Tag: RKBA

The Rime of the Ancient Libertarian

 

“I used to be a registered Libertarian and I have the Gary Johnson yard signs to prove it.” 

Think back into the past with me, back to the dark days of April, 2016. Bernie Sanders has become the first (and I believe only) American Presidential candidate to receive an invitation to meet with the Roman Pope, Hillary Clinton is lapping up primary elections like an old dog about to die, and that joke candidate from the 2012 Presidential election, Donald J. Trump, just won’t stop winning.

Gun Owners Are Being Othered, And We’re Letting It Happen

 

In the wake of the horrific shooting in Las Vegas, “bump stocks” became the cause célèbre of the gun control crowd. A bump stock, to be honest, is a rather silly device that attaches to the back of a rifle which allows you to rapidly increase the rate of fire of the gun, letting it mimic the effect of a fully-automatic rifle. Bump stocks specifically designed to get around the restrictions on civilian ownership of fully-automatic firearm that were imposed by the passage the National Firearms Act and the Hughes Amendment, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives decided (at President Trump’s urging) that they made a mistake back in 2010, and such things shouldn’t be in civilian hands.

The fact that you can replicate automatic fire with training and practice, (or even with something as prosaic as a belt loop) seems to be lost on the BATFE, but that’s a topic for another time.

The Common Roots of America’s Gun Culture

 

shutterstock_158418869I grew up in Calgary and spent many a day on my uncle’s farms scattered all over southern Alberta. Some of them were hunters, and some, like my Dad, were not. One thing all my farming relatives had in common, though, was a well-stocked larder. When you live on farm that’s miles away from the nearest town, you can’t just pop down to the local IGA (Walmart hadn’t been invented yet) and get what you’re missing: If you don’t have it in the house, you went without it until the next trip into town.

This sense of self-reliance and preparedness is what drove gun culture in America for hundreds of years. There is an element of sport to hunting, and trophy hunting will always offer the allure of competing against nature to bring home their prizes. But, by and large, people who hunted for food was what the public thought of when they thought of the typical American gun owner.

This is changing as America moves off the farm and into the city, but the same sense of self-reliance remains, and guns are a part of it. Writer and television host Michael Bane was one of the first to use the phrase “Gun Culture 2.0,” and it’s an apt description of what is driving today’s gun owners. If Gun Culture 1.0 was about hunting and traditional target sports like bullseye, trap shooting and Camp Perry, Gun Culture 2.0 is about concealed carry, practical pistol, and 3 Gun. The same self-reliant, independent streak, however, runs through both cultures, and it’s why today’s gun owners are buying guns in record numbers.