Tuesday, November 25, 2008

FYI

Gun Nuts is tonight, at 9PM EST. Caleb and I will be talking about those "ah-ha" or "lightbulb" moments you get as you learn how to shoot or when you finally decide to carry. I like to call them gunny epiphanies - that single point in time will forever exist in your memory. You will refer to it again and again throughout your life and remember the sensation of when everything perfectly aligned in your brain - it will be your moment of before and after.

We'd love to hear about it - so be sure to listen, and call, in!

3 comments:

jdege said...

From what I can see, the critical moment is when a person realizes that for one particular person, in one particular circumstances, keeping a gun ready for self-defense makes sense.

From something I wrote, many years ago:

A few years ago I was visiting my grandmother and stopped by her next-door-neighbor's, whom I had known since I was a kid. He invited me into his living room, but before I sat down on the couch he took a holstered revolver from under a pillow and moved it to a bookshelf.

I had handled guns in the Army, and even done some plinking as a kid (before my family moved from rural Illinois to a suburb of Boston, when I was 10.) But I had never considered keeping a gun for self-defense. I had never lived anywhere where I was at more than a minimal risk of crime, and I'd never really thought much about people who did.

But this gentleman was over eighty. He'd had heart bypass surgery twice. His wife was so crippled with arthritis she could hardly walk. He wasn't going to fight anybody hand-to-hand, and he wasn't able to run away.

And he lived in a neighborhood where crime was a problem. It was a small-to-middlin sized farming town, in what had always been one of poorer neighborhoods. It was right on the edge of town, on the main road in, which was well-suited for my grandfather's small-engine repair shop. But it was never really a great place to live.

Across the street was a mobile home that always seemed to be occupied by a bunch of young kids who threw parties all night. I've seen the police there as often as five times in one night. That after being hassled by the police some drunken biker there would see a light on in this gentleman's window, and decide that it must have been he who had made the call, and that he needed to be taught a lesson, struck me as being far too likely for comfort.

So when I saw that this gentleman kept a handgun ready for self-defense it was clear to me that he was at some risk, that he had few effective alternatives, and that for him to keep a gun was a reasonable and rational thing to do.

And that was the beginning of the end for my anti-gun preconceptions.

Not a major reversal, nothing to do with media campaigns. No exposure at all to twisted propaganda from the evil NRA. Just a simple observation based on personal experience.

Weer'd Beard said...

I'll try to call in!

I'll talk about what flipped me from being an Anti to a Gun Nut, and what FINALLY got the Mrs. to get her permit to carry!

phlegmfatale said...

Wish I could be there- I'm meeting Ambulance Driver, JPG, Holly Matt G and TOTWTYTR for dinner in Fort Worth - would love to hear this show! Y'all have fun!