Guns, Guts And Glory

Gun-Control Victims - Poland

"God created Men and Sam Colt made them equal!"

Being a seventh-generation Texan, I have spent my entire life with guns.  I started shooting at around 4 years old, got my first .22 rifle for Christmas when I was 8, and at one point I owned more than a dozen guns of all different types and calibers.  At no point in my life have I ever pointed a gun at a human being, and only once did I expose a side arm to diffuse a potentially nasty situation.

I was a member of the National Rifle Association from almost the time I could walk, much less hold a gun.  I was a competition shooter rated as Marksman at 100 feet for .22.  Thursday was Skeet Club at my high school, and on those days there were more guns and ammo in my school than in a battalion of some armies.  At one point, I even had a callous on my right shoulder and permanent specks of gunpowder in the skin of my trigger finger from shooting guns.

Growing up on the farm, it was the norm to see 12-year-old boys driving pickup trucks around the area with an entire arsenal in the front seat and gun rack just to plink beer cans down by the creek on Saturday afternoon.

When I say arsenal, I mean everything from .410 snake guns to 30-30 shoulder cannons and .45 semi-auto handguns, not to mention hunting bows, throwing knives and various other goodies.  We all knew safe handling like we knew breathing.  There was never horseplay with guns.  That was a serious offence, even among kids.

I never knew anyone that was injured by a gun, other than two relatives that ate their own bullets for whatever reasons they had to do that.

There wasn't much crime, either.  No one in their right mind would try to rob a bank or store when just about everyone else in the store was packing heat.  Occasionally, the news had stories of shoot-outs over in the bad side of town between a bunch of drunk rowdies, or maybe the rare fugitive holed up against the cops.

In the aftermath of events like Las Vegas, the whiners all come out in force saying guns need to be banned.  Well, folks, opioids killed 64,000 Americans in 2016, while gun homocides were about 12,000 (the actual number is almost impossible to find). 

Just for comparison, automobile accidents killed 35,000 people in the US.  Both cars and opioids are licensed, controlled and sanctioned by the US governments at all levels.  For a bit more perspective, cigarettes killed around 480,000 people last year, and tobacco is also licensed, controlled and sanctioned by the government in the US.

In fact, lightning strikes about 260,000 people, and kills roughly 24,000, per year annually, which means you are FAR more likely to be hit by lightning at any given point on the planet, than killed by a gun in the US - approximately the same odds as winning the lottery.

While events like Las Vegas are indeed very tragic, politicians and media calously use them to advance agendas that have nothing to do with our safety.

You see, America was founded by folks who clearly understood that government itself was the most dangerous force ever unleashed by humanity on itself.  They knew that the only way for humans to protect themselves from the vile force and power of government was to equal the playing field by guaranteeing that the populace would, in the aggregate, constitute an army that no government could ever conquer.  They ensured that the rights of religion, speech, assembly, and the press would be backed up by the right of the people to destroy by whatever means necessary any force that tried to take them away.

That is the true, if often unacknowledged, purpose of the US Second Amendment.  The right to own guns was not for hunting or self-defense (though they are valuable benefits), it is for the express purpose of eliminating a tyrannical government.

And that is why the government keeps trying to take away guns, whether by vile abuse of tragedies, or by creating tragedies to try and stampede the majority into giving up guns.  Put simply, no government can have absolute power as long as the people under that government have the power to fight back, and with 90 admitted guns per 100 people in the US, that's a mighty force for a tyrant to overcome.

Ask the victims of Hitler, Stalin, Ho Xi Minh, or any of the other tyrants of just the last century if they agree with gun control.  I'm willing to bet almost all of them would gladly have accepted a gun to even the fight just a bit.

To my mind, the only agreeable situation that might encourage me to give up guns would be for all the governments of the world to disarm first.  Even then, I'd be hard-pressed to let go.  With well over 100 million people dead at the direct hands of governments in the past 100 years, it makes good sense for all people everywhere to keep and bear arms.