Allow me to introduce myself.
I’m 55. I’m a single dad. A college
graduate. I work for my alma mater, I have a business on the side, I work as
hard, or harder than anyone else I know. I am a member of a local church,
attend regularly, read the Bible daily, and even write Faith-based books. I’m
pretty much, by all accounts, a decent guy.
I’m also a perfect example of why gun laws
work. And why they don’t.
A month ago, I traded a friend of
mine a nice MacBook Pro for a Ruger SR9. It was the first gun I’ve owned in 28
years. In fact, it was only the second gun I’ve even touched in 28 years. Not because I am anti-gun…I absolutely love
shooting and love hunting and the outdoors. In fact, my dream is to write the
kind of articles and books that the late Gene Hill wrote. Stories of the
emotional attachment, and the memories created by fine firearms, and days in the field.
But, until September 28th of
this year (2018 for future readers) I was prohibited from owning or possessing
firearms. I was a convicted felon.
I never did anything violent,
just stupid. In 1990, I had a construction business. I also had a partner. He
had a drug addiction. Having never been around drugs and being unfamiliar with
the signs of addiction, I didn’t recognize the telltale traits. We were cruising
along, doing well, and I decided to take a week of vacation to hang with my
best friend before he got married.
The Friday before I left, my partner and I
wrote out our bills, I signed the checks, (Lindsey, for some reason, never
wanted to sign a check, even though our account was set up for either of our
signature, not requiring both) we sent them out, and I told him I’d see him
about ten days later.
When I returned, my answering machine
(remember those?) was full. Employees were calling, suppliers were calling,
customers were calling. “Where was Lindsey?” asked the customers, because he
apparently hadn’t shown up on the job he was running all week. “Why did our
checks bounce?” asked our employees. We had two crews, and both Lindsey’s crew
and my crew went to the bank to cash their paychecks and were told the money
was gone. My suppliers repeated the same lament.
Before I left, we had deposited about
$12000 in receipts from jobs we completed, so the money was there when we wrote
the checks and I signed them. I called Lindsey but could not find him…or my
checkbook. The next morning, Monday, I went to the bank. The lady we normally
dealt with looked up my account when I told her what had happened, and she went
white. The account was overdrawn almost $7000. She checked the recent history
and saw that Lindsey had gone to another branch -where nobody would ask why he
was doing this without me—and withdrawn $9000 of the $12000 we’d deposited.
Then he vanished.
I found out later that he went on a drug
bender and wound up in a rehab outside of Washington DC. My checkbook
mysteriously reappeared on the front seat of my truck overnight, but Lindsey
never contacted me again. I sold the extra truck, and the extra tools,
(fortunately, the business was all mine before I met Lindsey and I still owned
the assets). I managed to repay about $5000 of the debt within a week or two.
My crew got paid, most vendors got paid, but there was still about $4000
outstanding. I went to each person personally and asked them for patience. I
explained what happened. Most were kind and waited until I paid them back. But
some of the vendors were larger corporations and had rules they could not bend
for me.
In a two-week period, I was arrested 11
times for bad checks. (Since I had signed them, I was on the hook) I could have
gone after Lindsey for embezzlement, but I had no idea where he was and he had nothing
of value. I was too busy trying to salvage my own life now. Three of the checks
were over $500 (the largest being $1025) and so in Delaware, I was now charged
with a felony.
Long and short of it…by the time I got to
court I had repaid most of the debts, but the state wanted at least a piece of
a scalp and so I accepted a plea deal to plead guilty to two felonies and drop
the other to a misdemeanor. I was stupid to do so, but I was 27 years old, I
had never been in trouble before, I was afraid I would go to jail, and I had a
public defender. That added up to me accepting the felonies.
I walked out of the courthouse, thinking I
was lucky to be walking to my car instead of the DOC van, heading to prison. I
got probation and within two years, all of this was in the past. Except that I couldn’t
own a gun anymore. And I couldn’t vote. And whenever I filled out a job
application I had to check that box. I was ashamed and broken-hearted.
The day after court, I took my beloved
Glenfield Model 778 shotgun to a pawn shop that a friend of mine owned and sold
it to him. I knew Dave would give me a better price than anyone else. I tried
not to cry when I signed it over to him. I saw the notch on the fore stock
where I’d commemorated my first buck. I thought about all the years hunting
with my best friend and all the times we’d had as boys -becoming men— with our
guns in hand.
That was March of 1991. Other than one afternoon in 1997, when we
were in Utah on our honeymoon and my wife’s friends who owned a farm insisted
we go out back and shoot some clays…I had not held a gun, owned a gun, possessed
a gun until three weeks ago.
In 2011, my “adopted dad” Poppa John
passed away. Pop was a legendary hunter and shooting instructor back home and
he’d always wanted to go hunting with me. He knew about my legal issue and he
kept pushing me to pursue a governor’s pardon. I investigated it once back then,
but the paperwork was daunting. We always talked about eventually hunting
together, and Pop teaching me to shoot trap. But Pop passed before I got around
to getting that pardon and to my regret, we never hunted together. (Even as I
write these words, I have tears. I miss Pop and I miss the hunts we would have
had)
I’ve had opportunity to shoot. I was
offered a Beretta P380 once. A friend of mine, who had no idea that I was
restricted, had taken it off a guy at a bar where he was a bouncer. The guy was
also a felon and did not try getting it back. I told Mike I didn’t have the
money to buy it and that was that.
In 2013, Delaware restored voting rights,
so I could vote again. That got me started back on the road to a pardon. And so,
in 2017 I started the process. In June of 2018, I appeared before the Board of
Pardons and was recommended. In September 2018, Governor Carney signed my
papers and restored my rights. I will tell you that twice in the process I
wept. The first time, when the Board said they recommended me unanimously
without my even having to testify. The second was on that Friday, September 28th,
2018, when I opened my mailbox and saw the letter from the governor. I went in
my house, opened the letter and read those words. I saw the gold seal affixed
to the page and I broke down in tears. I did this right. My fellow citizens
decided that I had lived my life in such a way that I deserved to be restored
to normalcy.
I never mentioned it to anyone during the
process and no one asked, but I was proud of the fact that I abided by the
rules from the moment I became a felon, until the day my pardon was in my
mailbox.
And that is the point of this story. The
current gun laws are more than adequate. They succeed because of people like
me. People who understand where we messed up -even if we were a victim
ourselves—and we understand what it takes to get this fixed. And in the time
between, we abide by the law. I knew
the penalty for having a gun. I chose to obey the law. There are criminals in
this world who also know the penalty. They choose not to obey the law. They
straw-purchase, or they steal guns, or they buy them in the black market. But
regardless how they acquire a gun, they’ve acquired it illegally.
They were already law breakers, so they just
see gun laws as merely another law to break. Me…I saw them as a guaranteed trip
to prison. My obedience to the laws came at a great cost. It cost me years in the field
with my best friend. It cost me precious memories with Pop. I was ashamed and
embarrassed. But I abided by the law.
Gun laws were made for people like me.
Because people like me abide by the law. Criminals do not. And no law on any
books anywhere will change that. In 27 years of restriction, I never used a gun
in a crime. Never shot anyone. Never robbed at gunpoint. Because I chose to
abide by the law. The laws are just fine.
I’m living proof.
