By Andrew P.

My father used to tell me you can pick your friends but not your family.  And while you can choose you wife, you’re also, often tragically, stuck with your in-laws. If you are as, um,  lucky as I am, those in-laws just so happen to be anti-gun . . .

I found out early on that my mother-in-law puts guns’ collective value to society somewhere between herpes and genocide. While that may leave a lot of wiggle room, her opinion of firearms in general is low, but fluctuates based on what the liberal carnival barkers are saying about them.

For example: double barrel shotguns are less evil than black rifles because Joe Biden says so. The rest of the family holds similar viewpoints, which come out whenever they bring up gun control at family gatherings. The discussions always start out civil, but never stay that way. They quickly devolve into an argument that’s about as pleasant as a prostate exam.

Until recently, that is, when the unimaginable happened. For years I had argued with these people about rights, the Second Amendment and freedoms. I tried to use logic and facts to refute their claims, assumptions and outright lies, but it was no use. It turns out the mind of a gun control advocate is a dark, narrow corridor where logic goes to die. You would be better off trying to convince a member of the Flat Earth Society that our planet is round.

But recently the town I live in was shocked by a rare and horrific crime. An elderly clerk at a local hotel was the victim of a vicious assault with no motive. A much younger, much stronger masked man walked into the victim’s workplace and struck him repeatedly over the head with a blunt object until he collapsed, unmoving, on the floor. The attacker took nothing, and left this poor man to die. Luckily someone found him and called an ambulance so he survived the ordeal.

When my mother-in-law brought this up at a recent visit, she was visibly disturbed. Things like this don’t happen here, she stated. I expressed concern for the victim, yet couldn’t help but shrug and say things like this happen everywhere. She asked why I wasn’t worried about a cold-blooded criminal being at large in our community.

I explained to her that this is one of the reasons I own guns. Because when that criminal comes to my door I will be able to stop him. And if he brings his friends, I will be able to stop them too. I told her that guns are the great equalizer, that without one she is only as strong as the lock on her door, and that for years now, I was prepared for a situation like that…a situation that she couldn’t even bring herself to think about.

I was expecting the usual “guns are not the answer” reply, so couldn’t have prepared myself for what came next. She said she might want to borrow a shotgun until they catch this guy. Spparently the world will again be a safe place after he’s in jail. The only caveat to this deal was that she would want me to load the shells with rock salt because she can’t bear the idea of killing someone. I joked that she would have to undergo a background check first, and that rock salt probably wont shoot through a door the way the vice president recommends. Neither joke landed, not that I was surprised.

As the visit continued, the topics changed and the shotgun wasn’t brought up again. When we got home I half considered loading a few 20 gauge rock salt shells just in case she calls us about it, but I doubt she ever will. She was either trolling me like a pro or managed to catch a fleeting glimpse of the light. I’m inclined to believe it was the latter.

I figure the take-away here is that amazing things can happen when gun control advocates can’t blame guns for violence. In this case, my mother-in-law was forced to either bury her head in the sand and continue to believe that “this can’t happen to me,” or to realize that she could just as easily end up like the victim; defenseless, and completely at the mercy of a stronger attacker.

Whether that attacker is a common criminal or a tyrannical government, the motivation for armed defense remains the same. She may not have ultimately chosen to arm herself, but the mere fact that she considered a gun as a solution (even one that shoots significantly less-than-lethal ammo) is a major breakthrough all by itself.

My hope is that my mother-in-law will someday join my wife and I when we go shooting. I believe she now understands the primary reason for owning a gun. I’d like for her to understand another major factor about gun ownership, one that can only be experienced at the range: that guns are fun as hell to shoot.

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78 COMMENTS

  1. “A liberal is a conservative who hasn’t been mugged, yet…. or somehow get’s a very rude wake-up call that there are evil people out there.”

  2. A liberal is a conservative who hasn’t been mugged yet, or so a friend of mine is fond of saying. This is understandable at some level. However, what I find truly reprehensible is that the grabbers must know that such things occur, but are willing to take away other peoples’ means of self defense because the grabbers don’t believe it can happen in THEIR town. So, to make themselves feel a bit more comfortable, they will throw their fellow human beings to the wolves without a second thought.

      • I was a navy nuke and we had to undergo a pretty fair amount of testing at discharge time. My prostate examiner was a large woman with huge hands. Just as she “broke the seal” the fire alarm went off and we had to leave the building. And then come back and do it all over again.

        I called my sister in law an idiot for her gun views. Didn’t sit well with my wife until we were at her other sisters in-laws house, my wife was telling the story and the father I’m law (county farmer) said “well maybe she shouldn’t be an idiot.”

    • “Prostate exams can be pretty enjoyable if you bring the right mindset.”

      In the right circumstances, prostate exams can save your life, so that analogy probably holds up better than you planned. Beyond that, how you spend your weekends is your business, dude.

  4. Aw, you forgot the second part!

    “A conservative is a libertarian who hasn’t been arrested yet.”

    • I like this. Though I would change it to “falsely arrested”.

      The former statement could be construed that all libertarians are criminals. 🙂

  5. I recently had a conversation with a family member that is decidedly anti-gun and a liberal to the core. I asked her a simple question; “What is your contingency plan if someone breaks into your house and threatens you and yours?” She stammered a bit and then said, “I’ll just have to trust and hope that it doesn’t happen to me.” I responded “Well, I’ll be hoping for the same thing, but I will also have a gun because the track record for hope and change has been pretty poor as of late.”

    • “Well, I’ll be hoping for the same thing, but I will also have a gun because the track record for hope and change has been pretty poor as of late.”

      LMAO

    • Does she have a fire extinguisher in the house? Does she have fire insurance? Has she installed smoke detectors/alarms? Why would she have them in the house if she has never had a fire? Does she just trust and hope to never have a fire, or has she done something to prepare for that (low-probability) eventuality?

      You might ask her those questions. If nothing else, it will increase her level of cognitive dissonance on the firearms issue.

  6. My first fiance resided on Long Island with her mother – a typical leftist. Not only did my fiance survive the 1993 World Trade Center bombing but the train on which she typically commuted to the Hicksville Station was shot up by Colin Ferguson. During a Thanksgiving dinner, her mother purposely seated me next to her best friend with approximately twenty other guests at the table. Evidently, that lady lost her only son to a mugger’s gun – something that I didn’t know. Around the time that the main course was served, my future mother-in-law (not to be) lit a major fuse by nonchalantly informing that women that I was a gun enthusiast. As one would expect, I became the skunk at the party with things rapidly deteriorating from there with screams, tears, and accusations.

    • Well it’s not too hard to see why she was apparently not your last fiance. Screams, tears and accusations? Oh my. I hope you smiled and thanked them for the compliments and good food while you were at it because that was just one low down dirty trick she pulled on you.

        • Oh I’ve had my words, and I don’t hold back. I don’t give a flying rat’s ass what they think of me, and besides, the food isn’t the greatest. The conversation came up with my cousin (LEO) and a couple of my aunts. One of them tried to tell me what the constitution said.. Schooled her on that one. She had no idea what it said. Something along the lines of “It says ‘a militia of the state has the right to bear arms’ and that means the military,” Literally it was so stupid I cant even think of what she said. Moving along, she tried to start to define a what an assault weapon is after I asked her to ellaborate on what “military weapons” are. Schooled her on that. The other one is trying to back up her previous claim, meanwhile, my cousin is like “you do realize he quoted the 2nd amendment verbatim, and he is right with regards to the classifications of military weapons and the composition of the militia. That being said, as a LEO, I think these guns are dangerous, but there are cases where they can save lives, including my own.” at which point I dropped it and walked away with a “you should really take the time to learn the constitution.”

          Piss em off much? Not my problem.

      • Just another Thanksgiving family get-together. Among my kinfolk, that was what Thanksgiving was FOR. It’s really, really common. And if it’s not Thanksgiving dinner, it’s Christmas dinner. Holiday dinners are a magical time when long-held grudges and peevations are aired, and resentments thrown on the table. Next to the stuffing and gravy.

        It’s a time for threat-assessment and body armor.

  7. Some people really do believe that the world was a safer place before firearms were invented. And it probably was for men in their twenties who were proficient with swords.

    • Yep, ask any of the victims of the Roman empire, the Huns, The mongols, etc. how safe the world was before guns.

    • The only men proficient in swords were the nobility. A few knights in armor with swords on horseback could defeat a group of uppity peasants with pitchforks pretty easily. Then some guy in China invented gunpowder, eliminating that power inequity. The elitists have been complaining about guns ever since.

      • Fun fact, the other main reason knights disappeared was because it was too expensive to be a knight, like 3 ponies, a war horse, a years worth of food, several servants, a squire (knight in training, also serves as your caddy), a sword (expensive), a mace, a lance, and a set of armor too expensive. If your family could afford that you still had to train in all forms of martial arts since you were seven, and then be a squire until deemed worthy. Then after all that some jerk in china invents a new kind of powder and you hear a loud noise and fall off your horse dead.

      • “The only men proficient in swords were the nobility.”

        Not in English folk ballads, they weren’t.

        • Considering the Chinese had a repeating version, (albeit a weaker version that was closer to a modern lever action, ) it’s really not that much of a stretch.

      • In fairness the bowmen were NOT of the nobility. Crossbowmen were of an even lower caste as it did take years of training and strength building exercises to be a long bowman, and they could shoot several arrows in the time it took to reload a crossbow.

        • Come to think of it, the crossbowman was the forerunner to the regular infantry rifleman since it didn’t take a lot of training to operate a crossbow. Imagine the crossbows we’d have today had gunpowder not been discovered – 30 rounds as fast as you could pull the trigger, maybe?

        • You could take it one step further and argue the crossbow was the forerunner to modern gun control. After all, the Vatican did try to have it banned for reasons that sound pretty similar to modern progressive’s arguments against “assault weapons”

        • Today, Fully-Automatic crossbows! In England no less!!!

          youtube.com/watch?v=QS4RKoRyTik

    • Yeah, the samurai class in Japan felt really safe – having the right to kill any peasant who dissed you was a really good plus for young, sword-wielding males. Sort of like being a gang member in (disarmed) Chicago today.

  8. As a long time gun carrier coming from a Liberal tax and spend NY family.
    My sister in law held a fund raiser party for McCarthy when she was running for congress in 1992ish. Guess who wasn’t invited??
    Some folks just believe the Earth is square and should just be best left alone.

  9. Might want to mention, that firing rock salt at somebody is treated just like buckshot, and could be used against her (or anybody else) in court.

    See, using rock salt, pencil erasers, barbie shoes, or whatever in a shotshell, shows that you did not feel the threat was enough to use lethal force. Yet a shotgun is always considered lethal force, just like any other firearm.

    It also leaves you open to a civil suit, should the BG not die. Say the BG takes a load of rock salt to the face. While not dead, said BG would be facially disfigured, maimed, disabled, blinded…

    Never teach anybody to shoot to wound.

    By your Mom in Law a tazer. Show her how to use it, and at the same time, show your concern for her safety, and your respect for her choices about guns.

    • ^ this. Shoot until the threat has ceased. If that’s two magazines into the fight because the guy is a bath-salt user, then you did your job.

    • BS. Let her buy her own damn tazer. If she isn’t willing to take responsibility for her own safety, let her pay the consequences.

  10. I find most “leftists” have an unrealistic grasp of their surroundings. First is always the “you’re just paranoid that (insert violent act here) will happen to you” mantra. Immediately followed by the “we need to get these assault weapons of mass destruction off the streets because something can happen to me at any time” comment. Then followed by the classic “it’s just common sense” statement. Anybody else see an oxymoron or two in that line of thinking?

    • Ha. Never thought about it that way. Ill have to use that the next time a liberal calls me paranoid. Thank you for the ammo.

      • No problem Josh… There are many such examples, this just seems to be a recurring theme as of late.

    • “(W)e need to get these assault weapons of mass destruction off the streets because something can happen to me at any time”

      Odd that that seems to be the only kind of harm they can envision happening on the streets. Murder, rape and robbery apparently don’t qualify as “harm.”

      • Kind of shows you that they (people who espouse those ideals) generally live in areas with little to no crime and just can’t understand why some of us “just don’t move” to a safer area. Nope… they’re not sheltered at all.

  11. My in-laws don’t have a problem with guns, even the F-n- law has had 6 times more guns than me, and applied for a CCW…. over three months ago. I GOT MINE IN A WEEK!

    So it just the evil black ones with high capacity magazines because obama says we can’t trust people but yet maybe the DOJ doesn’t trust him. Not to mention they think the writers of the constitution were idiots so it is changeable Yet they love and value this country and consider guns a “Hobby”, and not a Right.

    But there son and son-in-law (me) possess them, but that’s ok, it’s just everyone else they don’t trust.

    Basicly every wrong & judgemental perspective they have is due to CNN-washing

    • “Not to mention they think the writers of the constitution were idiots”

      And in police academies across this land, cadets are routinely taught the Founding Fathers were common terrorists.

  12. Rock salt is a myth. It is completely ineffective, unless the BG is directly on top of you. And in that case, you want something better than rock salt.

    http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/bot33.htm

    On the other hand, I’ve loaded 20 gauge shells with airsoft bb’s before, and that makes a rather good dog deterrent. Airsoft bb’s are meant to be projectiles though, rock salt isn’t.

    • Have you ever tried loading them with tiny fish hooks? Please do some research for me and tell me how it works out. I’m dying to know.

      It certainly wouldn’t work well in the home, but I’m surprised someone hasn’t developed a small, personal-sized flame thrower.

      That thought first entered my mind the night I was mugged by five thugs (my ear is still messed up, 28 years later); I’ve been longing for one ever since. It was night, and those guys would have looked so pretty, running down the street on fire…

      • Fish hooks. Cool idea. I’ll load up a few to test… Also have some more candy rounds and other stuff to shoot.

        • That’s the good stuff right there! Set your attacker and the neighborhood (would it really be a loss where most muggings happen) on fire in one shot!

        • I was looking into making some myself. Wanted to use magnesium and fletchette darts so it would continue to burn in a wet environment (like inside a torso).

          Thought it would be a great mental attack on threats like mobs and gangs.

          People running around on fire, others screaming and ripping at their bodies in a desperate attempt to remove the hell fire.

          Will just be a bad ass way to light bonfires for most people.

  13. @Andrew P., do not give your mother in law a gun unless she really likes you. And maybe not even then.

    • And don’t give her one if she insists on using salt in it. Someone like that would not have the mental capability to do what would be needed to be done if a situation occurred.

  14. “I joked that she would have to undergo a background check first…”

    It would’ve been pretty cool if you transferred her the shotgun through an FFL and she failed the NICS.

  15. Perfect opportunity has just presented itself to you to convert her to at least to gun neutral, may be even pro gun, if you act quickly. Call her up and ask her if she still wants to borrow it. If You can get her to agree, than tell her that first thing you need to do is to take her to the range to learn the basics of firearm handling and use. With any luck she enjoys shooting and will want to continue.

    To bad she put that clause in there about rock salt in order to “not kill”, because if you were to be a real bastard you would bring a 12 gauge loaded with the hottest buckshot load you could find and let her take 1 or 2 shots. After that she would probably want to call it quits and forget the whole idea. That’s when you tell her you do have another option with you and break out a Mini-14 ranch rifle(with a 10 rnd mag and wooden stock), which you explain is often used for hunting small game . With any luck she enjoys shooting the rifle. From there just try to get her to the range occasionally, and in future conversations you can explain how the only difference between “assault weapons” and hunting rifles are cosmetics and at the range one time swap the wooden stock with a synthetic one with a pistol grip to prove you point. After that I think it would be a pretty safe bet that she would take your opinions from than on very seriously and in the end probably agree with you when ever those family gun control debates come up.

    • You’re an evil genius, the only flaw is if she doesn’t take an interest. I’m gonna remember this.

      • If she does not take an interest backup plan would be at family gatherings bring up current events similar to the story that got her slightly thinking in the first place. It’s tricky though because you need to present it not as though you are not making a pro self defense argument, but just a bit of casual conversation. It can not be a hey did you here about this event out of the blue either. It needs to be very carefully segued into the conversation in a way that it seems to have been the natural course the conversation would have taken. In fact it is best not even bring up self defense at all while discussing the event. Let her connect the dots in her mind that bad things happen all the time, and bring up the idea of self defense herself. It might take a few conversations before she puts it together that these things happen all the time and maybe she should think about self defense, much less bring it up in conversation. Like I said it is tricky because you need to make sure she does not realize what you are secretly trying to manipulate her into thinking differently, or it will probably backfire.

    • If someone’s not willing to kill to defend themselves, then they need to stick with pepper spray or a taser. It’s part of the cardinal rules: Never point at anyone you don’t intend to shoot, and never shoot at anyone you don’t intend to kill.

      • Remember that the goal is to stop the attack rather than kill the attacker. His death is an unfortunate side effect that is justifiable only because letting him continue his attack is even worse.

        • Duh, dude. But “shooting to wound” is Hollywood nonsense. There’s no place on a human body that will stop them in their tracks with absolutely zero chance of killing them. Shooting someone in the shoulder or leg can still kill them in less than a minute if you hit a main artery. So my point stands that if you’re not willing to accept the ramifications of taking a life, don’t use a firearm to defend your own. Anyone care to tell me I’m wrong?

        • Nope, can’t argue with that. If you are going to shoot someone, you have to accept that they can die, and be sure that death is justifiable for what they are doing (assaulting someone, stealing hand grenades, about to push the button on the remote trigger for the bomb.) If its not, you probably shouldn’t shoot.
          Running away, don’t shoot. Hands up, don’t shoot. Confusing scene where you can’t tell who’s assaulting who, don’t shoot. Seems simple enough, there are a thousand reasons not to pull the trigger, and only a few to pull it.

  16. If you have to go less then lethal, I would consider using one of the commercial loads available. too much can go wrong loading salt.

    Less then lethal can kill, but i am wondering if it might be useful in close quarters like your typical apartment setting.

    I was trained with slug and buck, so those are my defense loads but the over penetration issue does make me very cautious.

  17. My MIL and FIL were both gun neutral to anti-gun until one night an alleged neighbor through a brick through their bay window as a statement. It was intended to scare inlaws into keeping quiet about the illegal activities occuring next door. The vulnerability drove them to my front door to learn everything they could about a home defense firearm. Btw the police never solved the crime, no witnesses and lack of interest in followup.

  19. DON’T GIVE HER A GUN!
    EVERYBODY KNOWS, ALL MOTHER-IN-LAWS ONLY WISH TO KILL THEIR SON-IN-LAW! SLAUGHTER THEM LIKE DOG! DOGS I SAY! AND IF YOU GIVE HER A GUN, SHE WILL SLAUGHTER YOU!
    [/Liberal-Progressive reasoning]

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