Tony Messenger: A conservative veteran points the way to gun safety compromise in Missouri

May 11—This is a sentence I didn't expect to write: Sen. Josh Hawley is right about something.

Missouri's senior senator, an elitist Republican with degrees from Yale and Stanford, likes to pretend he is a populist man of the people. More often than not, I disagree with him, or at least find him disingenuous. Not this time.

After Donald Trump was found liable by a New York jury for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, Hawley suggested the verdict would have little impact on the Republicans who support the former president.

"Maybe I'm wrong," Hawley told the Kansas City Star. "Maybe it'll affect it. But I just kind of doubt it."

He's not wrong. Almost on cue, the next night in New Hampshire, in the made-for-television Trump rally that CNN pitched as a "town hall," the hand-picked Republican crowd literally laughed away the verdict from Trump's New York peers. Just as Trump's supporters have laughed at the criminal fraud charges the former president is facing in New York, the likely election-related charges out of Georgia and the investigation into Trump's role in the Jan. 6 insurrection and in mishandling secret documents.

It's easy for thinking people of all political persuasions to see this collision of events and become disheartened. Just as they do after Republicans turn their backs on constitutional principles and demonize transgender people and take away their freedom to make health care decisions with their physicians. There's also the fact that in deep-red states like Missouri, the Republicans in charge will do nothing to stop gun violence and instead weaken gun laws year after year.

That's where I found myself this week: disheartened.

Then I received an email from Phil Henning.

Henning is a Republican who lives on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. He's a conservative and a veteran, the sort of reader who often disagrees with me. Henning writes me regularly, mostly taking me to task for, in his view, not pounding the drum loudly enough about how bad crime is in the St. Louis region.

This week, we found common ground.

"I agree with you on pulling back on recent gun carry laws in Missouri," Henning wrote, responding to my column on the Wild West that has been created by Republicans' aversion to gun safety laws.

"I have no issue with restricting gun ownership to 18 years old for handguns and 21 for rifles except for legal use of personal property," he added. "That protects hunting and home defense. I also believe a training regimen of at least 8 hours on gun safety and citizen use of force is reasonable and a 3-day waiting period (what we have in Illinois) prior to a weapons sale."

Henning agreed to let me share portions of his letter because we both find value in Americans understanding that people of diverse backgrounds can come to some agreement about the current state of gun violence in this country.

Henning is a retired lieutenant colonel in the Air Force.

"While we can't legislate behavior, we can pull back on allowing kids to possess firearms and having no training to carry a deadly weapon," he wrote. "My Air Force unit trained many young airmen in the safe use of weapons and 18 year olds carried M-16s and other weapons with a chambered round and we had almost a perfect safety record of zero 'accidental discharges' across the Air Force with about 8,000 security forces armed in daily duties."

His letter reminded me of the words of retired Army Major Gen. Paul Eaton, who last year wrote on Twitter: "Let me state unequivocally — For all intents and purposes, the AR-15 and rifles like it are weapons of war."

Dozens of the nation's top military leaders have come out in favor of basic gun safety regulations because they know what weapons of war do to children. They've seen the blood and carnage firsthand.

I haven't served our nation like Henning or his fellow veterans have. I appreciate the wisdom that comes with having carried a weapon of war in defense of the country. We'll likely continue to disagree, sometimes vehemently, on some of the topics of the day. But on one of the most volatile subjects — gun safety — we found common ground.

That gives me a modicum of hope amid a disheartening time.

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