Talking about guns

Almost without exception, physicians and stockbrokers have at least one thing in common, and I don’t mean affluence. They like to kill animals: deer, ducks, quail, elk, the like. If it walks on four legs or flies, and the Game and Fish Commission has a season for it, you’ll have a difficult time getting your chest cold seen after or your IRA updated. The Arkansas Medical Society could hold a convention at Stuttgart when the mallards are on the wing, and as the oaks begin their annual striptease the woods south of Fordyce are so full of investment counselors the doe buy derivatives.

Our little lunch group is, then, unique, or almost, for our stockbroker pal is the guy who stays at his desk when his coworkers are shivering in duck blinds or stalking antlers in the crisp of deep autumn. They’re hunting bucks while he’s back at the computer screen, making bucks. In fact he doesn’t own a gun.

“Never appealed to me,” he said of hunting, he who searches for different game, he who was tearing into his platter of parts-is-parts foot-long hotdog, cheese fries to one side. We were talking about guns, a conversation prompted by the latest news from Colorado’s mass murder, courtesy of CNN and Fox, beaming down to us from the overhead television sets. One of our number, the insurance man, a duck-and-deer devotee, was opining that there had to be a way to keep crazies from amassing arsenals and then unleashing them against the innocent. His grandson, in his early teens, had been among the first to catch the Batman movie and, although he lives in another state, “Could just as well have been him” among the victims.

“Gergen had it right,” said one of our lawyer members, the one we call the Capitol D Democrat. He had seen political analyst David Gergen on television the night before, lamenting the “failure of leadership” on gun control: Barack Obama talking the talk during the ‘08 campaign, then avoiding the matter entirely once in office; Mitt Romney and the other Republican candidates talking of nothing but Second Amendment freedoms.

“Clinton passed three gun bills in his first two years and got re-elected,” Capitol D quoted Gergen.

“But lost both houses in the mid-terms,” added another of the lawyers quickly.

“Taxes,” interjected the stockbroker. “Taxes. Hillarycare. Gays in the military.”

“Yeah, guns weren’t his problem,” agreed the federal employee, the middle-manager. “Well, not his only problem, or even the biggest.”

Capitol D sighed. “I’d go along with that. But to do — nothing…”

“He’s boxed in,” the fed continued. “It was all he could do to get health care…”

“And the bailouts…” the other lawyer piped up.

“…and the bailouts, and now it’s election time and it’s all he can do to defend them.”

“Had a war or two,” I kicked in.

“Budget,” came the broker.

“All that,” nodded the fed. “It’s tight in those swing states…”

“Plenty of time for them to swing Romney’s way…” the insurance man said.

“…so he doesn’t have a lot of margin.”

“I suspect he’s got turnout worries, too,” I volunteered, whereas the gun lobby would be a highly motivated bloc. “They’ll scare the daylights out of everybody who owns one but hasn’t fired it in 20 years,” the stockbroker chuckled.

“They’re already scared,” the insurance man said. A few days before the Aurora massacre he had retrieved his .270 from the gunsmith who had given it a good going-over, replacing a shoulder cushion, re-sighting it. The talk at the busy sales counter was of nothing but the likelihood that Mr. Obama would attempt this or that Second Amendment infringement, perhaps even firearms confiscation, if given another term. “They weren’t joking. They were serious, really serious,” the insurance man reported.

“Well, here’s where I am,” the stockbroker offered. “Seems to me the cat’s out of the bag. You got a country where nine outta ten houses have got at least one gun, maybe a bunch of ‘em.”

“I’d say 19 out of 20 around here,” one of the lawyers interrupted.

“Whatever. Forty-nine outta 50, who knows? What I’m saying is that you can pass all the laws you want — say you pass one that says everybody has to turn in ‘em by next July first. How many you think are gonna get turned in?”

“Nobody’s saying…” somebody tried to say.

“I know, I know,” the broker continued. “What I’m saying is, the cat’s outta the bag.”

“And we have to settle for that?” the exasperated Capitol D Democrat asked.

The insurance man said, “I’d say we don’t have much choice.”

• • •

Steve Barnes is host of Arkansas Week on AETN.