A teacher escort­ing Amer­i­can teenagers on a “cul­tur­al immer­sion” trip to Rome once told me the hard­est part of the job was ensur­ing the school’s “zero tol­er­ance” pol­i­cy was enforced. The small­est sip of wine at a meal…a quin­tes­sen­tial ele­ment of Ital­ian culture…could cost the teacher her job. I find it a bit dif­fi­cult to square that with a teenager’s“right to bear arms” at a pub­lic protest.

The ref­er­ence, of course, is to Kyle Rit­ten­house, who was acquit­ted of killing two peo­ple and wound­ing a third with an AR15-style assault rifle. I’m not ques­tion­ing the ver­dict. My quandary is why he had the gun in the first place.
Accord­ing to recent stud­ies, “The ratio­nal part of a teen’s brain isn’t ful­ly devel­oped and won’t be until age 25 or so. Adults think with the pre­frontal cor­tex…the part of the brain that responds to sit­u­a­tions with good judg­ment and an aware­ness of long-term con­se­quences. Teens process infor­ma­tion with the amyg­dala, the emo­tion­al part. That applies no mat­ter how smart teens are or how well they score on tests.
The U.S. is the only non-strife-wracked nation in which sup­pos­ed­ly “ordi­nary cit­i­zens”, includ­ing teenagers, can wan­der about in pub­lic with a semi-auto­mat­ic rifle slung over their shoul­der, or a hand­gun in a hol­ster on one hip. It’s nei­ther my pre­rog­a­tive, nor with­in my exper­tise, to ques­tion the ratio­nale that doing so is an American’s con­sti­tu­tion­al right. But my expe­ri­ence makes me won­der how it’s sup­posed to keep peo­ple safe. 
Over the course of 40 years as a for­eign cor­re­spon­dent I report­ed from more than a dozen con­flict zones around the world. When gun­fire sud­den­ly breaks out, the uni­ver­sal first reac­tion is con­fu­sion. A movie it ain’t…in fact…it’s more like this:
“A bystander who inter­vened in the shoot­ing of a police offi­cer in Col­orado on Mon­day by shoot­ing the gun­man was him­self fatal­ly shot by a respond­ing police offi­cer, the author­i­ties said on Fri­day.”

                                    DON’T TELL THE NRA

Despite that, the mantra of Wayne LaPierre, head of the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion remains: “To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun.” Hope­ful­ly Mr LaPierre isn’t the “good guy” in ques­tion. Some time ago secret footage showed the NRA’s lead­ing light unable to fin­ish off a wound­ed ele­phant with three shots from point-blank range. (He did, how­ev­er, man­age the near impos­si­ble — make me laugh and feel sick­ened at the same time.)
The ele­phant might have avoid­ed the suf­fer­ing and LaPierre the dis­grace, if his organ­i­sa­tion insist­ed gun own­ers go through a ver­sion of the train­ing my long-time col­league, Lar­ry Doyle, had in the U.S. Marine pla­toon lead­ers pro­gramme before he was deployed to Vietnam:
“It was three weeks or so before we fired on the range. First, we had to learn all the parts of the weapon, dis­as­sem­ble, and clean the weapon, reassem­ble, dis­as­sem­ble and speed reassem­ble, all under the very harsh eye of drill instruc­tor Manuel Mont­gomery, who did not hide his lack of respect for his ‘mag­got’ candidates.”
Why, I won­der, aren’t civil­ians who want to car­ry guns oblig­ed to go through some form of train­ing akin to that of Marines, whose duty it is to bear arms?

                        CHECK YOUR GUNS AT THE DOOR

A cult hero of old West­erns was the coura­geous sher­iff who made the bad guys hand over their guns before they came into town. The mod­ern, real-life equiv­a­lent of that is a “clear­ance bar­rel”, a sand-filled con­tain­er about half the size of a 45-gal­lon drum. A fea­ture of pret­ty much every U.S. mil­i­tary base I’ve ever vis­it­ed in a war zone, they’re where you clear a loaded weapon, remove the mag­a­zine and then dry fire into the sand. The idea is to pre­vent acci­den­tal dis­charges inside the base. So far, I haven’t heard of them being sug­gest­ed, nev­er mind made manda­to­ry out­side bars in states that per­mit “open carry”.
John Reade, a for­mer col­league draft­ed in the 1960s, said the Army went one bet­ter in Vietnam:
“When I was sta­tioned at a heli­copter gun­ship base, our unit’s weapons were kept in a stor­age Conex. No one was allowed to keep one with them at all times. A chain ran through the han­dle grips and was locked with a key-lock. The Army knows that unsu­per­vised teenagers, loaded weapons, alco­hol and/or drugs are a bad mix.

                                THE INTERNET, HOWEVER…

So why are kits for untrace­able “ghost guns” avail­able online for a few hun­dred dol­lars, no back­ground check, includ­ing age, need­ed? Because…wait for it…they’re only 80 per­cent com­plete, and there­fore tech­ni­cal­ly not guns. Bryan Muehlberg­er, whose 15-year-old daugh­ter Gra­cie was killed by a ghost gun, wrote that turn­ing the com­po­nents into a func­tion­ing weapon “typ­i­cal­ly takes an hour or two. The top five YouTube instruc­tion­al videos for con­struct­ing the guns have been viewed more than 3 mil­lion times.”

Try­ing a lit­tle wine as part of learn­ing about a cul­ture with one of the low­est gun-death rates in the world, on the oth­er hand, is appar­ent­ly too life-threat­en­ing to contemplate…which speaks vol­umes, does it not?

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