Enjoy owning a gun? Then practice gun safety

Riflery class was one of my favorite physical education courses at Texas A&M.

A couple of days a week I made my way to the range, which was set up underneath the student section of our beloved Kyle Field, and learned how to shoot in the four standard positions - prone, standing, sitting, and kneeling.

I had never fired a gun before, but my instructor, a former marine who also literally wrote the textbook we used, knew just about all there was to know, and he soon had all of us shooting like professionals.

After each class, I proudly took my paper targets back to the dorm, and, being the sentimental sort, I still have a few in a box somewhere.

There’s a certain satisfaction that comes from hitting your target, particularly when you see your progress over the course of a semester.

Now, I don’t claim to be an expert marksman, but I could hold my own.

Years later, I even owned a couple of handguns including a little .22-caliber Browning complete with a rosewood handle and Truglo sight.

Again, I was no Annie Oakley, but the challenge was the fun of it, just seeing if this time I could hit my target and with any luck have a tight grouping that would have made my instructor proud.

I was never what I would deem a hardcore-gun enthusiast like my instructor, who used to show us mail he received from Handgun Control Inc. and then place NRA literature in the gun-control group’s postage-paid envelopes.

But he taught me, above all else, to be safe when handling weapons.

That emphasis on safety is why my handgun and ammunition were stored separately at home or in the car and the gun, which had a trigger lock, was never kept loaded.

Yesterday, The State reporter Bristow Merchant wrote about a case of a prank gone wrong when a Berkeley County gun store owner shot and killed his friend inside his shop.

He pointed what he said was supposed to be a replica gun at the man and fired the fatal shot.

Island Packet reporters Jake Shore and Sofia Sanchez recently wrote about the tragic case of a three-year-old boy who died after getting hold of a family handgun.

The boy found the loaded gun in a kitchen drawer.

Try to imagine for a moment the pain each of these deaths has caused.

Parents, siblings, friends all left to grieve and to contemplate what might have been and for what?

According to the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, gun violence is another of the public health problems that we have yet to solve.

“In 2019, there were 39,707 firearm-related deaths in the United States – that’s about 109 people dying from a firearm-related injury each day. Six out of every 10 deaths were firearm suicides and more than 3 out of every 10 were firearm homicides,” the CDC wrote.

Of the stories I shared here, legally-owned firearms appear to be involved, so what went so tragically wrong?

When I was in elementary school, a lunch lady told me there were no such things as accidents. Maybe she was right.

Gun owners have to assume responsibility here and now.

These are lethal weapons, not toys, and if you cannot be a responsible gun owner, you shouldn’t have one.

If you own guns, take the time right now to check them.

Are they loaded? Are they easily accessible to a child? Do you have trigger locks?

If you can’t take the basic steps of storing and using your firearms safely, it’s time to let them go.