* Originally published January 5, 2016

“If you know how many guns you own…
you don’t own enough”
seen on the back of a T-shirt at a rally

   Nicholas Kristof was a Rhodes Scholar and twice a Pulitzer Prize winner. He writes opinion pieces for The New York Times. An op-ed in 2013 about two rifles, two men, and a goose is amusing and scary.

Kristof is not an East Coast urbanite with no concept of the importance of guns to protect farm stock from wild predators. He grew up on a sheep and cherry farm in Oregon. He was given a .22 rifle for his 12th birthday and then took an NRA safety course.

When he was a child his family gave a goose to a neighbor. The problem with the goose was that it had no concept of property lines. It would trespass onto a neighbor’s property, jumping into the watering trough for his sheep. Furious at this fouling (pun intended) of the water, the neighbor threatened to shoot the goose. Finding it one day on his property the irate neighbor raised his gun. When the goose-owner  came to corral the runaway, he saw his neighbor and the gun. “Naturally” he pulled out his gun.

    Kristof observed, “Our neighbors were both good, admirable, law-abiding people, but their guns had led to a dangerous confrontation. The NRA might say that guns don’t kill people, geese kill people, but in the absence of firearms they wouldn’t have menaced each other with axes or hammers. The sheep-owner’s wife eventually persuaded the men to stand down. Good [or goose] sense prevailed, the goose survived, and so did the neighbors.” The last part of that statement is worth pondering.

Kristof began his column by saying, “When I travel abroad and talk to foreigners about the American passion for guns, people sometimes express a conclusion that horrifies me: in America, life is cheap.”

There are several aspects to the story that piqued my interest. One is the ridiculous gun-happy response of the aggrieved neighbor. He was worn out with the goose’s behavior, but there were alternatives to his response. In too many instances a minor disagreement with guns at hand has led to a death. I also like the fact that it was a woman who calmed the two sharpshooters. At our best women are superb negotiators and able to calm passions, preferring talking it out to duking it out.

When someone is uncomfortable with an issue there are many tactics: change the subject, bring in spurious arguments, attack the speaker, or other clever obfuscating. Gun lobbyists talk piously about mental health. That’s what we need to work on, they say. Get the guns out of the hands of the mentally unstable and the problem is solved. Although our mental health system is in disarray, few persons with mental illness are  dangerous.

We know we are a nation conflicted about guns. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has stated that over seven children and teens are killed every day by guns in the United States. Maybe that doesn’t seem like a lot, but in less than a week it is more than the number of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012. We saw the grief of family members and friends of the 20 children and it was heartbreaking. That occurs daily in our country away from intense media coverage, so it is easy to dismiss.

You know the expression, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” I saw at a protest rally someone with a placard that said, “Guns save lives”. I wonder if gun advocates are willing to say, “Guns don’t save lives. People save lives”?
(Kristof’s op-ed, “Lessons from Guns and a Goose,” was printed in The New York Times, January 16, 2013.)

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