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CLEARWATER, Fla. -- Since the day he debuted as a Philadelphia Phillies right-hander in 1960, Dallas Green has always maintained a tough guy image.
Standing 6-5 and more than 200 pounds, Green became Phillies manager, then general manager of the Chicago Cubs. He's weathered some tough times, but nothing could prepare him for what he would experience Jan. 8 when his 9-year-old granddaughter Christina Taylor Green was one of 19 people shot and six people killed at a Tucson neighborhood meeting of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords' constituents.
"That little girl woke an awful lot of people up. We just miss the hell out of her," said Green, speaking publicly for the first time Wednesday at the Phillies spring training headquarters. "I'm supposed to be a tough sucker, but I'm not very tough when it comes to this."
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He expressed a touch of anger and frustration, not directly at alleged assailant Jared Lee Loughner, but at the system that permits weapons such as the Glock 19 allegedly used in the Tucson shooting to fall into the wrong hands.
"I'm not sure anything (good) can really come of it," Green said. "We just talked about living in the United States and how important it is that it's still the best country in the world to live in.
"You would hope there would be some understanding that there are crazies in this world. I guess the one thing that I can't get through my mind -- even though I'm a hunter and I love to shoot and love to have my guns -- I don't have a Glock or whatever it is and I don't have a magazine with 33 bullets in it. That doesn't make sense to be able to sell those kind of things.
"I guess I never thought about it until this thing happened. What reason is there to have those kind of guns other than to kill people? I just don't understand that."
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