I t w a s just four years ago that it happened. A bullet streaked through the air. Had it gone six inches to the left, I would have been a widow, and my five children fatherless. The goodness and the mercy of the Lord spared us that tragedy. But it was bad enough. A shattered nerve in the arm o f my breadwinner and the partial loss of the use of one hand is lamentable to say nothing o f the anxious moments, the three-hour ordeal on the operating DEATH STALKED CLOSE— too close!
table, the days in the hospital, the endless hours of pain. The cause of this sudden catastrophe? A gun in the hands of a careless teenager. It wasn’t an accident, exactly. You read in the papers about guns being accidently discharged and o f stray bullets maiming and killing. This gun was aimed at my husband and the trigger was pulled deliberately. Did the boy hate m y husband or have it ‘in for him ’ ? No. Yet my husband had a close brush with death. Too close. W hy? A convalescing kid had been confined to his room. Stomach flu. Not well enough to go to school. Not sick enough to be in bed. He was bored. Televi sion helped pass away the hours. What did he see on television? Gunplay. Lots of it. Some gangster shot from a third-story window. This teenager was on the third floor. There was a gun in the closet. He got it out. He loaded it, worked all the bullets out—he thought. People came and went on the avenue outside his window all afternoon. Not one of them suspected that a gun was aimed at him as he walked innocent ly along. The teenager practiced aiming until that sport got tame. He was bored. He decided to ‘dry- fire’ . M y husband came up the walk. The gun was aimed at him. The kid pulled the trigger. His little game of dry-firing backfired. The impact and the shock of it sent my husband crumbling to the ground. I’ve heard that in ancient Rome it was against the law to deliver evil tidings to a pregnant woman. But what could they do? I had to be told. The doctor put me under sedatives to ease the shock of those first anxious hours. I lived through the ordeal, our little unborn Gregory lived, and Monroe lived. I’m still looking for an answer to the ‘why’ o f it all. Of this one thing I am convinced: children are not taught to respect a gun. It is a lethal weapon. Yet very young children come to play in our woods and to climb all over our stamp pile. They come bran dishing very real-looking guns. Toys, to be sure. But real to the child. They didn’t aim them at the squir rels or the birds or at the dog. That’s too mild. They aim them at each other. Bang! You’re dead. I got you. I did, too. Fall down. You’re dead! Was it right for that teenager to point a gun at Monroe and pull the trigger? Had he moved a hair breadth to the left, the teenager would have been a murderer and might have spent his life behind bars. If that was wrong, then why do we allow our chil dren to point guns at people and yell, “ Bang, you’re dead” ? I don’t. M y children don’t play with guns. I ex plain to the neighbor children that we don’t play with guns at our house, and I ask them to leave tnem with me until they are ready to go home— or if they prefer, they can take their guns home and leave them there while they come over to play. A four-year-old accepts my verdict, but there are a five and a six-year-old who don’t. Suddenly they mumble that they want their guns. The Bible says that we are to abstain from all appearance of evil. That isn’t a code just for adults. It goes for children, too. “ Thou shalt not kill,” says God. “ Thou shalt not pretend to kill when you are a child,” I say. It isn’t easy. Toy guns are every- (concluded on next page)
by Dorothy Grunbock Johnston
7
AUGUST, 1960
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