Beth Thames: Grocery list includes drinks, chips, Little Debbie cakes and … ammo?

This is a guest opinion column

Back when I was in college during the Middle Ages, when the weekend rolled around, University of Alabama students were ready for it. Women students pulled on jeans (skirts were required on campus), dug out our tennis shoes, and fashioned our long hair into ponytails. If the day was sunny and the temperatures warm, we packed a picnic lunch in a basket and headed to the bank of a creek near campus.

Creek-banking, as it was called, was a coed activity that was muddy, wet, fun, and innocent, for the most part. There was sometimes alcohol involved, usually cheap beer.

We rolled out towels and blankets on the grass, put some music on somebody’s transistor radio, and took in the sun, the fresh air, the smell of Coppertone sun lotion or Jungle Gardenia perfume, the popular scent of the day. Then we just relaxed, eating our ham and cheese sandwiches and drinking Cokes from those little glass bottles. When we got too hot, we waded in the muddy creek.

If we ran out of food, somebody would drive to the closest convenience store to stock up. After we pooled our money together, we had enough for a late afternoon snack of junk food. We wrote down what we each wanted on paper from somebody’s notebook—drinks, chips, Little Debbie Cakes. Nobody wrote down ammo, as in ammunition. That would be crazy.

And so it is. When I read that a convenience store in Tuscaloosa was selling ammunition in a vending machine, I thought it was a bad joke. American Rounds, the company that places these dispensers in food markets around the country, does have rules and safeguards: a person has to be 21 and the machines use facial recognition and card-scanning capability to check the customer’s credentials. They say they are selling to law-abiding, responsible gun owners. I just hope they’re right.

The machines are stocked every two weeks, whenever the stock gets low. There is no limitation on how much ammunition a person can buy. The company thinks the “buy your ammo on your own schedule 24 hours a day” accessibility is a good thing. I think it’s scary.

Apparently somebody on the Tuscaloosa City Council thought so, too, and they questioned the legality of such a machine. The company moved it to another store based on low sales.

We’ve become so used to guns, ammunition, deaths, mass shootings, and children injured by weapons carelessly left where they can get their small hands on them. We have to remind ourselves what guns are for and what they can do. We’ve just done away with the rule that says a person needs a permit to carry a gun, which means no background check is required and no safety training. Police officers were understandably upset by this since it makes their job harder.

Alabama ranks third in the nation in firearm deaths, behind thank God for Mississippi and then Louisiana. If easy access to guns and ammunition made us safer, we’d be safer. But we’re not.

Do we really need to make it easy for young people whose brains are still developing to load up and drive around town, ready for a tussle with a neighboring fraternity house or a professor who gave out Fs and Ds routinely? What about someone who has a fight with his girlfriend and is still furious? What about a college student who is drunk or drugged or worse?

And we all know that criminals can get guns and do, and the ammunition that goes along with them. Let’s make it inconvenient for them to do so in a convenience store at 2 a.m., especially one that’s close to a college campus. Let’s make it inconvenient for them to buy as much ammo as they want and do whatever they want to with it.

Common sense may be inconvenient, but it’s sorely needed in this situation.

Contact Beth Thames at bethmthames@gmail.com