No Firearms Allowed
When asked if access to guns contributed to the uptick in deadly shootings, Parizek responded: “I don’t want to dip my toes too far into legislative issues, but we’re a right-to-carry state. We unfortunately find a lot of legally possessed firearms used in crimes these days. That’s a problem.”
--City violence a 'behavioral problem,' police spokesman says
The fact that Iowa is a right to carry state, and has a conceal-carry law, has bothered me for a while. When signs saying "No Firearms Allowed" started appearing in places where it never occurred to me that there would be firearms, like the public library, or the co-op grocery store, that really bothered me. When my local Living Social offered a discount on a conceal carry class, I wrote them an angry letter asking them to justify how carrying a firearm was being social and attempted to cancel my account. (You can't. You can remove your credit card, but there is no way to cancel your account. Again, not very social in my book, unless being social is a suicide pact.)
I grew up with guns in the house. Almost all of them were locked in a safe in the basement, but a rifle was always in my parents closet. You never know when the Huns might invade, I guess. My dad hunted, and shot for sport, but he was also an emergency room surgeon.
Decatur, Illinois was a battleground in the 1980s. Located on a crossroads of major highways, just south of Chicago, north of Memphis, west of Indianapolis and east of St. Louis, there were huge drug wars between two rival gangs. At one point, Decatur led the murder per capita rate for the whole country.
I was rummaging through a bunch of our VHS tapes one day when I came across this video that my dad had made. It was a training video for nurses and orderlies in the ER. I watched as my dad calmly explained what different caliber of bullets do to a human body, about the size of different exit wounds. He did demonstrations on milk jugs and pieces of styrofoam. The purpose behind the videos was to give the staff in the ER the knowledge they would need to help the people who were coming in shot, but the effect on me was horrifying.
I've never been able to reconcile my father the doctor with my father the card-carrying member of the NRA. The proliferation of firearms in this country horrifies me.
My dad thinks guns are neat- he likes to collect them, read about them. When I look at a gun, I see a tool, a tool with one real purpose. To kill.
I lived near downtown Decatur during the early 90s in a neighborhood that wasn't very safe, and I actually got used to falling asleep at night to the sound of gunfire. Then a week ago or so here in Des Moines, as I was falling asleep, I heard a distant series of cracks and was instantly wide awake. I went and checked on my wife and kids, who were safely reading stories in the boys bedroom. My wife looked confused when I poked my head in. I explained I thought I had heard gunshots and wanted to make sure they were safe. A couple days later she found a note on a local website that someone's front door had been shot at, on our street.
I have hope that someday, we as a nation will find a solution that will make this minority feel, if not happy, at least satisfied that their rights are not being impinged upon while the rest of can feel safer. I don't understand why we need to keep the tools of death out in circulation. One day, we will join the rest of the world in controlling them.