Quote of the Day
After I got shot, laying in my hospital bed, I said to myself. “There will never be another person standing over me with a gun, holding all the power to determine if I will live or die”
I have never supported gun control since. It’s not gun control, it’s the power to control the defenseless.
UR a Smart Ass, Carl @Ur_a_Smartass_C
Tweeted on March 31, 2023
A lot of people have stories to tell about why they are “gun nuts” of some flavor or another.
Barb has hypothesized that my abusive and sometimes brutal grade school experience contributed to my interest in guns and self defense. I told a coworker about one of my experiences and he said, “If that were to happen today it would make the national news.”
I suppose Barb could be right. But I did not get emotional involved and buy my first gun until the Ruby Ridge incident occurred. That was long after the time when I could have legally purchased a gun and my own children were in grade school.
There were always guns around my suburban family but it was crime rather than government oppression that increased my interest. But I didn’t get into training until I found myself as the (non-sworn) supervisor of a police force and figured I needed to know what made them tick.
Growing up in the 60′-70’s, one always thought of self-defense. You didn’t wear rings in your face because it would get ripped out in a fight.
Or your older brother would drag you around by it.
Could you imagine having an earring around four older brothers?
If you couldn’t fight, you learned to run. And keep an eye out for trouble. So you could avoid it.
Running around the hills, packing a gun was just natural.
Gun control is nothing more than government/crime partnership to disarm their victims. As it has been for the entirety of human history.
It’s sad to hear Smart-asses trouble. Glad he’s on board now.
But as Will Rogers said; “Some can learn from reading. Others from observation. And some just have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”
As they say, a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.
I was picked on in grade- and middle-school (high school was, ironically, OK), so I’ve long had an interest in self-defense. Growing up my family didn’t own guns, so my interest in armed self-defense didn’t really start until I was an adult and a friend took me shooting.
A couple mags of 9mm and a couple rounds of 12ga, and I quickly realized what a game-changer firearms are for self-defense. I bought my first gun a couple months later, and within a year had three more, including my first dedicated carry gun and a CHL to go with it.
Went shooting with that friend again, and the second time didn’t have to borrow guns (I did anyway — he had a couple I wanted to try out, and vice versa — but I didn’t have to).
As a kid I decided I wanted to make the bullies work for their laughs, hopefully enough that it wouldn’t be worth the effort. Finally, as an adult I have the power to say “No” and enforce it.
Sadly most people are incapable of coming to their senses via rational thought.
It invariably requires a ‘come to jesus’ moment of physical violence to reach them. Sometimes, when that moment happens, it’s too late to have a change of rationale. And then there are those who even AFTER being violently abused by a criminal refuse to acknowledge reality.
Hmm, my firearms ownership is out of simple rebellion against my cultural upbringing. I came to it honestly as a evaluation of personal values but my first rifle purchase was “Because I could! Fuck you, Canada!”. Quite a liberating feeling. The idea I wasn’t asking a government bureaucrat permission to do so has a profound effect. A lot of people in the world are appalled that one can just walk into a store a buy a gun because, gasp, they want one!
I’ve found those from oppressive countries are often the biggest firearms proponents once they get to America. Perhaps it is because they’ve seen tyranny up-close-and-personal and don’t care to repeat it.
I went to high school with a guy who had to cross the Soviet-era border in Yugoslavia to get to freedom in the West. Literally risked his life to do it because his family wanted him out. A friend of his didn’t make it. I suspect hearing about that experience of Communism in the real influenced my later thinking. That man even today has my eternal respect for what he risked to have what too many take for granted and think “can’t happen here”. He lived it. Saw it happen before his eyes. I suspect if he could be an American he’d be a serious gun owner as a result of his own experience. And I wouldn’t blame him a bit.
Carl is good people. Reminds me that I haven’t chatted with him in years. Gotta fix that.