By Michael Kaufman

I used to own a gun. I kept it hidden in a shoebox in the attic, where it remained unfired for years. I was comforted by its presence. I thought it might come in handy some day if a dangerous criminal came to our house, or maybe a gang of anti-Semites or the Ku Klux Klan. We lived in Englewood, New Jersey, at the time but hey, you never know. Besides, we have something in this country called the Second Amendment that says that American citizens have the right to keep and bear arms.

The Founding Fathers of our Revolutionary government gave us this right so we could protect ourselves against any attempt by future government leaders to establish a dictatorship. Maybe I would need my gun to help keep the fascists from taking over. I could not have imagined that some 40 years later a delusional right-wing candidate for the United States Senate would speak openly about “Second Amendment remedies” or that gun-toting right-wing militia groups around the country would be preparing for battle against a government they perceive as barreling towards socialism. (The odd thing about this is that corporate rule in this country has never been stronger.) Some scary people are out there now with guns—and I’m not talking about the mentally ill ones who go on killing sprees at schools, movie theaters and other public places.

You can see some of them on the TV news: wackos like Ted Nugent (who predicted he’d either be dead or in jail if President Obama were re-elected) and the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre (who said in a 1995 a fund-raising letter to NRA members: “The semiauto ban gives jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.”) Six days later NRA member Timothy McVeigh used a similar argument to justify using a fertilizer bomb hidden in a truck to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people including 19 children under the age of six.

I never thought about using a fertilizer bomb but sometimes I fantasized about using my gun to kill a Nazi war criminal, an old Hungarian guy who lived a few blocks from our house. The Hungarian government had been asking for years that he be sent to Hungary to stand trial. But the U.S. allowed him to remain here, accepting his argument that he couldn’t get a fair trial under that country’s Communist government. This man’s crimes were described by Charles R. Allen, Jr., in his book Nazi War Criminals Among Us (1963). Chuck Allen was one of my journalistic heroes, a great investigative reporter who devoted much of his work to exposing the presence of numerous Nazi war criminals in the U.S.  (For more information about his life and work, copy and paste “Charles R. Allen Jr (Saidel)” into your browser bar: The actual link is too long to print here but those search words will lead to a 2005 obituary and it is a darn good read.)

Even now I don’t think it was so unreasonable to entertain thoughts about shooting the old Nazi. I knew from my few trips to the shooting range, however, that I’m not a good marksman: I never got close to a bullseye and was lucky to even hit the target. What if I missed the Nazi and shot an innocent bystander, a child, or even the guy’s wife?  I never fired the gun. The bastard died of old age.

One day my wife was looking for something in the attic and she noticed the shoebox. I had never told her or anyone else in the family about the gun. This led to an argument that I lost: She didn’t give a fig about Second Amendment rights, protecting our house from criminals, anti-Semites, racists, or the coming of fascism. We had children. As unlikely as it may have been for them to climb into the attic, find the gun in the shoebox, figure out how to use it….and to then shoot and possibly maim or kill someone (even themselves) with it—it wasn’t worth the risk. She was right. Statistics show that many more deaths occur to family members in the homes of people who have guns than in homes without the guns. So one day when I wasn’t home she threw it in a dumpster.

And if the government ever becomes so insufferable and tyrannical that the majority of people find it necessary to rise up against it,  those weapons you or I may own won’t help much. But that doesn’t mean all would be lost, either.

Gandhi, anyone?

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.