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Fate sits next to you when you're driving a car.

If you drive recklessly and hit somebody, you don't know whom it may be.

That who could be the variable that turns your life's equation into an insoluble problem.

One evening in 1949, on a night off between performances as Lt. Pinkerton in Madame Butterfly with the Atlanta Opera Company, I went to see a highly-touted Italian film in a small art theater on Peachtree Street at 14th Street.

After the movie, when I walked out of the theater, I saw a turbulent scene in front of me across Peachtree Street.

Police cars were everywhere, and an ambulance, siren blaring, was drivinay from the scene.

A taxi stood slantwise in the street, driver's door open, front wheels against the curb.

Two police were holding the arms of a young man — the taxi-driver.

A hushed gasp dominoed through the crowd on the sidewalk.

It's Margaret Mitchell. He hit Margaret Mitchell...he was driving that taxi there.

He was going like a bat out of hell...Margaret Mitchell had gotten out of a car and started across Peachtree St. She never saw the taxi coming.

Margaret Mitchell, author of "Gone With The Wind", hung on to life through five agonizing days. No hope was ever held for her recovery. She died.

Hugh Dorsey Gravitt, the 29-year-old taxi-driver, had killed one of the most beloved Georgians who ever lived.

Gravitt said she had darted in front of the cab. He had tried to miss her, he said, but couldn't.

The front page of the next days Journal-Constitution gave the tragic story the kind of space it had given to Pearl Harbor, and the death of Franklin Roosevelt.

Letters to the Editor screamed hysterically for retribution.

Gravitt should be tried for murder, jailed for life, even executed.

Gravitt was, in fact, charged with, and convicted of, involuntary manslaughter.

He served about 10 months in prison.

He had not known Mitchell, nor had he intended to kill her.

If his taxi had killed Jane Doe, the case might have been buried deep in the inner pages of the newspaper.

Hugh Dorsey Gravitt died at 74 in Cumming, Georgia.

The cause of his death was unannounced.

Gravitt's life had been that of a recluse in the small Georgia town.

But wherever he was, he was known from 1949-on simply as the man who killed Margaret Mitchell. Mitchell had given us Scarlet and Rhett, Ashley and Melanie and Tara.

All of those names, as well as that of Margaret herself, were immortal.

Gravitt often said, "I'd rather it had been me instead of her. It won't ever heal."

I wonder if Gravitt ever heard prize-fighter Joe Louis' famous words," You can run, but you can't hide...? "

For forty-five years, no state could have been large enough to give Gravitt a hiding place.

And no town, even Cumming, could have been out-of-the-way enough to allow him to escape the stare of timeless public rage.

For four years in the early 1940s, I was a gunnery officer in the U.S. Navy. Much of that time I wore a Colt .45 pistol in a holster on my belt. Since World War II, I have owned a small-calibre pistol. I own a valid license to carry a concealed weapon. I've never carried the weapon away from my house. I have never fired the pistol in all these years. I do not expect ever to fire it.

The NRA has invited me, through the mail, to join that organization. I have no interest in being a member.

For many years of my opera-singing life I lived in the Heidelberg area of Germany. I never tried to get a gun while I lived there. I never felt that I needed one.

Buying a pistol or revolver in Germany was a tough proposition. Guns were hard to come by for criminals as well as for those who wanted to protect themselves against criminals. While I was in Germany, small arms were almost totally limited to police and the military. Crimes committed with guns were punished by long, no-nonsense prison sentences. As a result, not many gun crimes occurred among the civilian population.

In Germany, slander (Verleumdung) is a criminal offense, and a fist-fight will land you in jail. If someone calls you a bad name, you can sue him, but you can't hit him. The Germans, so brutal and violent in war, are more peace-minded than we are, in peacetime.

The only places I might have felt uncomfortable walking late at night were in areas of Frankfurt, Mannheim, etc. where American soldiers frequented night clubs that provided whatever they were looking for.

All the above being said, why are we any different from Germans when it come to gun-carrying?

Where did our special rights come from? Do we still need guns?

Our American history began in violence exercised as the only way to throw British tyranny back across the Atlantic. Americans consider the colonists who fought at Bunker Hill, Lexington and Concord, to be heroes. The writers of the Constitution made sure that future Americans would have the right to bear arms, not only in order to protect themselves and their property, but to be musterable quickly into defensive forces.

In 1812, we had another visit from the British, during which tete-a-tete they burned down the White House. We got used to needing to outshoot those who would take away our freedom. In those days, small arms were slow, hard-to-aim, and to reload in a duel, and were not much as a military threat or protection. With the opening of the West, and the advent of the six-shooter, sidearms became both a threat, and the protection against threat, among settlers and gun-slingers moving side by side into territories far from law and order.

Our long, hard-to-police borders, and our thousands of miles of Atlantic and Pacific coastline, have made prohibitions of any kind difficult, if not impossible, to enforce. We couldn't keep alcohol out of the country during the 20s, and we can't make a dent in drug-traffic today. Could we keep small arms out of the U.S. if they were outlawed by law? Are you kidding?

As long as a buck is to be made by illegal importation of prohibited items, the black-market in those items will make millionaires galore in our hemisphere. What can we do? Protect our borders and airways with millions of Armed Forces personnel? Make tougher laws, longer sentences? Build more jails? Educate better against crime of all kinds? I don't know.

Nothing has worked up to now.

But I'm glad I can protect my wife and our home if ever need be.

Editor's note: It was generally reported to have been a taxi that struck and killed "Gone with the Wind" author Margaret Mitchell. Columnist Louis Roney, who was on the scene after it happened, was told by police that a taxi was the vehicle involved. We were contacted on Aug. 19, 2010 by Hugh Dorsey Gravitt's daughter, who is writing a biography of her father's life as the "man who killed Georgia's most beloved daughter." She said her father was driving his personal car at the time of the accident.