DAILY BEAST Column: After the latest massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown I listened to the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre say, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” I decided to find out what it felt like to be that “good guy” by carrying a gun everywhere I went for a month, doing the absolute minimum that’s legally required…
Ms. Magazine ran my initial post on the experience on June 12. More than 2,000 commenters responded to that article—most of them angry gun rights advocates saying how stupid I was; one even suggested that I put the gun in my mouth. Most of them missed the point entirely: the experiment was designed to show how easy it is to obtain a gun without being required to know how to use it…
The Ms. Magazine blog moderator withheld most of the threatening comments, and ultimately the magazine, its small staff overwhelmed by the flood of vituperation, initially decided not to run the rest of the series, a development Joe Nocera of the New York Times noticed and reported on… (more)
EDITOR: As a child of about six, I entered my parents bedroom while my mother was still in bed and saw, what I mistakenly took for a toy gun, on the bureau. We were used to playing with cap pistols. I picked it up, pointed it at my mother, and pulled the trigger. Fortunately the safety lock was on. That is how close I came to a lifetime of tragedy.
