Why North County owns guns

By: BRIGID BRETT - For the North County Times | Tuesday, November 16, 2004 11:19 PM PST ∞

It's 2 a.m. Except for the occasional cry of a coyote, the night is deeply silent. The rest of my family is asleep, but I'm lying here wide awake, thinking about guns. I'm thinking about how, when I lived in Los Angeles for 15 years, I knew nobody who owned a gun ---- not even those who lived in rough neighborhoods. And how, here in this peaceful rural enclave of Valley Center, almost everyone around me has at least one firearm.

I've asked some people I know why they feel the need to have a gun, and a few of them talk about protecting themselves from rattlesnakes and mountain lions. I have a hard time buying that one ---- there are more injuries caused by hurtling down Valley Center Road in a month than there are from rattlesnakes in a decade. As for mountain lions, I've lived here for 10 years and I'm still waiting to see one.

Most people tell me about the Second Amendment and their inalienable right to bear arms. They talk about the Founding Fathers and the Constitution.

Sometimes they like to remind me that guns don't kill but people do. When I ask these people what they feel they need to protect themselves from out here, where crime usually consists of having a bicycle stolen, they say it's better to have weapons in the hands of responsible people than criminals.

None of this makes much sense to me. I've lived in North County long enough to see that many men here in the land of big boulders and horse ranches have Wild West fantasies. This is, after all, John Wayne country, the place where real cowboy and Indian games were played out. There's a little bit of a Texas mentality in Valley Center ---- if people could get away with driving around with guns on their roof racks, I have no doubt that many of them would, even if there was no logical reason for it.

People tend to forget that in the days of the Founding Fathers all firearms were single shot and took about a minute to reload for the next shot. They also tend to forget that in those days there was no standing army, which is why the Founding Fathers needed ordinary people to protect the country.

Most important, in the days of the Founding Fathers and the Wild West, there wasn't an epidemic of ADD, OCD, hyperactivity and depression among teenagers. Suicide wasn't the second-highest cause of death among teenagers after car crashes. And homicide wasn't the third. Instead of playing adrenaline-pumping video games like Grand Theft Auto for hours on end, boys tired themselves out chopping wood and hauling water.

Grizzly bears and mountain lions were a real threat a hundred years ago here in Valley Center, so it would have made sense for men to own guns and teach their families how to use them.

By 3 a.m., I'm wondering when there'll be another Columbine or Santana High massacre. I'm also wondering why President Bush, who cares so deeply about eliminating weapons of mass destruction around the world, should care so little about eliminating the weapons of destruction right here on our own soil: semiautomatic assault weapons. Will I ever get any sleep?

North County Times columnist Brigid Brett lives in Valley Center.

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