The 26th president’s great-grandson reflects on hunting, history and politics.
Today, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I see the extraordinary opportunity I had growing up on a farm in what then was rural Pennsylvania. My parents and many of our neighbors hunted for the table as much as for the sport. At an early age, I learned how much better tasting a wild duck is compared to a fatty domestic duck. Because my parents were skilled wing shots, we often ate pheasants, doves, ducks and geese. Often, I tease many of my friends who grew up in big cities that they are deprived of the best food this country has by having never eaten wild game.
The farm provided endless opportunities to observe wildlife and see nature firsthand. I enjoyed catching frogs, snakes, turtles, salamanders and crawfish, and learning where birds made their nests and hatched their young. My parents generally tolerated my enthusiasm for exploring the outdoors. Once, early in the morning, I caught a box turtle and proudly put it on the dining room table where my mother was having breakfast. She was a Victorian and said, “How nice, but we don’t dine with turtles.” As a result of this deep and early exposure to nature, it was an easy jump to understanding the importance of conservation and protecting our environment.
My mother grew up in Kentucky, in a family that was highly competitive when it came to bird shooting. She had to compete with her numerous brothers, who were amazing shots, and she could occasionally outshoot them. Despite their mastery with a shotgun, neither she nor my father were good rifle shots. I remember showing her a large snapping turtle sunning itself on the edge of our pond. We selectively shot snapping turtles because they ate baby ducks that hatched on the pond. At a range of 10-15 yards, she took aim at the turtle with a rifle and missed. She never missed with a shotgun. To impress me with how lethal a shotgun was, when I was 8 or 9 years old she had me catch a spotted turtle from our pond and put it in the field and shot it. It tore the turtle apart and made an indelible impression on me. A shotgun, like any gun, was dangerous, and it had to be respected.
At the age of 10, I was allowed to shoot clay pigeons. One of my parents’ friends had a cement bunker which held a clay-pigeon launcher. Standing behind it, one would say “pull,” and a clay pigeon would soar into the air. At first, using a 12-gauge shotgun to shoot at clays was painful, but with time and some patient coaching one became proficient. When I turned 16, my mother gave me a 16-gauge shotgun, which I found to be much more fun to shoot with.
When I was a teenager, we had a plague of groundhogs on the farm. My father said that he would pay me 25 cents for each groundhog I shot. I eagerly accepted his offer. I learned how to stalk groundhogs so they could not see me and scurry into their holes. I also learned that in order to kill them cleanly, it was important to hit them in the head, which required better marksmanship. This was great practice and served me well later in life. At the end of the summer, I told him I had killed 48 groundhogs and was proud to collect $12.
The shooting skills and gun safety habits I developed during those formative years on the farm would serve me well beyond our Pennsylvania countryside. When I decided to serve my country and enlisted in the Navy, I discovered that my early education in marksmanship had given me a solid foundation for military training. During BUD/S training for the SEAL I teams, I once dozed off during a lecture on shooting the AR-15 and was roundly dressed down by the instructor. When we went to the rifle range, I got the highest score in our training class and managed to partially redeem myself in the eyes of the instructors.
In Vietnam, as an assistant platoon commander, I always went ashore with one other person to check out the beach before bringing the rest of the platoon ashore. At night, two people could quietly and discreetly check out the beach faster and more effectively than more individuals. We didn’t want the platoon to land where hostiles might be waiting. I used a .45-caliber M3A1 submachine gun. It was an amazingly reliable weapon and would fire after swimming through the surf zone.
After I left active duty in the Navy, I joined the U.S. Department of State as a foreign service officer and was assigned to Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso. Before long, I enjoyed hunting big game in West Africa. Fifteen years later, I had the privilege of hunting elk, mule deer and Antelope in Montana.
Given my experience with machine guns in Vietnam, I was totally surprised by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that a bump gun was not a machine gun. To reach this conclusion, the conservative justices had to conclude that the court would no longer defer to the government entity that regulated firearms and had the expertise to do so, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (“ATF”).
In some ways, a bump gun works in a similar way to the M3A1 or grease guns we used in Vietnam. Both the M3A1 submachine gun and bump stocks use the gun’s recoil as the key mechanism to achieve rapid fire. The grease gun uses recoil to automatically cycle cartridges, while the bump stock uses recoil to create rapid trigger activations, enabling near-machine-gun rates of fire.
Originally, the ATF classified bump stocks as legal accessories rather than machine guns. But after the horrific 2017 Las Vegas shooting — where a gunman used bump stocks to kill 58 people and wound over 500 — the ATF reversed course and banned the devices as machine guns under existing law.
The conservative Supreme Court majority overturned this ban, ruling that the ATF exceeded its authority and that bump stocks don’t meet the 1934 National Firearms Act’s technical definition of a machine gun, which requires multiple shots “by a single function of the trigger.” By prioritizing narrow legal technicalities over the practical reality that bump stocks enable mass casualties at machine-gun-like rates, the conservative majority chose ideological rigidity over commonsense public safety.
My experience with guns and the numbers of people killed by them in our large urban areas has led me to believe in sensible gun regulations. I use the word “sensible,” as sometimes politicians who are unfamiliar with guns and eager to score political points hurriedly draft legislation that is nonsense. One example is when a politician drafted legislation that meant a bolt-action rifle with a thumbhole would be deemed an assault weapon and needed to be registered as one. A bolt-action gun can only fire when first another round is loaded into the chamber using the gun’s bolt to remove the empty cartridge and replace it with a new one.
As with the bump guns, the conservatives who determined the Supreme Court’s rulings on guns do not appear to understand American history, or choose not to understand it, as they interpret the Second Amendment. The state militias at the time of the American Revolution were a bulwark against a standing army that could be used by a tyrant to subvert our emerging democracy. Under English common law, weapons such as swords could not be owned by the masses. This common law carried into the English Colonies in North America and is totally ignored by the “originalist” justices who dislike government regulation, including allowing cities to regulate pistol ownership.
The NRA, originally founded to teach young Americans how to shoot, has sadly evolved into a lobbying agent for the gun manufacturers. The NRA seems to oppose any form of gun regulation. That is not a responsible position to take for an organization that has such influence on gun safety laws.