I like guns. A lot. I like them for a number of reasons beyond what they provide, which is the the ability to exercise meaningful freedoms—to actually fight against oppression and/or tyranny, but I also like them for purely aesthetic reasons—the way we appreciate other works of fine art. My friend Jim Cornelius, who does excellent work over on his site Frontier Partisans, is often entranced by the beautiful precision rifles created by Rigby and CZ. He likes them so much, in fact, he can often be found muttering into his coffee about the beauty of these fine guns. As well he should be.
It’s likely that I inherited this love for a fine firearm from my father, who built a stunning collection of single-action pistols and lever-action rifles over the course of his life. I also inherited from him an appreciation for the leveling power of a firearm properly employed by people with excellent motives—he was for many years a reserve deputy sheriff in Los Angeles County—and what came with that was a clear-eyed understanding and insistence on firearms safety. Both of these things have informed, and perhaps even shaped my life, given subsequent careers where I carried a gun at the tip of the spear in foreign lands, and while patrolling the streets of America.
But growing up in a very different country than the one we are living in now, it never occurred to me that firearms ownership by free men and women, law-abiding citizens, would come under such brutal assault by so many school-marms and various forms of intellectual clergy, and for such a strange reason: the abhorrent behavior of crazed and violent criminals. But perhaps I should not be so surprised: these are the people who have always disciplined the entire class rather than deal directly, and finally, with the problem student.
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