What Gun Owners Really Want

I’ve owned six guns. I’ve drawn them on bad guys. I want to be understood.

BY WALTER KIRN

My father’s Iver Johnson .410 shotgun, which he promised would be mine soon, leaned on its stock in a closet off the kitchen filled with other guns and camping gear. The shotgun was given to him by my granddad, who’d bought it at an Ohio sporting goods store in the early 1950s. It was a squirrel gun that took only one shell and had to be manually cocked to fire; my father said it would teach me to shoot safely. I was months away from turning 15 and felt that a gun was the proper acknowledgment of oncoming adulthood.

When spring came, I got to use the Iver Johnson, but not for hunting, as it turned out.

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I have some disagreements with the author (I would prefer to see high capacity semi-automatic rifles, aka evil black rifles, regulated via the NFA rather than any ban as one example) but overall this is something I think is helpful to read as a reminder that the NRA speaks for only a small minority of us.