Column: Does America stand for sanity, or allegiance to guns?

On Memorial Day, when our country honors its wars and its war dead, it seems to me that too many in our country have adopted a new pledge of allegiance:

I pledge allegiance, to the guns, of the United States of America,

and to the gun lobbies for which it stands,

A divided nation under guns, easily divisible, with liberty and justice for those with guns!

I changed my flight back home to Hawaii so that I could be at the protest of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in Houston on Friday, following the mass murder of 19 kids and two teachers at the Uvalde, Texas, elementary school earlier in the week.

The NRA callously refused to postpone its annual gun-selling convention in Houston despite the call for the organization to stand down in wake of yet another mass killing, the third in a period of three weeks — with 10 killed at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., and one person killed and five wounded in shooting at a church in Laguna Woods, Calif.

On Friday, thousands of angry people of all ages jammed into Discovery Park across the street from the massive George R. Brown convention center in downtown Houston.

Before I left my sister’s home for downtown, she warned me, “Remember where you are. This is Texas and anyone can carry a gun — and they won’t like what you are doing.”

Well, the gun carriers were across the street inside the convention center.

Very few came out of the convention to face the thousands who were challenging their dangerous organization.

The crowd challenging the NRA and gun violence was loud but peaceful. The signs people carried hit home on the senseless murders committed by people who were allowed to buy weapons.

In Texas any 18-year-old can purchase an assault rifle and all the ammunition they want, as did the 18-year-old who murdered 19 kids and two teachers in Uvalde.

As Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz tried to dodge answering the fact that guns kill people — but instead blamed murders on mental health alone — the signs in the Houston crowd in front of the NRA convention took on the lawmakers and politicians, in Texas and around the country, who are paid off by the gun lobby to kill any proposed gun control legislation.

Interestingly, former President Donald Trump seems to like the gun-toting Second Amendment except when the killer guns are near him, as his NRA admirers were required to check their weapons at Trump’s assembly door.

It’s time again to put pressure on our lawmakers to carry gun control legislation and make the 2022 midterm elections a one-issue election — on gun controls.

As a minimum, this means requiring background checks before the purchase of weapons, a federal age limit of 21 years before one can purchase a gun, banning assault weapons, and red-flagging persons with mental and/or security issues.

Time to end the allegiance of too many in our country to guns and violence, and to begin to walk a path of sanity toward our own personal and national security.

Honolulu resident Ann Wright served 29 years in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves and retired as a colonel; she also was a U.S. diplomat for 16 years, but resigned from the U.S. government in 2003 in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq.