners moved in. And by high school age, any student who wanted to access the family gun could have easily done so.

High school, like today, was a steaming cauldron of tauntings, insults, humiliations, put-downs, rejections from girls, teachers ridiculing your stupidities and coaches yelling in front of 50 other boys that you run like a giraffe. And yet there were zero cases of random shootings in schools.

Do you understand? ZERO! Zero's not many. I can imagine fans of gun control dispatching researchers into the newspaper archives of the 1930s and '40s hoping to prove me wrong by one or two or three. Good luck. I'd like to know if you find any. My understanding is zero.

So, you who believe stricter gun laws are the answer have to work brutally hard to win my vote. You have to explain to me why, with more guns available then than now, incidents of catastrophic misuse of guns were fewer and incidents of random shooting of students by students was zero.

An admittedly nerdy New York Post columnist came close to sympathizing with Andy, the Santana High School shooter. Oh, he covered himself. He clearly stated that nothing, NOTHING could excuse what the young shooter did. He then proceeded to recount his own ordeals in high school, including mob bullying up to and including physical torture. He effectively articulated his implacable hatred of his oppressors. And he said the question should be NOT "Why are there so many shootings?" but "Given all the taunting, why aren't there more?"

I, too, was the high school nerd. My nickname was "Skinny" and even "Spider." Whether I was badgered as much as that columnist we'll never know, but my feeling is quite opposite.

Pretend it were scientifically possible to take my entire payload of humiliation through all the days and years of high school and wrap it around one single imaginary person and pretend HE did it all by himself. Now, suppose a stranger entered the room and found me and my master tormentor-in-chief standing there. If the stranger were to say, "Barry, get out of the way. This guy has made you miserable and I'm going to blow him away!"

I would fall to my knees and holler: "No! No! For God's sake, don't shoot. DON"T SHOOT! Yes, he's a miserable waste of blood and gristle. I hate him worse than anybody but Hitler. Still and all, don't shoot! Don't shoot! For God's sake DON"T SHOOT!"

Thanks to those Charles Atlas muscle-building ads on the backs of all boys' comic books we reacted differently to the verbal and physical bully. We worked out. Lifted weights. Trained and learned how to fight. We made the wrestling team and basked in the warmest caress of earthbound glory when we heard that even the football players in the locker room were nominating US as the ones they'd most hate to get into a fight with.

I never beat up my tormentor-in-chief when I converted from nerd to jock. I did something much better. When I made captain of the wrestling team he came to me in a nice way and asked me to teach him some tricks on the mat. We became good friends. Because this Web site has such tremendous reach, I'm going to mention his name.

He's Doug Maynard, who lived in McAdoo Heights north of Greensboro, N.C., in the 1940s. Thank you, Doug. I owe you plenty.

Tell me, you hard-fighting fans of gun control: How well did we control liquor during Prohibition? How well are we controlling drugs right now? Forget Brady Laws and five-day waiting periods; if every gun of every kind were banned beginning at the end of this paragraph, what gives you hope the black market would not do what black markets have always successfully done?

And as for the talk about "smart" guns, guns that can be fired only by their adult owner: What is it you think you're celebrating when you succeed in pressuring a gun manufacturer to start producing "smart" guns?

Let's say you want to ban, for instance, cherries. You'd have a good chance to ban cherries. You know where the cherry trees are, you know the major and the minor marketers, you know the retail grocers and fruit stands. You could, with the government solidly behind you, shut down production and distribution of all cherries. And if you were to ask me, "What about the millions of cherries already OUT there?" I'd simply say, "Wait four days." After four days all existing cherries would no longer look and act like cherries.

Guns keep on looking and acting like guns. So, while you're drafting wording to usher in a new age of smart guns, what are you going to do about the 200 million-plus stupid guns already out there?

I wish there were an easy way to get there. There's not, but I know where I want America to go. I want America to go forward to real gun control – the gun control of 50 years ago.

Back then we had the only kind of gun control that can work.

I'll control MY gun. You control YOURS.

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