After leaving Plymouth 10 years ago, I have lived in a community of about 10,000 in northern New Hampshire. I bought a gun. Up here, we have to have guns because everyone else does. They are easy to purchase. Here, every public meeting in City Hall and every session of the legislature has people in attendance toting guns. I don’t go to church anymore because some people carry there. One election, a man came to the polls with a gun and the place cleared out.
At least once a year since I have been up here, somebody shoots someone. Usually it’s domestic violence, like two years ago when one of my high school friends from Massachusetts lost her granddaughter who lived nearby, shot to death by her boyfriend. Not long before that, a jilted boyfriend followed his ex-girlfriend back to her apartment from the bar where I hang out and shot them both to death. Soon after that, a separated father who lived two doors down from there shot his wife to death and took the kids. A couple years before that, a neighbor I had befriended was shot to death by her estranged husband, then he killed himself, leaving a small child with his dying mother. One of my best friends here lost his wife to a murder-suicide by an extra-marital lover. He is remarried now to a widow whose first husband had died after shooting himself. Last year in town, a man shot his neighbor to death. They lived in the same tenement building and were arguing over the order of placement of their cars in the common driveway. I could go on.
Five of the last 10 years here I have been a Democratic Committee chair or vice chair. One of my jobs is candidate recruitment. I can’t get a young woman to run for state office because they are all afraid of the proliferation of guns in the State House. Someone is always leaving one out somewhere or dropping one on the floor. There are over 400 legislators in the House chamber, many of whom carry. The day is coming when a dropped gun goes off and everyone carrying pulls theirs out and kills one another while trying to stop the shooter.
A little research on the stats demonstrates that trained security guards and a mag at the entrance is a much safer strategy, unless, of course, you want to limit town government participation to the extremely paranoid, the morbidly insecure, and the hopelessly pathological. That’s what we’ve got here. I don’t recommend it.
– Theodore Bosen