I support the Second Amendment, but I don’t think it is a carte blanche for owning assault rifles or armor-piercing bullets. I think there’s nothing wrong with background checks and cooling-off periods. Or, for that matter, with local handgun bans.

Why? Because I read the papers (or their on-line equivalents). Here are a couple items from Vermont and beyond.

- A 73-year-old retired college professor was shot to death as he sat eating dinner with his wife. The culprits – so far two have been charged – were boneheads with guns who set up their own back yard shooting range 750 feet from the professor’s home. The weapon that killed the prof was – you guessed it – an assault rifle that one of the men, Brad Lussier, fired several times without aiming.

For those of you who may have missed it, Brad Lussier decided to fire an assault weapon without aiming in a residential neighborhood, killing an innocent bystander and forcing his wife to watch her husband die before her eyes.

- In other local news, a 44-year-old man shot and killed his 18-year-old son while the two were hunting together. Apparently, Kevin Kadamus thought his son Jacob was a turkey and without checking to make sure what he was discharging his weapon at, he shot and killed his own son. If grief could trump stupidity, I’m sure Mr. Kadamus would try to go back and time and never touch a gun, but it doesn’t.

- Of course, we’re all well aware of the “cop killing cop” incident from New York City a few weeks back. Is that a gun story or racism story? Well, it’s both and it’s interesting to see how much more upset police get when they kill an innocent cop than they do when they kill an innocent citizen. (Of course, both the innocent dead cops and the innocent dead citizens tend to be black.)

- Near our nation’s capital, members of Maryland’s statewide SWAT team shot up a control center at a nuclear reactor. Granted, the SWATters were a half mile (2,500 feet) away from the site, as opposed to the Vermont boneheads, who were a mere 750 feet, but how hard is it – when siting a shooting range – to determine how far a bullet from said range might fly if it goes off course and what might it strike?

So, while I support the Second Amendment, I also support keeping guns out of the hands of children, criminals, lunatics and boneheads, although that last category is often hard to determine in advance.

And it is, to some extent, personal. Twenty-seven years ago this spring, a college classmate of mine was shot in the head as she sat by the Allegheny River on campus. A bonehead with a high-powered rifle was shooting at a gopher across the river and like a true bonehead, he didn’t heed the admonition to never shoot facing water. The bullet ricocheted and ended the life of a bright, vivacious young woman.

© Mark Floegel, 2009