Guns

Currently I don’t own a gun. I have owned guns in the past. I had my first gun when I was twelve. It was a single shot J.C. Higgins .22, purchased for twelve dollars and fifty-one cents at the Sears and Roebuck in Mobile. I used it to shoot nutria in the bayous and rivers south of the city. I hunted quail with another J.C. Higgins product, a .410 side by side for which I had to purchase the cartridges from my grandfather if I ended up with fewer quail than cartridges expended. I hunted feral pigs with a twelve gauge shotgun firing slugs and obtained a season long sore shoulder from its recoil. During my careers in the Air Force and CIA I qualified on any number of other weapons including a 3.5 inch rocket launcher, more commonly known as a Bazooka. I can hit targets on the ground from a moving aircraft with a mini-gun and I am an expert shot with either hand with handguns. I’m also an expert with multiple types of rifles up to and including a .50 caliber sniper rifle firing a sabot light armor piercing round. I know a lot about guns and how to use them but I currently don’t own a gun because I don’t think I have need of one since I no longer hunt.

I don’t belong to the NRA, nor am I a registered Republican, being a free-thinker capable of reaching my own decisions without the input of a national or local political party. I am not a rabid defender of the Second Amendment believing that some restriction on the ownership and use of firearms is necessary not unlike the ownership and use of a motor vehicle. As a hunter I never used a firearm that had more than two rounds available believing, as taught by my grandfather, if you can’t bring them down with the first shot you don’t deserve it. Thus, when I hear people defend thirty shot clips in semiautomatic rifles for hunting deer, I’m a little bewildered. I have the same objection to the compound bow when bow hunting. If hunting is a tradition then why don’t we stick with the same conditions the tradition originators had. Single shot muzzle loading black powder rifles and oak or hickory bows? I have the same objections to Boron Graphite tennis rackets and hit-it-a-mile Graphite drivers in golf. If it’s tradition you’re going to argue, then let’s play with the same tools our ancestors used and get away from aluminum bats and let’s not call it the National Stock Car Association for the cars are anything but “Stock.”

That puts paid to the argument of the hunting tradition justifying the possession of thirty shot semi auto rifles with a bayonet lug and night vision scope. But let’s go to the real reasons people don’t want to give up their firearms: they think that somehow possession of these firearms will protect them against a totalitarian government taking power in the U.S. or the anarchy attendant to a racial or economic based revolution. These reasons are as much a myth as any other. If the military and law enforcement take orders from a totalitarian government firearms possessed by members of the public aren’t going to matter and no matter how many rounds you have you aren’t, by yourself, going to stop the mob from overrunning your home or business and taking your possessions. Realistically speaking, 99 percent of gun owners have never been in a real fire-fight where they’re being shot at and when/if it does happens the majority of them will run away or hunker down behind the biggest rock they can find. It’s human nature. Paint ball is not real life. Trust me a 9mm hurts a hell of a lot more than a paint ball even if, in my case, it was a half-charge round.

I don’t believe having firearms is, in any way, going to stop a totalitarian takeover of the U.S. nor will they be the cure to armed insurrection so I don’ t have a gun. What I do have is a voice, a vote and the will to use them.

This space previously held three paragraphs of what you needed to do to prevent the totalitarians and anarchists from achieving their goals. It was things I think each person can do but it is according to me, and then I realized you don’t need me or anyone else telling what you should do save for one thing: Think and act for yourself.