ArcaMax

I'm 67 years old, and when I was a kid, we used to shoot politicians like they were ducks sitting on a pond. We didn't always kill them, but we always hit them squarely.

Not many American boys hunt anymore, and not that many of our citizens serve in the military, so the standard of civilian marksmanship under pressure has declined. A kid who can hit a squirrel with a .22 rifle won't miss the governor.

In addition to the ABCs of assassination, my childhood also taught me about absolution, the forgiveness of sin doled out by the Catholic Church back in the days when confession required you to enter a dark box, kneel and speak your sins through a screen designed to keep the priest from giving you the fish eye the next time he saw you at Mass.

In that old red brick school in that old red brick neighborhood, in that New England shot-and-beer-and-slush factory timeclock town, the nuns took you to confession every week so you could present God with a clean soul when you attended Mass on Sunday.

"Put your heads down on your desk and examine your conscience," the nuns would say before they led you over to the church for confession.

To examine your conscience was to search your mind for any sin you might have committed since your last confession. It was grisly work. It still is because I still do it because I believe searching out your sins is better for you than endlessly repeating affirmations of the "I am strong. I am beautiful. I am enough" variety.

This week my head's back on the desk asking myself how I felt when some six-fingered kid with a military-style rifle gave ex-President Donald J. Trump the kind of nick on the ear your barber gives you if he's working with a hangover.

The man who was killed didn't enter into my desk head-banging exercise, and neither did the two wounded. Even by the strict standards of Sr. Claire Rita in 1964, I felt as bad for them as I should.

I despise Donald Trump, and the thing called "Trumpism" that is a combination of nostalgia for segregation, dislike of women in men's jobs, fear of drag queens, flag worship, and the stupid belief that all the steel mills will reopen if you click your ruby work boots together three times and say, "Freedom of religion isn't freedom FROM religion."

But am I sorry Donald Trump didn't die? If I am it's a great sin, a smear on my soul that might never wash clean, not even if scrubbed with holy water.

But what if I thought that his dying would save the Republic, the way Americans thought sending thousands to die on Normandy Beach would save the world? Remember the people on the other side thought their soldiers were saving the world by making Germany great again.

Americans like hard questions with easy answers expressed in the form of a slogan

I believe killing any human is wrong, morally, and in most cases, legally. I don't think you can have a good reason for killing a politician any more than you can have a good reason for shooting any stranger on the street. If I had known someone was going to try to kill Trump, I would have reported that person to whichever authority I could find the fastest.

But if I could not stop the bullet, how did I feel when I heard it had missed? The answer to that question is where the sin is or isn't.

In the confessional, you fall to your knees as though you were hit by a bullet and you're pridefully trying to die without a whimper.

And you begin by saying, "Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee ... "

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.