What do you think about gun laws?

As you already know, because I have told you many times, I was raised around many very wise people. Some were my family, and some were my friends, and some were just acquaintances. Most of the wisest people that I have ever known never had a very good formal education.

Maybe something about me that you didn’t know is that I was raised in a time when most people, including myself, was not far from a gun. My whole family, all the men, and most of the women, are very good with a gun. When I was a young man, I always had a 22 pistol and a 222 rifle in my Jeep. The truck that I rode to work in had a gun rack with two rifles in it and a pistol in a holster hanging on the same rack. Most of us were from ranching families and it was an obligation to shoot a coyote if you saw one, no matter whose property it was on. And, when you told the property owner, he would thank you. There were sheep on all the ranches and they were very susceptible to predators.

My Uncle was on the U.S. Army Rifle Team, and did exhibition shooting. My dad and other uncle were almost as good with a gun as he was. When ever they went to a turkey shoot, the people that would run the turkey shoot would only let them compete against each other, or a lot of times they would just give them each a turkey, then just let them exhibition shoot for the rest of the match.

I’ve killed everything that squirmed, ran, or fluttered, until I couldn’t stand the thought of doing it any more. My dad always said “don’t kill anything that you don’t intend to kill“, and “don’t kill anything that you don’t intent to eat”. I’ve eaten some pretty interesting stuff. My whole family still hunts game animals and it doesn’t bother me, I know that there is great fitness in killing your own food.

What I’m saying is that I was raised around guns, and I don’t have that visceral fear that I see in people nowadays. When they see a gun they react like they just about stepped on a snake. So, I feel differently than most of the people that I know now.

I have had a gun accidentally discharge on me on three different occasions. All of then discharged safely into a dirt bank, thanks to the training that my family gave me on handling guns safely. Most of the people that handle guns a lot will tell you a similar story. My family taught me to “Never chamber a bullet until you intend to use it, and always have your gun pointed in a safe direction while chambering or un-chambering a round”.

Some of the other training that I remember was “Gunpowder and alcohol don’t mix”. That means when you’re drinking don’t use a gun. Some of my family violated that rule a little bit, but nobody got hurt. Another saying was: “It’s the unloaded gun that is the one that kills somebody”. What that meant is to always check to make sure that your gun is unloaded every time you hand it to somebody, or put it away, or any time that it is supposed to be unloaded. You always check.

“When crossing a fence, always un-chamber your bullet, lean the gun against the post and go to the next post to cross, go back and get your gun.” There were so many rules for double checking gun safety when I was growing up, that guns were fairly safe.

Now, as you might have guessed, I’m heading in a direction that I’ve always wondered about. Who has the right to own a gun? The U.S. constitution gives an American in good standing as a Citizen of the United States the right to bear arms.

As in the second amendment: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Now for some more stuff that you didn’t know about me. I was born right after World War Two, where the sting of Nazi Germany and what they did to the Jews was still fresh in people’s minds. One of the things that was pounded into my head along with my other gun training is that my gun was mine, and it was nobody else’s business, and that if I have guns, it is nobody else’s business. I was told to “Never, ever, under any circumstance register my guns with any one especially not the Government“. And the reason that I was given as an example, was what happened in Nazi Germany. Because they were unable to fight back, millions of Jews were lined up and marched into ovens where they were killed in great masses. You can imagine the impression that makes on a young mind.

I was told that “Ben Franklin said, that we should always be wary of an unreasonable and out of control government, and we should always be ready to take it back if they stray too far”.

Now to deepen what you don’t know about me. When I used to target shoot with my favorite target shooting 22 rifle, that my cousin “Oregon” wore out for me, I used to practice shooting without flinching or blinking. I would watch the bullet arch into the target. I soon found that I always shot a rifle with out flinching or blinking and I always made head shots, because I didn’t like killing. But, I killed for food, because that was what I was taught to do. It was only after I married my wife that she told me that I didn’t have to kill things if I didn’t want to. I have to say that it had honestly never occurred to me that I didn’t have to kill things. If I knew that my family or my life was threatened by an intruder I’m sure that I would shoot them with out flinching or blinking. I like most animals better than I like most people.

So now I get around to the bottom line of this post. What kind of gun control should we have? Should people have to register their weapons? And if weapons were registered wouldn’t that just make a “Hit List”. We were recently reminded of the kind of irresponsible people that there are out there when the North Coast Journal published all of the names of people that have gun permits in Humboldt County. It pains me to be criticizing this poor woman who is probably just trying to make a living, but she seems to think that all names should be published so hers is Heidi Walters, and she writes for the north Coast Journal.

Please read her well written article. Then come back here and tell me what you think about gun registration. You can’t comment on their site without leaving your return address. You can say anything you like here. I have absolutely no way of tracing any comment back to you, so you can speak freely here, but of course I’ll delete the ridiculous comments after a while, but I will leave the well thought out ones.

Please comment if you are a journalist, a gun owner, or a gun hater, but try to give a reason for the way you feel… I did! This is the link to the gun article.