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#ShootBack
Well, well, well, what to do in these trying times? People getting shot left, right, and center. Mowed down by cars. Shoved in front of trains. Beaten to death in broad daylight.
When the Pulse nightclub shooting happened, I was still on Facebook, and adopted the highly virtuous rainbow Gadsden with the caption #ShootBack. Pulse was a gay nightclub in Florida. You may know I am not the most pro-gay commenter here, but that doesn’t mean I support culling gays in the streets. Or anybody else, for that matter.
We are about to receive the mother of all gun-grabber propaganda pushes, and some of it will make sense, piece-wise. Only the criminals, and the crazies, of course. You will be tempted to display your reasonableness by agreeing to a few small things. Child locks. Licenses. Databases. RESIST. These are all steps on the Road to Hell.
If our sniffy betters in government are allowed to “solve” the problem (which will not get better) by disarming the lawful, then the next step will not be to review the effectiveness of gun-grabbing — that’s not why they want to do it in the first place. They will see what else they can trim from our liberties in pursuit of “solving” the problem, which problem they, in fact, have caused. It’s too valuable a problem for the government to ever actually get rid of.
So I’m simply dug in like Hell against any “common sense” gun regulation. I would rather live in a 100% armed society than a 0% armed society — one of these can actually be achieved. Crazies and bad guys getting blown away by their intended targets will go a long way toward solving the actual problem.
Keep your guns. Buy more. Stock up ammo. Learn not only how to shoot effectively, but why to shoot. Make up your mind beforehand that some things are worth shooting over, and some are not. Let the law be your primary instructor on this, but certainly not the only one. Seek out training, advice, and camraderie at a shooting range, gun club, or yee-haw barbecue out on the mesa (but have the guns secured before anybody cracks the first beer).
You meet the best people at shooting ranges. Find the little Mom-and-Pop shops, even if they only have a five-yard, three-lane “range.” Go to the big full-service ones when you want the luxury experience, but you will actually meet regular people at the small ones, and you’ll be forced to talk to them just like real people do.
Black, white, gay, straight, Muslim, Christian — even atheists! — are all members of a single tribe at the range. It’s one of the last places where a sense of civic pride and individual duty are unashamed to show up. In fact, everybody kind of has to get real reasonable, even if they didn’t show up that way. It is a life-affirming, community-building, restoration of faith in the people in your locale to just take some time and shoot the bull — er, chew the fat — with the people you meet at the range.
And so you take this armed positivity out into town with you. I’m positively cheerful when gadding about armed. Maybe that’s just in contrast, because I hate everybody when I’m unarmed. And when I’m armed, I make up my mind early on that some things are just not worth shooting over, and so I will let them slide, where I might have objected had I been unarmed. A man relieves himself behind the sign in front of my building — do I confront him? Not if I’m armed, because you never know where a confrontation may lead, and if you get yourself into a situation which may require you to draw that weapon in self-defense — well, you got yourself into it, and the court case is not going to go well for you. So you don’t get to just patrol the world uprighting applecarts when you’re armed. You become an observer, and a very polite one. As you please. Oh no, you first, I insist. Go ahead.
And when the situation is thrust upon you, you have some skills, some resources, and some decisions pre-made.
The proprietors of so-called “gun-free zones” should be required to provide reputable armed security in exchange for making such an unreasonable demand. “Shall not be infringed” is not directed exclusively at Congress, unlike the first amendment. A proprietor is not allowed to require you to give up breathing or financial agency just for setting foot on his property — why is it so with this human right? I hold that the Constitution forbids any entity from disarming you (infringing, etc.), and anyway, why should it be allowed as a condition of doing business?
Society is collapsing around us. Things are going to get worse, not better, for the foreseeable future. We may win the next election or not, but the trend is clear, sustained, and comprehensive. We have no border, no budget, and the government exists to suppress us while they install their new electorate — it’s working. You with no criminal record are guilty just walking down the street, while hardened felons are untouchable. If the government and its selective enforcement don’t get you, their brownshirt thugs and agents of fear will.
I don’t know how much is salvageable, and I continue to try the “approved methods” to effect political change. But I don’t fool myself that voting harder is going to fix anything. It’s just something that needs to be in place while we work on alternative solutions to our problems, lest we get what we want and then have no political edifice. One of the most proximate problems, and least likely to be solved by government, is that of being shot at or otherwise threatened with deadly force by the mobs which function — at arm’s length, to be sure — to intimidate us into the government’s directed mindset of fear and complicity.
#ShootBack
Published in General
Greenwood, Indiana.
A legally armed civilian stepped up, and the media buried it as fast as they could.