Death by Gun

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

I heard a statistic on the radio this evening: thirty-two people are killed with guns every day in the United States. That's it. Thirty-two. It's only a number, and not a very big one, unless, of course, one of those thirty-two is you or someone you love. Thirty-two people's lives come to a sudden end in America each day as bullets rip through their bodies. But generally they are other people's bullets and other people's bodies, and those shootings basically don't register on our collective consciousness.

So let's make it somewhat more personal. I want to talk about two murders by gun that occurred in a small town in Arizona last Wednesday evening. It was in the community of St. Johns, AZ, and the murdered men were Vincent Romero, 29, and his friend, Timothy Romans, 39. I don't know much about these guys, only what has been in the news. I know that Romero was a divorced man who had custody of his eight-year-old son. I also suspect that he probably wasn't a very good parent.

You see, Romero and Romans were murdered by the eight-year-old Romero boy, apparently with malice aforethought. Mr. Romero had a gun in the house, either unsecured or poorly secured, and the young boy, who possessed knowledge of how to fire it, took that gun and deliberately killed his father and his father's friend.

Before I get to speculating too freely, you need to understand something about Arizona. This state is gun crazy. The citizens of Arizona have been gun crazy since the days when the Clantons and the Earps went at it in Tombstone. These people love their firearms. They flaunt them, they conceal them, and they use them as props in their lovemaking and masturbatory rituals.

I'm not a fan of guns - never owned one and never will. As far as I'm concerned, the lack of guns in my home makes me somewhat safer than those who maintain personal arsenals. If someone breaks into my house, they had better be after books. Chances are when those guys break in, we'll all sit down and have a literary discussion. A house full of guns, on the other hand, attracts criminals. If some old codger of a homeowner pulls a gun on home intruders, he needs to be ready and capable of using it. More often than not, that isn't the case.

The elderly and guns are a bad combination, and an even worse pairing is kids and guns. I write to several people in prison. One of my correspondents gained notoriety as a "school shooter" more than a decade ago. This young man was fourteen when he went to school one morning and killed several of his fellow high school students. He is now in his mid-twenties and has lived in a cage every day since his awful crime. He is a man rotting in prison over a crime committed by a boy. He had easy access to guns in his upper-middle class home, and he made a fateful decision that ruined the lives of several families, including his own, and made an emotional imprint on hundreds of his friends and classmates that will be with them for life.

The little Romero boy is currently in jail. He probably won't face a life in prison, but his crime will be with him for the remainder of his life. Even with sustained therapy, it will have a significant impact who he becomes and how he lives. His crime will be with him to some degree until the day of his death. A crime committed by an eight-year-old will cast a shadow across his lifetime and the lifetimes of those who knew and loved his victims.

We will learn more over the next few months about the things that drove this little boy to kill his father and another man. He was troubled, of that we can be certain. Kids aren't born troubled, they become that way through their experiences in life - and some of his experiences were obviously very bad ones.

Bad experiences and easy access to guns can be a recipe for death, regardless of age. And yes, you Arizona macaroons, guns do kill people!