Robert B. Simpson: What president really meant

It's sad to learn that your country is not as exceptional as you'd always thought. That it may have led the world in space exploration and the defeat of polio, but it can't solve a problem that seems somewhat less complex than going to the moon. It's equally frustrating to learn that you don't have the mental ability you once thought you had, but that you are, in reality, unable to see things others see readily.

I grew up with loaded weapons kept close at hand in the home, and the doors were never locked, whether at night or when the whole family was gone. Guns were a fact of life without being the center of life, without, in fact, even being noticed all that much. Until I was an adult, I had seen exactly one man, other than law officers, carrying a pistol on his hip, and he was in a backwoods area away from most other humans. In those years I never saw a rifle or shotgun displayed across the rear window of a pickup truck. I thought my experience was normal and that it would be ever thus. Shows how dumb I was.

The recent murder of innocent citizens in Oregon by a nutcase with guns -- you may not remember exactly which mass shooting that was, as there is a sameness about them -- brought out the same responses as all those mass shootings before. The President spoke angrily and sadly about the continued bloodshed and our apparent inability to do anything about it. He was immediately accused of politicizing the incident. I thought, given that we politicize everything in this country, and that these incidents seem inherently enmeshed in politics, that what he did was normal. Shows how ignorant I am of these things. I just don't have the mental sharpness to see immediately that the President, by expressing sadness and anger over the senseless deaths and frustration that these things keep happening in this country, but rarely in other developed countries, was somehow piling up political capital for himself. Or maybe setting the stage for the government taking all our guns, that action that he has for some reason postponed through most of his two administrations.

It was pointed out to me that I just didn't understand what the President was really saying in his comments after the Oregon shootings. That accusation hurt, given that I have dealt reasonably successfully with the English language for eight decades, but I swallowed my pride and waited to learn what President Obama really meant. What he wants, I was told, is for nobody to have guns except the people who protect him and his family. I went back and listened to his comments again, and then I read a transcript of them, twice. What I thought he was saying was that we need to have some reasonable gun safety rules that would still allow responsible gun owners to have their weapons for hunting, sport, defense of their homes, or whatever, but would screen out more of the people who are most likely to go on a human killing spree.

That's when it came clear to me why it so often seems as if the people who react to mass shootings by calling for more guns, or for the President to shut up, or by insisting the whole problem is flawed upbringing of our children and too much mental illness -- that's why it often seems to me as if they and I heard two different speeches. The reason is, I'm too dumb to read the President's mind, while they know exactly what he means when he utters these thoughts that seem eminently sensible to me.

When he points out that other countries have people with mental illness the same way we do, yet don't have serial mass shootings, they know he is actually comparing us to these other countries, probably socialist ones, so as to deliberately make us look bad. When he says we need laws, but laws that allow us, unless we are identified in advance as a bona fide threat, to keep our guns just like always, they know that what he really means is that he's going to come take our guns right out of our homes. See, I'm too dense to understand his thoughts, so I just foolishly rely on what he says and what his actions for the past 6-plus years have indicated.

I'm grateful to have been enlightened, but I'm also considerably worried. Until now, I had thought my weapons, which I've owned in peace for many years, were mine to have and hold just like any other private property, to use as my last line of defense if my home is invaded. Now I have to worry, when I hear a noise in the night, that it isn't a burglar, but the President, come to take my guns.

Robert B. Simpson, a 28-year Infantry veteran who retired as a colonel at Fort Benning, is the author of "Through the Dark Waters: Searching for Hope and Courage."

This story was originally published October 10, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Robert B. Simpson: What president really meant ."