FOW- Guns

I own lots of guns. I got my first gun, a shotgun, for Christmas when I was 12. It was really my gun too not one that was just called mine. I would keep it in my room and yes I had ammo for it since my brothers and I reloaded. My friends had guns too that they would hang in their rooms. I am sure that would be illegal in every jurisdiction nowadays.

When people talk about the availability of guns these days I kind of laugh. You could mail order guns when I was a kid! Guns were way more available and without any paperwork whatsoever. Yet kids didn't bring guns to school except for show and tell. Yeah, kids brought guns to show and tell back then, no big deal. "This the Luger my dad got in the war." and such. No one I know thought about shooting anything but ducks, pheasant, elk and deer. Every hardware store had guns. I bought my first really nice shotgun with wages I earned doing a summer job at Fredrick & Nelson's. For those that don't know, F & N was a high end department store, a competitor of Nostrum's, now long gone. Something has changed in the mindset of kids for certain. I blame video games, violent movies, music and TV.

Things have changed with the people that own guns now too. Really when I was a kid I didn't know anyone that owned a gun that wasn't a hunter. Now I believe that most people that own guns are not hunters and quite frankly I think a lot of them are damn weird. Back in the day when you went to a gun store, which were usually hardware or sporting goods stores, you saw very few handguns and no so called assault rifle copies. Now you go to a gun store and those guns are 90% of their inventory. People talk about killing people like it is an ordinary thing. Of course few if any of them have killed anyone or they would think differently about killing. Well that is not quite true. I have worked with people that have killed others and thought nothing of it but there was something missing in them to begin with.

Some of these people that get into guns live in a fantasy world where they think the PNW is some kind of dangerous place. I don't know if they really believe that, I tend to think not but they want to pretend that they live in a dangerous place and that they have to be situational aware and all their other buzz words that come out of the articles they read. They all say the same things because they all read the same articles by the so called self-defense experts. What makes these people experts? They read a lot and fantasize a lot. Very few, if any of these experts have actually been in a self-defense shooting and no, war doesn't count. That's a whole different animal.

I guess I could be an elephant hunting expert even though I have never hunted elephant just so long as I read a lot about the subject.

What scares me about these people is that some are just itching to use their guns on someone, looking for an excuse so to say. Really, if you are a guy why would you ever need to shoot anyone? I mean you are not going to be raped more than likely. All the malefactor is going to want is your money. How much money do people carry around? A few hundred dollars at most. A lawyer will eat that much money up in the first session and if you shoot someone you had better get a lawyer if there is even a shadow of a doubt about the justification of the shooting.

The other thing I see is that a lot of these people know very little about guns and basic safety. Some refuse to take any classes which in some ways may be a good thing considering the caliber of people teaching and the paranoia they instill in their students. But to not know the basics about gun safety is not a good thing. Every kid that hunted had to take and still has to take a hunter safety course where the basics are taught. So many adults, at least males, think they know everything. I knew one guy that was shooting away at a can in the water and seemed to be oblivious to the background. I told him that bullet ricochet on water and he should cease fire. He didn't believe me! He didn't know this basic safety fact and he had a gun. Scary.

I really think that the NRA missed a bet years ago. They should have followed the lead of the SCUBA diving industry that require a person take a basic class before they can get a tank filled. The NRA could have worked with dealers and manufacturers to have anyone that buys a gun have an NRA safety card. It is way too late for that now. Everything is politicized to the point that any talk of any restriction is anti-gun and will lead to taking all guns away in many people's minds.