A good man with a gun

Just hours after Gov. Rick Perry invited New Yorkers with guns to move to Texas, where guns are regarded as a good thing to have around, a Texas man shot his wife, then himself. At his daughter's 16th birthday party.

Sweet 16.

A good man with a gun, by Rick Perry and NRA standards, since he apparently (police were still checking) had no criminal record. Whether he was crazy -- apart from taking a gun to a teen birthday party -- was not reported by Raw Story.

That gets the number of Americans shot to death since the Newtown massacre up to around a thousand, and the number saved by gun-totin' hunnerd-percent 'Muricans to -- zero.

The Texas party follows, by a very short interval, the slaughter of a family of 5 in New Mexico and of another family in Kentucky (plus who knows how many others haven't crossed my computer screen in the past 96 hours?).

In none of these cases was the home invaded by scary black dudes, or by anybody else. All this shooting was homegrown, with guns kept around the house. The New Mexico house was found to be full of firearms.

During my 45 years as a newspaper reporter, there were uncounted little domestic slaughters like these in the circulation zones of the papers I worked for. The very first news story I ever reported for a daily newspaper concerned a 13-year-old boy who shot his father in the back with the family shotgun.

It is just possible that this shooting did halt a murder, or at least some serious violence. The father was chasing the mother around the house with, at least, mayhem in mind. Of the scores, perhaps hundreds -- I wasn't keeping a list -- of similar domestic slaughters that happened on my watch (not necessarily ones that I reported), I cannot recall another that even potentially prevented other violence. And while some may have slipped my mind, I recall only one of these family murders that did not involve a gun -- a women stabbed her boyfriend in the back with a butcher knife.

How many people were shot to death in these family get-togethers? Hundreds, at least.

And how many times during a period of 45 years did an armed citizen stop a murderous attack, at home or at some public place where he was lawfully in attendance? Never.

That's right. Zero, nil, zip, nada, nothing.

It happens from time to time, somewhere, but compared to the millions of Americans shot to death, not to any extent worth mentioned.

Let's state the obvious: Some parts of the Constitution, like having state legislatures elect senators, were ill-conceived. The Second Amendment was one of these mistakes, and we ought to repeal it.