Even though my father, brother, uncles and grandfather were in the military, I seldom handled guns growing up. That’s because unlike many of the other people in my family, I’ve never had enough patience to hunt.
Although I had a gun and some rudimentary training on using it for most of my life, it occurred to me that potentially fumbling around with a weapon I halfway knew how to use in the middle of the night when a burglar was in the house wasn’t the best idea in the world.
So, I did learn to shoot.
I went through a training course at Front Sight in Nevada where the first-rate instructors took us from square one all the way up to dealing with multiple attackers and clearing a house during a hostage situation. Because of that and follow-ups at the range since, I know my way around a Glock 19.
That’s a necessity for me because aside from the normal dangers most people have to deal with, in my profession I semi-regularly get death threats as part of my job. There’s a great line from a song called “The Hatred” by the Snow Goons that I think about, "I got a gang of haters, every day I piss 'em off a little more. What you think I got a....pistol for?"
In the wake of the San Bernardino shootings when Barack Obama was laughably calling for gun control in the face of a terrorist attack in a state that already has some of the country’s toughest regulations, the first thought that occurred to me was that I need to get my concealed carry permit as quickly as possible. The answer to someone breaking into your house or a situation like San Bernardino isn’t taking guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens; it’s putting guns in the hands of more law-abiding citizens who have the opportunity to use them when it matters.
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It’s easy to call for gun control if you’re Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Michael Moore, Michael Bloomberg or any of the other people surrounded by armed bodyguards because they have no need to protect themselves personally. However, for the rest of us, as the old saying goes, “When seconds count, the Police are only minutes away.” If someone breaks into your house tonight, you may be a corpse by the time the cops get there if you don’t have a gun.
Worse yet, if you have the incredible bad luck to end up in a building where Muslim terrorists start shooting and you’re unarmed, not only are the authorities going to show up AFTER you’re dead, but you’ll suffer the additional indignity of having the President use your lifeless body to promote his political agenda while he chides people not to let your murder impact their opinion of Muslims.
It’s disgusting.
After San Bernardino, some liberals started getting a little more open about their real long-term goals. They finally admitted that they want to disarm the populace. They want your semi-automatics; they want your handguns; they want your hunting rifles. Of course, the criminals, the terrorists and most importantly to liberals, the government would still be armed and you would have absolutely no hope of defending yourself against any of them without guns. Many of the people who want to take your 2nd Amendment rights today are determined to do it because they know if the government has all the guns, you won’t have any option other than to comply if they take all your other rights tomorrow. The less fascistic liberals are okay with this because either they’re rich and already have armed guards or they have no choice other than to rely on police officers because they wet themselves at the very thought of using a gun to protect their lives.
Many of them will lie about it because that’s what they do, but they are bound and determined to take our guns. Given the general gutlessness and incompetence of the Republicans in leadership in Congress along with their fear of crossing the mainstream media, chances are they’d already be calling for major gun restrictions if the NRA didn’t exist to pressure them. The Republicans in leadership aren’t very smart, they’re terrified of controversy and they don’t care much about what their constituents have to say, but they do fear upsetting an uncompromising, deep-pocketed organization that has 4.5 million members and tens of millions more that take what they say about gun laws as gospel.
For that alone, the NRA deserves support.
However, what really convinced me to join the NRA was the endless hatred hurled at the organization by ignorant people after the San Bernardino shooting.
The NRA was smeared, slimed and slandered relentlessly for doing more than any other group in the country to protect a Constitutional right that’s under assault. It was made the scapegoat for the failure of the Obama Administration to properly vet a terrorist threat. The NRA was called a group of domestic terrorists, murderers and even evil for fighting to make sure that the average American doesn’t lose his ability to protect himself and his family.
Any group that’s on the receiving end of that much hatred just for doing the right thing is a group worth joining.
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