Back when I was in college in 1969, part of my liberal arts curriculum required two semesters of physical education. Never terribly athletic, I was pleased to see that one of my options was riflery. Alfred University had an ROTC program (Reserve Officer Training Corps), so there was a well-equipped rifle range and a real live Army instructor, Major Doak.

The Major was a very accommodating man. He taught us female civilians in detail about the weapons we would learn to shoot. He stressed safety and respect for the power of the rifles we would handle.  He didn’t patronize us as a bunch of girls playing with guns. We honed our skills as rifle-women during a semester of classes. Major Doak also gave us experience shooting handguns.  It was a heady experience for this city girl from New Jersey. I enjoyed it. A lot.  

My father-in-law, Jack Mandavill,e had been a hunter most of his life. Growing up on a New York state farm during the Great Depression, hunting was a valuable means of supplementing the produce they raised to feed the family. He hunted deer, pheasants and ducks. He had acquired more than a handful of rifles and shotguns over his lifetime, and we inherited a half-dozen of them when he died. They are stored away, unloaded, in a secure hidewaway in our home.  

A couple of weeks ago when I was, again, plagued by insomnia, I gave up on sleep and logged on to Facebook. There in my newsfeed was early news of the terrible massacre in Las Vegas. Twenty-two dead and dozens injured in a shooting at a country music concert. Sh*t! Damn it to hell! Not again!

This was beyond awful. It was beyond horrendous. I searched in vain for more details, but none were to be found this soon. When I finally did go to sleep, I was not imagining how much higher the body count would go, or how many people were wounded, physically and psychologically.

We now know the 58 innocent people (and one not-so-innocent) died that night, and more the 500 souls were maimed or critically wounded by gunshots. More than 20,000 were psychologically traumatized by the horror rained upon them. Our entire nation experienced the wretched deja vu’ of mass shooting, and the world watched, again, us crazy Americans begin the Ground Hog’s Day ritual of mass shooting, mass mourning, and mass doing nothing.

I told you my opening anecdotes in hopes that you would not consider me a gun prude. I’ve read and approve of the second amendment. I lived in Michigan for 35 years and understand the culture of hunting and gun ownership. I’ve learned gun safety and shot guns and own them. But I’m also just another freedom-loving citizen who is sad and sick and tired of fine, ordinary Americans burying their innocent relatives;  who is revolted by the artificial memorials of accumulated balloons, flowers, stuffed animals and candles that bloom at the sites of unspeakable tragedy.

So I’m not going to rant and rave about gun control. We all can recount the incidents that curdle our stomachs — dead children in Sandy Hook, et al. We know that legislators live in fear of pissing off their constituents who own and use guns responsibly if they (the legislators) don’t blindly support the NRA.  We know that there are paranoid folks who would have us believe that any attempt to regulate guns is an attempt to repeal the Second Amendment. And we know that some legislators accept huge amounts of money from the gun lobby to sidestep all attempts at reasonable legislation.

So let’s move on to a new idea.

I would like to suggest that all reasonable, gun-owning members of the National Rifle Association – who are certainly part of the overwhelming majority of Americans who favor a saner approach to gun ownership — all of these card-carrying members petition, protest, withhold their dues, whatever they can do to get the attention of the NRA leadership, and demand that this group become the American Cancer Society of armaments and begin to eliminate the epidemic of unnecessary deaths by firearms.

With all of its massive power and wealth, the NRA could throw all its efforts into staying ahead of the bad guys who perpetrate these bloodbaths by working with Congress and their own membership to close gun show loopholes, to digitize gun registries, to mandate background checks in all cases of gun purchasing, and to develop new safety measures to be incorporated into newly manufactured firearms.

I’ve heard all the arguments against these safeguards, and I dismiss them all as the macho, paranoid rantings of people who honestly think they have a right to bear military-grade firearms with ammunition that can explode a human head like a watermelon. Just because we are Americans doesn’t mean we are limitlessly entitled to have whatever our hearts desire. It is because we are Americans that we should be ahead of the curve instead of behind it when it comes to sensible, common sense solutions to a problem that only gets worse with each passing bloodletting.

In the credit card industry, whenever the naughty boys figure out how to circumvent new technology invented to protect us from theft, the industry researches and develops new means to thwart the naughty boys. And we all embrace those means, knowing full well  that whatever has been developed will work for a time — until the naughty boys figure that out — and that no solution will ever be the be-all, end-all, 100% guaranteed, fool-proof, for all eternity fail-safe fix. But that doesn’t stop the industry from doing something. They persist in fighting abuse of something we have come to consider a basic right — credit card usage. They do something!

It is my own opinion, my own small voice, that says I’ve had enough. But I believe there are some other small voices out there who feel, as I do, that we have not been heard in our outrage against what continues to happen to reasonable people because of unreasonable laws (or lack of them).

I call upon the reasonable men and women among gun owners and users in our great country to speak out against those who, by their selfish, misguided inaction cast a dark shadow on all of them. This is your chance to persist in fighting something we have come to consider a basic right — the responsible ownership of guns. This is your chance to finally DO SOMETHING.