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I come from a small town. No, strike that. I actually come from a place that did not even rise to the level of being a "small town." We were what is called an "unincorporated township." Suffice it to say that our two stoplights, though separated by miles, constituted whatever sort of center you might want to apply to Bainbridge, Ohio.

A lot of people I knew when growing up had guns. Almost all of them were shotguns or rifles. On the opening days of deer season, the district teachers knew better than to schedule tests, or even significant lessons. But in the course of developing within that rural subculture, I also learned fear. Not of weapons, but of dads.

Dads, who had weapons, would kick your ever lovin' ass if you even for a moment treated a rifle, a shotgun or a toy replica of the same as something less than lethal. That was of course if you were their son. If you were not their son, they would call your parents and talk to them. Weapons were locked up. They had a purpose. They were not left lying about, and they were not to be touched when a dad had a "drink or two." Weapons were for killing things, deer and duck mostly, but other prey as well, I will admit.

Those days seem to be gone. This man wanted to show his girlfriend how "safe" three pistols (Three? Did he have three hands?) were, so he placed them to his head and pulled the trigger.

On weapon No. 3, apparently, his thesis failed and Darwin's theory gained another point of evidence.

We lose more than 1,000 Americans per year just to accidents. (Although the police, perhaps for legal reasons, counted this as a suicide.) Not to mix apples and oranges, but back in 2006, the grand total of gun deaths in the nation of 126 million known as Japan was two. Yeah, two. The next year when it "skyrocketed" to 22, it was a national political scandal.

Look, I know we are not culturally anything like the Japanese. But we have 30,000-plus dead per year and they have two? Are we really that inferior? I mean, just in our accidental rate, we so far outstrip even the deliberate rates of any developed nation, making us the laughingstock.

And maybe, just maybe, the NRA does not care. Once, they were an educational foundation that actually did something good. Once, they spent all their money teaching people, well, how to not be so careless as to shoot themselves in the head, among other things. But those days have passed apparently, and now the NRA is about money. There can be no other explanation as to why they so comprehensively abandoned their educational mission and went into almost pure advocacy.

They can certainly see these numbers. They can see that more Americans are killed accidentally per capita than in any other nation, and they apparently just do not care to do anything about that fact. The leaders of the NRA, such as the draft-dodging coward and slimeball Ted Nugent, may not care about this drain upon America's greatness, but I do.

Maybe if Nugent had for one moment of his life, served the nation he might have developed a different opinion.

(To be clear: Here is Nugent's classification record. You can see that he was exempt for student reasons in '68. So were many others. But then he was made 1-A, which means, "Ready to go.")

Yet, despite his later denials about what he told various magazines about avoiding the draft ("I shit my pants..." etc.) in 1969, when his nation most needed him, he was assigned a 1-Y classification. (Nugent later told Creem Magazine, after his earlier denials, "I have never done a drug in my life. I have never smoked a joint in my life. I took two tokes off a joint with the MC5 one night and almost gagged and thought it was stupid. And that's it. I took two tokes off a joint once. I snorted one line of cocaine. And one line of crystal methedrine before my draft physical — but God, that was worth it because I wanted to see the look on the Sergeant's face. That's it for drugs."

As Snopes points out, "The 1-Y classification denoted persons 'qualified for service only in time of war or national emergency' and was generally assigned to registrants who had exhibited medical conditions that were limiting but not disabling). After the 1-Y classification was eliminated at the end of 1971, Nugent was reclassified as 4-F."

In other words, when his nation actually needed him to carry a weapon, Ted Nugent, a leading light of the National Rifle Association, not only shit his pants, but he did so literally in order to avoid serving in the US Army. Then he took meth to avoid standing for the nation with a rifle in his hands. This is the role model that the NRA puts forward? Well done NRA, for teaching our children to be moral cowards and then focus on getting rich like Ted Nugent. He is a hero for our future generations to emulate.

These opinions are not those of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the DoD, the US Army, or any unit the author is associated with. I can be reached at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.

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