I was a Fatherless Serial Random Sumbish Shooter

I was two-years-old when my mother divorced my father. And as Elder Romney noted the other night, that experience turned me mean, mean enough to take up an assault rifle and kill a man. Actually, being only two, I wasn't physically able to shoot an assault rifle--that kind of killing came later. I had to improvise.

I don't remember it all now, just flashes of memories, images really, the dreamlike clips of toddlerhood that flash through one's mind now and then. I see my-two-year old self, the son of a single mother, slowly and deliberately scraping a Lincoln Log roof slat across my Fisher Price blackboard, gradually shaping and sharpening it into a shiv as I quietly sang along to my favorite Burl Ives album.

I went to the animal fair,
The birds and the beasts were there,
[scrape]
The big baboon by the light of the moon
Was combing his auburn hair.
[scrape]
The monkey, he got drunk,
And sat on the elephant's trunk;
[scrape]
The elephant sneezed and fell to his knees,
And that was the end of the monk!
[scrape, scrape, scrape]

After weeks of work, my Lincoln Log shiv was finished and I began the first round of the bloody rampages that would characterize my boyhood. At that age, I wasn't allowed to leave our house, so opportunities were limited, but in the few months between mom's first and second marriages, I managed to shank the milkman, the Avon Lady, and the mailman in what the local newspaper called a "series of bizarre and tragic accidents."

I lived the next two years in a constant state of happiness as the oldest son in the optimal family environment: two opposite sex parents with two children, a pet dog, and a pet rabbit. Having two parents was wonderful. Daddy Dale taught me how to be a man by, as hard as it might be, always drunkenly staggering to vomit into the toilet rather than upon rug or the dog or the bunny.

Unfortunately, this idyllic existence was short-lived. Daddy Dale died of a heroin overdose and mom was a single mother again.

It's hard for a four-year-old to deal with the hardship of being raised by a single mother. I dealt with it the only way I could. I slung Daddy Dale's M-1 Garand rifle on my back, mounted my tricycle and spent the next 3 years going all NRA on all the random sumbishes I saw around my town. I can't tell you how many I shot--Daddy Marv took my ear collection away when he made us all a proper family--but as I recall, it was a lot of random sumbishes.

Mom divorced Daddy Marv about a year later, and once again the ideal two parent family was ripped from me, this time before Daddy Marv had a chance to figure out which name belonged to which child.

Once again, I turned to killing, and I'll say I was pretty damned good at it for an eight-year-old. I must have shot 50 or 60 random Northern Utah sumbishes before Mom finally married for the last time when I was ten.

I haven't killed anyone since then. It's like Mitt says, going all NRA is for children of single mothers. That ain't me, anymore.