NRA instructor Eugene Kenny would have joined his fellow gun-rights supporters at the state Capitol Wednesday — if he hadn’t accidentally shot himself in the foot.
He was there in spirit. And on the internet.
“I’ve been watching this like a hawk,” Kenny said about the debate in Hartford over what may be the toughest proposed state gun-control laws in the country, including expanded background checks on buyers as well as a ban on the sale of most assault weapons and all high-capacity magazines. (The legislation passed overnight; the governor signed it on Thursday.) Kenny was rooting for the package of laws to fail; he said they would cut into gun-owners’ rights without protecting the public any more than current laws already do. “You can count on one hand the number of assaults with an automatic weapon” that take place in New Haven, he said. “When you have sick minds out there — it’ll be a bullet, a gun, a bomb — they’re going to do evil” no matter what laws are on the books.
Kenny, a 49-year-old licensed National Rifle Association instructor who leads training classes in pistol and rifle use, delivered his arguments in the front foyer of the two-family Edgewood Avenue house where he rents an upstairs apartment in the Edgewood neighborhood.
Wearing an NRA hooded sweatshirt, he had his left foot in a cast because he accidentally shot a bullet last week while cleaning his Glock handgun.
“I usually always cock it back and it usually ejects a shell that’s in the chamber,” he recalled. “You pull the trigger to release the slide … This time there was a cartridge in there. And BANG! Hit my ankle.”
A self-described “stickler about safety,” Kenny said he has never had a student injured over 10 years of leading firearms classes. He said he’ll draw two lessons for his students about this recent accident: How he did the wrong thing by not checking the chamber. And how he did the right thing — saving his life — by pointing the gun toward the ground, not at his head or chest, as he cleaned it.
Kenny went to the hospital for treatment. The police interviewed him there about the incident.
They’re still investigating the incident, according to Sgt. Al Vazquez, head of the major crimes unit. They have the Glock in custody as part of the investigation. The gun was legally registered.
Vazquez said his detectives are also still investigating the theft of a safe last November from Kenny’s apartment. It contained around 10 guns — mostly handguns, plus a Saiga 12 rifle. “I took a hit, $8,000 worth of firearms” in that theft, Kenny said.
Neither of the recent mishaps has shaken Kenny’s faith in the value of owning guns for self-protection and recreation, or in the folly of new gun-control proposals.
Kenny (at right in photo) developed his love of guns as a child while traveling from New Haven to Hawkinsville, Georgia, to visit his grandparents. They taught him how to handle a .22 Remington rifle and a Crossfire air rifle. “We shot varmints, lizards, birds, toads, whatever was hopping around,” he recalled.
He lived down the street from New Haven’s then-operating Winchester rifle factory as a kid. His dad, a Fair Haven schoolteacher, would take students to the factory’s indoor range to teach them to shoot.
As an adult, Kenny trained and obtained his license to teach others how to lead gun courses. He currently teaches at Chris’s Indoor Shooting Range in Guilford. He said while he opposes the package of bills in Hartford on philosophical grounds, they may only help his business because rifle owners and others may need new certification training. And people are lining up to buy weapons before new laws take effect.
The idea of further regulating rifles particularly disturbs Kenny, though. He calls that “an effort for the government to counterbalance anyone who might question their authority. If it comes down to a civil war situation or a breakdown of the country, do you trust the military and the police to have all the guns and you have slingshots and Derringers?” he asked.
“I seen what happened in Katrina in New Orleans. You have police there, dereliction of duty. You have total [anarchy], basically almost like warlords running the streets. Your self-defense is your personal responsibility. Rifles are important because they can counter forceful incursion. The Second Amendment is also about people being able to challenge unlawful unrighteous government .… If it comes to a point where they’re more restrictive than the former colonial powers we got our freedom from in the first place, that’s why some of the forefathers wanted to include that” in the Constitution.
Kenny, who studied philosophy and political science at Howard University, said that as an African-American he does struggle with some of the complexity of the historic debate over the Second Amendment.
“Sometimes it allowed militias that put down slave insurrections. That’s a reality,” he acknowledged. “On the one hand I know that it helped protect blacks that were [set upon] by the Klan… But on the other hand I know it was also used to help people keep my people in slavery. So It’s a tricky fence to walk on that one.”
Ultimately he comes down on the need for citizens to arm themselves against a government run amok — even if ultimately the government has the bigger guns.
“Remember Philadelphia? They bombed the whole block in the ‘80s,” he noted, referring to the attack on homes occupied by members of the MOVE radical political group. “Now they’ve got drones … There’s no physical way you’re going to stop the government in this country. You’re going to get rolled. People talk a good game …”
So why bother fighting to own big guns?
“Every particular firearm has its own personality,” Kenny responded. “It shoots differently. Some are more accurate. Some shoot, kick light.”