Growing up in the 1950s, I was a big fan of Cowboys.
No! Not the pro football team from Dallas, but cowboy stars like Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, The Lone Ranger and Tonto, Hopalong Cassidy, “Wild Bill” Hickok, Lash LaRue, Johnny Mack Brown, The Durango Kid and The Cisco Kid, just to name a few.
Boy! They always got the bad guys. And could they shoot. They were my heroes and I could shoot too. With my two six guns in my holster, I would challenge anyone to a draw.
I loved to hear the sound of caps as they fired from my guns. Hardly anyone could outdraw me. I killed em all. I loved guns, but as I grew older, I laid them aside to do more adult things. But these days, it seems I must get back into guns.
Even before the horrendous shootings in Odessa, Texas, the Texas governor and the state’s legislators passed a bill of “gun reforms” including one that would even allow its citizens to carry guns into church.
Is that a good decision?
If a person enters a place of worship with the intention of shooting up the place and killing innocent people, then having a gun-toting citizen there for protection might be considered a good idea, that is, until the police show up. The police, seeing two individuals with guns, chances are that both will be shot and most likely will be killed.
We do not live in the old wild west. We are supposed to be civilized. Making it easy for people to have guns, especially assault weapons, makes it easier to kill people, loads of people at one time.
Ask any police officer, whether in Texas or New York or Alabama or California, if they want assault weapons to be in the hands of the public, they would definitely answer, no way! After all, the police are the ones who would be in the most danger of being shot and killed by such weapons.
Let’s protect our police and make sure that these assault weapons be kept out of the hands of those individuals who should not have them. The life we save might be that of a police officer, or you.
Alvin Goldberg
Great Neck
