Stephan:   The weapons death merchants to stay prosperous require America's psychotic gun obsession to be passed on from generation to generation. I was part of an earlier generation seduced in this way. At 11 I became a Boy Scout, at 12 I got a 22, as did many of my friends, and that summer went to the NRA -- then a very different nonpolitical organization -- gun safety class my troop sponsored. At 14 I got a 4/10 gauge shotgun. By then I was obsessed with marksmanship, had built a 50-foot target range with a Detroit Bullet Trap in the basement and many days shot 50 to 100 rounds with the 22 and, then, 45 caliber pistols I had acquired. At my family's farm in Virginia, I asked for a skeet machine for my birthday, and with the 12 gauge shotgun I had been given by a family friend, who hoped I would go duck and goose hunting with him, began shooting trap and skeet. To the great disappointment of several men, who knew me as a boy, and many more contemporaries, but to the quiet approval of my father, an anesthesiologist who was the commanding officer of a forward combat hospital in the CBI theater throughout WWII, I had zero interest in hunting. No interest at all in killing things, just the precision of marksmanship. When I was drafted into the Army while working at National Geographic after college I scored the highest marks they had seen in several years on the rifle range at Fort Gordon, and the Army in its way pressed me to go to sniper school. I chose instead to become a medic, and when I got out of the army in 1964 having seen what guns do to the human body, I went home, took the 37 weapons I had accumulated over the years, went out in my family's boat and threw them into the Chesapeake Bay. I have not fired a weapon since. But as I look back now I realize how strongly boys in America are oriented to take up weapons, and it has only gotten worse as this report describes.