I don't know what it's going to take.
My Dad, with a medical condition, trained soldiers in how to handle rifles, machine guns and grenades during WWII. He was a really good shooter - breathtaking how accurate he was. My brother inherited those genes and I didn't. I was a pretty good shot but I didn't care for it. My brother and Dad liked to hunt. I liked animals. But I learned a lot being around it.
My brother moved west and some decades ago, I went to visit him. He'd joined this informal gun club and asked if I'd like to come along. He promised no animals would be shot. So I did.
The place we went was some farmer's field surrounded by hills so a stray bullet couldn't get away. I heard them say something about a forest. So we go out to this field and my jaw drops when I see them unload their trunks full of weapons and steel cases of ammo. They've AR15s/M16s, Nato FNs - a whole bunch of heavy duty semi automatic rifles. There are about 6 heavily armed guys.
About 100 yards or so away, there's a hunk of forest kind of sticking out from the rest of the forest about half a football field. These guys line up and open fire on this forest. In two to three, maybe five minutes, it's basically gone - all cut down. The farmer wanted it taken out. It was a young forest in that I don't think any or many tree trunks were more than 6" in diameter. It just shocked me how powerful these weapons were.
They had some magazines there used to promote gun sales and the advertising pictures were of dead people and how big of a hole the weapon put in the dead guys head. They'd roll the dead body over to show you the entrance and exit wounds in the ad. Might have been an ad for bullets. I don't know. It make me feel like puking looking at it. Very disturbing.
These weapons are so powerful, it's frightening. Two of the guys in that group failed some sort of psych test, one trying to become a cop and the other with the army after he joined. The army forbid him to own a weapon. So a few months later, he bought an APC and a SWAT team took him down. Third untested guy should have failed -he was in the process of trying to buy a little howitzer that he thought he could tow to the farmers field on the back of his Volkswagon Rabbit. Seriously. I begged my brother to get away from these people - which he eventually did.
I was working one day in an industrial park and I heard shots. I called the police. Uniforms got there pretty quick. They took the report quickly and started to get in the cruiser. I grabbed him and said "You can't. It's 30 odd 6." Their faces went pale. I went on "Get the SWAT team. Please don't go." Ignoring me, they got in their cruiser and went looking for the shooter. I was sick with worry as I saw them weaving around in their cruiser. At 100 yards, it's really hard to miss with a good rifle. You can kill someone a mile away. A 30 odd 6 can blow a 6" hole in your head. If those police got into an altercation, pretty good odds at least one of them is dead because the shooter could be just waiting and sees them before they see him.
I know we've heavily criticized cops rightfully for slaughtering unarmed blacks but those two cops were very brave that night. They shouldn't have to face as much of that as they do. If you had to do that frequently, I think it would make you pretty jumpy - on edge too much.
I do not understand after things like Sandy Hook or Colorado or Columbine, etc why we continue to subject our society to this craziness. This was my first Sandy Hook:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman#Funeral
In 1966, Charles Whitman killed 16 people at the Univ of Texas. I'll never forget it. The tragic anniversary is fifty years this August and we really haven't done much about it.
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