From The Vault Of Art Shay: Guns, Guns, Guns

\"From this hardstand on the tarmac we would climb into the sky to meet the enemy. It was Yom Kippur, Sept. 27,1944; the first and last time I used a machine gun. It was a 50 caliber twin Emerson Turret gun mounted on the front of our B -24 Liberator. I was leading the lowest of four echelons of bombers from Tibenham, England to bomb a German Tiger Tank Factory in Kassell. I killed the Nazi pilot who was trying to murder me. That\'s what guns are supposed to do, and in war, not in schools.

I had heard that several police and hobbyists around Des Plaines had a fast-draw club. I looked it over as a \<em\>Life\<\/em\> story possibility. One of my editors turned me down. \"What\'s the point of drawing faster than anyone else?\" he said. \"These guys are crazy.\"

Wandering the city with novelist Nelson Algren, I found the doorway through which police machine gun bullets killed an officer of the Blackstone Rangers as he slept: Fred Hampton.

Out on Madison Street, we got bounced by two playful young wielders of toy guns.

That long ago week I also had to do a \<em\>Life\<\/em\> story on gun fancier-war novelist James Jones. He proudly showed me his gun collection in Marshall, Illinois.

About the same time, \<em\>Sports Illustrated\<\/em\> wanted me to cover Jordan\'s King Hussein as he pursued game near the then-new tollway running near the Butler estate. Paul Butler, the scion of the Butler family, led His Majesty on a futile hunt for pheasant, but provided exotic shotguns for the hunting party. Something like the German Mainlichers Hemingway so admired. For me, the highlight of the Royal visit was a cheerful, chubby Jordanian Colonel who discreetly made his way from lady to lady, asking in a \<em\>sotto voce\<\/em\>, \"Would you like to spend the night with His Majesty?\" This approach would later be taken in a Texas accent, with great success, by Lyndon Johnson, the first of the modern presidential horn dogs. His earliest targets were usually girl reporters. I didn\'t want to learn whether the King\'s pimp had any takers.

One of the concomitant horrors of recent school and movie murders is the recurrent des\criptions of the tiny defenseless bodies of kids gunned into tinier pieces of flesh and blood by the automatic weapons used. Police responders with 30 years on the job, one after the next, avowed they had never seen such horror. Garry Wills, the world class ecclesiastical novelist and reporter, and I found ourselves working together in the small Memphis funeral home tasked with rebuilding Martin Luther King\'s features to make them presentable to his family and the public. As the morticians grimly worked at this grim task in the next grim room, Wills and I, in tears, listened to the speeches of King coming in over the radio. Garry shook his head in an understanding yes, listening to me lobby the morticians to lift the scrim over King\'s face for a few minutes so his mourners could see him plain, like this. \r\n