Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

This is one of those subjects wherein who you were, and who you are, is important. I was a little boy. Years later, I became a parent. So, I know whereof I speak when it comes to boys and parents and guns.

Here’s the thing about little boys. I did not notice this when I was a little boy, because I was one. However, I did notice this about them when I had my first daughter, which sounds counterintuitive, but stick with me. When my first daughter was a little girl and entered pre-school, it was the first time I was able to see her regularly in the presence of little boys. I noticed something right away. When little girls picked up something, say, a block that was part of a puzzle, the first thing they did was examine it and try to figure out what it was and perhaps why it was there among the children in the pre-school class.

When little boys picked up something, say a block in the classroom or a stick on the playground, the first thing they did was ask themselves, how can I turn this into a weapon. You could see it on their faces. Can I throw it? If so, at what? Can I swing it? If so, what can I hit with it?

It’s one of the elemental differences between little girls and little boys, and I believe it may be genetic, which is to say, it may date back to caves and the people who lived in them. In those prehistoric days, cavemen were hunters who pursued animals they could cook over a fire and provide as food for themselves and their families. Little boys copied their cavemen fathers who used sticks and then hatchets and spears and other primitive weapons to hunt with. Little boys picked up sticks and swung them and hit things the way they had seen their fathers swing sticks to hit and kill animals. Little boys ate the meat from the animals and made the connection between sticks and their stomachs. The connection, minus the provision of the food part of the equation, persists to this day.

This is the thing about parents and little boys. If you have a little boy, you must get between the instinct and the stick, which is to say, you must teach a little boy that there are other things you can do with a block that is part of a puzzle and a stick lying on the grass on a playground. You teach the little boy to put the block in the square hole, and you teach him that he can take the stick and use it with two or three others to build a teepee, for example.

It is perhaps one of the unfortunate aspects of modern life that later in the little boy’s life, blocks become video games and sticks become guns. Here is where the difference between a stick and a gun becomes important.

One of the things you teach a little boy is that if you swing a stick and hit something, you can break it. If you swing a stick and hit someone, say, another little child, you can hurt him or her. Sometimes in the course of human events, this lesson comes from experience, if a little boy hits another child with a stick and gets in trouble in pre-school or later in elementary school. At that point, the authorities become involved, and they call the parents, and there are conferences that involve why the little boy hit someone with a stick and what the parents can do to ensure that it never happens again. These conferences between the parents and the authorities are serious matters. If the child who was hit were to be injured, the little boy could be suspended or referred to professional counselors for treatment. Even if the other child was not injured, the event is treated with great seriousness. No one wants the little boy’s aggressive behavior to be repeated or to escalate.

Now comes the part where we get into the major difference between a stick and a gun. While a stick, if used to hit someone, can hurt them, a gun if fired at someone can kill them.

This distinction is not adequately addressed in our modern life, because while hitting someone in kindergarten is treated seriously, guns are not.

There are many reasons this is so, but chief among them is the horrible Second Amendment to the Constitution, which while not giving you a right to own and use a stick, does convey, according to idiots on the Supreme Court who have interpreted this bloody amendment, an absolute “right” to own and use a gun. So, just to be clear, you don’t have a right to a switchblade knife, which can be and is banned in some states, but you do have a right to a gun.

While there are conferences between parents and school authorities concerning the use and misuse of sticks, there are no such conferences about guns. Why is this? Because we do not treat guns seriously in this country. The evidence that this is so is located about one mile from where I write this on U.S. Route 6, just outside of Milford, Pennsylvania. There stands a gun store where you can walk in with a credit card and a drivers license and walk out with a deadly weapon and all the ammunition you can carry. There are no warnings given about the deadly nature of firearms. There is no training required for their use. According to Supreme Court decisions written by those geniuses Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, you can do this in any gun store in America because the Constitution says you can, and because Clarence Thomas could not find any laws on the books at the time the Constitution was written restricting the right to own and use a gun.

This is not a realistic or serious way to look at guns. Because they can kill human beings, they should be treated differently. We do it with other things: because automobiles, if used improperly, can kill people, we require training in their operation and licensing. You can be stripped of your license if you misuse an automobile by, say, driving it while intoxicated or in a dangerous and irresponsible manner.

Not so with guns. If you walk into a gun store and buy a gun and bullets and then go home and stand in your yard and fire that gun at a tree stump or into the air, nothing can be done about it. The authorities cannot take your gun away from you for such behavior. The unseriousness of the way we treat guns was shown as if in neon letters recently when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that a convicted felon with a restraining order against him for hitting and abusing his wife could not be stripped of his guns when he left prison, because…you know the answer: Second Amendment. The Supreme Court reconsidered that decision and came up with the idea that maybe, just maybe, your record as a felon and a wife abuser could affect your rights under the Second Amendment, but it was a stretch for them, with Clarence Thomas voting, naturally, on the side of the felon and his gun rights.

You can read the above as my assessment of why we had a school shooting by a 14-year-old boy and why his father was charged with six felonies for supplying him with the AR-15 the boy used to kill his classmates and teachers in the high school he attended. While this country takes seriously enough a little boy hitting another child with a stick that the parents of the boy would be called into the school for a conference with the authorities, we do not take seriously that it was completely legal for a boy’s father to go to a gun store and spend $1,500 on an AR-15 and give it to the boy for Christmas, apparently without a thought about what the boy might do with the weapon of war he had just put in the boy’s hands.

Until we start treating guns as seriously as we treat sticks, what happened in Georgia last week will continue to happen in other schools with other guns wielded by other boys.

Because the Second Amendment is more important than life itself.