I just read ammoland.com’s article Real Training: Painful, Dangerous And Uncomfortable. If that’s the definition of “real training,” I haven’t had any. Come to think of it, I’ve somehow avoided major pain, danger or discomfort for the last 56 years. OK, my mother was abusive. An ex-wife held a GLOCK 30SF to my kidney. I used to jump out of airplanes (that didn’t end well). But in total, my life was and is good. Here’s the thing: gun control advocates’ utopian vision of a gun-free paradise only finds favor because their supporters’ lives are pleasant, safe and comfortable. If they lived in a world where they really needed a gun, they’d be pro-gun so fast it would make a revolver’s cylinder spin. They’re not pro-gun because we have guns. We created — and continue to create — the “safe space” from which the antis’ attack our rights. Am I right?
Ever since my army funded vacation to Afghanistan. I wish more people took the time to explore destitute third world countries, we would have more humility. Yes, first world countries have comfort and luxury that others would commit crimes to have (and they do). People still need to acknowledge that the world as a whole is a jungle. If someone wants to kill you, they can. No law can stop them, only returned force and violence can deter. On that same note, things like the Constitution are only as valid as the people believing it. If I kidnapped you and took your guns there’s no amount of second amendment screaming that could stop me. Only solid situational awareness, the will to fight, and a weapon to do so. So, do we make it safe? Eh, but the fact MOST people believe in our laws does a pretty good job. Plus access to food and water helps.
Agreed. Very few people are thoughtful enough to realize that they exist solely at the sufferance of those they do not have have the strength, skills or tools to fight off. They get away with it because most people are peaceful. However, that’s like blowing through stop signs on back roads in flyover country. It works only as long as your luck holds.
I don’t want to go off on a tangent, but… I’m going to go off on a tangent.
Peace in Ancient Greek means to bind together. As in being bound together by mutually harmonious relationships. It has nothing to do with the modern nonsense about the lack of preparation for war or strife.
I’ll give you an example: my friend and I are very close – him and I even hug as brothers when we greet one another. Yet both of carry guns regularly. So, does mean we are not peaceful, or mens of peace? Even when we were both armed in each other’s presents? Of course not.
The flip side would be two neighbors who do not talk to one another and both are unarmed. Neither one holds ill will towards the other, but they do not have a relationship with each other. Is that being peaceful? I would say absolutely not.
My measure, you can be peaceful and still be ready for war. The two are not mutually exclusive. Being of peace is being present in relationships, not the lack of preparation for war.
I don’t need my gun, I want it. Peace is a want but not a need.
I don’t want war, if it comes I’ll make it my own and give my enemy no peace.
So many spelling errors. It’s impossible to read a well made point when the writer can’t spell the simplest words.
I going to say that is incorrect. Seeing as how the people who really need guns (inner city urban dwellers) are the most outspoken against them. Where those who don’t need them as much (rural area dwellers, myself included) are the most supportive of them.
Well, at least they are outspoken about other people having legal guns. I suspect more than a few of the inner city types are packing illegally.
I’ve always suspected that inner-city urban dwellers had guns if they wanted them. They just don’t want anyone else to have them. Sort of “I got mine, now we can stop.”
The more genteel inner-city dweller park in underground garages, have taxis pick them up in front of well-lit apartment or condo buildings, don’t walk their streets after dark, and essentially keep themselves segregated from people who don’t look like them. So of course they think they don’t need guns.
And most of them think that’s a good way of life, a FREE way of life, not realizing they live in prisons of their own design.
Much, if not most, of the problem is that poor, inner city dwellers only see themselves as helpless victims of gangs and other violent criminals. They cannot imagine having the power to stand up for themselves. It doesn’t help that virtually no public officials encourage them to defend themselves using firearms where necessary.
Many years ago, on an airliner, I overheard a conversation between a Los Angeles cop and another passenger. Three of the cop’s comments have stayed with me:
The cop told of having a hard time persuading (virtually dragging) a Hispanic father to attend his son’s high school graduation. The son had been very successful in high school and was due several awards in addition to his diploma. The father did not want to attend because he was unshakably convinced that, because he was Hispanic, someone, somehow, would, at the last minute, devise a way to deprive his son of the honors he had earned. It’s hard to reverse that kind of defeatist mind set.
The conversation occurred some months after the Rodney King beating. According to the LA cop, policy at the time was to give an order and, if the individual resisted, beat on him until he complied. In the cop’s opinion it would have been better to swarm King (several big cops piling on simultaneously) but that was against policy.
The cop also criticized lowering of hiring standards. He said well qualified applicants, such as former military police, were being rejected in favor of minorities with sketchy backgrounds, who should never have been trusted with badges, to satisfy diversity quotas.
I have never understood why anyone living in an urban hell hole wouldn’t up and leave. If my neighborhood was so littered with drugs and violence that it was unsafe to raise my children there, I would be gone. Even if i was state dependant relying on gov assistance for all my wants and needs, I would flee to rural america. There is hud housing and welfare in the country too. I guess I can just be glad they don’t so my area might stay a little nicer a little longer.
When you can barely scrape the cash together for rent and food every month, moving to the ‘burbs isn’t really an option for you.
But for some people it is an option, of course you may be surrounded by some people who do not look like you. The racism sometimes cuts both ways.
Honestly hard to imagine 56 years without pain or danger. Who has that kind of a life?
Obviously has not driven a car with the crazies on the road lately.
No place or event involving firearms has ever had me in a state of fear the way driving with the nuts on I-287, I-95, The hutch, Saw Mill, etc. does.
Pfffft. Try the Belt Parkway during the morning rush and you’ll know true fear.
Ever seen the Fr. Duquesne Bridge in Pittsburgh?
Left lanes exit right.
Right lanes exit left.
You’ve got 300 feet. Good luck.
Reading that sounds like the weather half the year up here.
Your ex-wife held a gun to yer’ kidney RF? I thought my ex was f’ed up. A whole lot of folks NEED a gun and don’t know it yet…”come to Jesus”.
Yes she did, but in her defense, she thought that it was his liver.
Do you have any idea how much a kidney costs these days?
“Do you have any idea how much a kidney costs these days?”
Last I heard, a donor kidney is worth $20,000 to the one doing the donating.
The recipient probably pays $50,000 for it, if not more…
Installation charges are tough.
I’ll take a WAG that Tax, Tag, Title, and Dealer Prep, ooooh, call it $250,000 out the door…
Interesting, with similar logic, you could say people are anti-vaccine because vaccines have been so successful. Probably some truth to both theories. But as always, there are some rabid idiots who would blame the cure no matter the ailment.
The anti-vaxxers get away with it only because virtually all of the neighbors’ kids are vaccinated. The logic for guns is different. Banning guns won’t take them out of the hands of violent criminals. Neither will it stop them or the violent mentally ill from using other methods to cause harm.
The idea that a mostly prepared herd protects the vulnerable, therefore allowing said vulnerable to be ignorant works for both guns/vaccines and viruses/violence. I agree guns are not 100% the same as vaccines, forgive my imperfect analogy.
I never much liked the “if it ain’t rainin’ it ain’t trainin” notion. As a civilian now, I find it abhorrent. I see pictures and videos of people going through firearms training crawling through cold mud and doing other unpleasant things and think “ain’t gonna go there”. I don’t get my self into situations where I might have to crawl through mud so I am definitely not going to do it when I don’t have to.
The training philosophy can be sumerized as such: be as comfortable driving your gun as driving your car. That way you don’t have to think about the operation of said gun/car when it counts. You can focus on solving the problems and not the weather or operation of the gun/car. If you were only a fair weather driver/shooter/soldier/Marine, then you wouldn’t be a very experienced/good driver/shooter/soldier/Marine when it came time for foul weather driving/shooting/soldiering/Marine’ing…. You would be overwhelmed by things you can’t control and focus on the inappropriate/wrong things.
Oh…… And we dont make laws making it illegal to walk around in dark allys at night all alone dressed “like that” to prevent rape….. Gun owners (like some rape victims) can be smarter in exercising our freedoms but we are not victims because we exercise our freedoms….. We are just free, and idiots want to rape us.
“I used to jump out of airplanes (that didn’t end well).”
Please. For anyone who voluntarily exits an aircraft at altitude and *survives* the experience, it sure as Hell did end well.
How high did you ‘bounce’?
Too high. But not high enough to kill me.
Had a buddy that was an ardent jumper. Til a bad landing got pins in his leg. He swore it wouldn’t slow him down but he never jumped again.
I hated and still hate choppers.
I hated and still hate choppers.
Me too. It’s like flying inside a blender.
I’m convinced helicopters only fly because they’re so hideous the ground repels them.
choppers beat the air into submission. as long as everything works 100% perfectly, you fine. If something fails, you life will get way more interesting, up to and including death.
Nothing but sex is more fun than flying a good chopper low-level and VFR, and the sex is only better the first few times per partner.
Flying military is a different matter. IFR light plans, fussy rules, sometimes dubious maintenance, COs leaning on you not to Red X a ship, oh, and being in the military, all make that less fun.
My friends that have died in choppers died due to SAM missiles, mid-air collisions, hitting unseen obstructions, or getting shot up by ground fire. I never lost a friend to maintenance failure, though non-fatal maintenance problems were not so rare.
I learned to fly with the Army, in their Ft. Wolters class 72-39. It was just fun, Kiowas, not Hughes 55s. Flying as a civilian is fun but expensive. I now prefer sailplanes.
“Too high. But not high enough to kill me.”
Yikes. A ‘streamer’ might cool me on sport as well…
I have 10 military jumps with round chutes, old school. The impact is roughly 15 mph, equivalent to jumping off a 10 foot porch onto hard ground. Go out and try that a five times in a day! Tell me how good that feels.
If you have a little wind and you can get turned into it, it’s not too bad. If there is no wind, or you can’t get turned into it, or it shifts at the last few seconds, it’s a different story. “Ending well” is relative. As an aviator, the saying was, “Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.” Some of my ‘chute landings took me several minutes to walk away from! BTW, I wouldn’t call it a “bounce,” it feels more like a “splat!”
I did not walk away from my last landing. For weeks. And I didn’t walk well for years.
“BTW, I wouldn’t call it a “bounce,” it feels more like a “splat!”’
I don’t doubt you, JohnF. I was under the impression ‘bounce’ is the term that skydivers use.
(I am firmly of the belief I will never voluntarily exit an aircraft in flight unless that sucker is on fire…”
As an aviator, the saying was, “Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.”
I dunno, most people in the Army Air Force used to say, ” Why would anyone want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane?”
I have 17 jumps on the round military chute OVP68. Landings weren’t a problem maybe because we spent full two days training them on ground until my legs felt like they fall off. But one opening after only 10 sec. free fall was so abrupt i slipped a disc. I guess my harness was a bit loose.
We created — and continue to create — the “safe space” from which the antis’ attack our rights. Am I right?
Not yet, but we’re getting there.
What evidence is there provng illegals are in your town. FM radio on, push seek. If 40% of the stations are Spanish, you have illegals.
Immigrant crisis in Europe is evidence one needs the 3rd world has yet to reach the level of civility of the west. If anti’s lived in the 3rd world their positions on guns would change.
“You sleep safely in your bed tonight because of the tough men who man the walls of the city ready to do violence on your behalf.”
Anti-gunners have just as much contempt for the government’s rough men as they do for the smoother armed citizen. There are those here who think they are rough enough to tend to the required violence. Both are fools.
which is why I own a gun…
There are those here who think they are rough enough to tend to the required violence.
I was raised by one of the supposed rough men who performed the required violence in Luzon, and he thought the whole thing was a bunch of BS and just wanted to go home. Face facts; being in Infantry is just a crappy job and is no fun at all. He was proud that he was squared away. I was influenced by another older rough man who killed quite a few Bavarians to make the world safe for democracy and he was just doing his job. He was proud he did do his job well though. Both rough men were really just ordinary people.
No, they were not. “Ordinary” people are behind the curve when it comes to dispensing violence. Everybody has been in a school yard push and shove. But until you’ve gone full out trying to kill or maim and came thru it you really don’t have any experience or understanding of “rough” men.
Your “Ordinary” men were anything but.
It’s complacency which gets worse with time. It’s not really material wealth. Those in the West have enjoyed freedom from tyranny for generations. The last real threat was World War II. Those that fought in it and lived through it are mostly gone sadly. Antis delude themselves thinking, “It can’t happen here.” Whether it’s rampant crime beyond the control of police, or the rise of a tyrannical govenment, it easily can. Most of the world is not free, subject to oppression or terror.
Thoughtful discussion.
That fear the father had about his son’s success takes a while to let go of. It would take hanging out with people who succeed regularly. I also heard that dad putting his son’s achievement first.
Inner city residents don’t move any faster than for instance West Va coal miners up and relocate. It’s extremely difficult to move somewhere foreign without support. If you think that when they arrive they will mess your place up, you think they don’t feel that?
This country has had an image of peace. The small town with Barney Fife is not an actual reality. Wives were abused, children were abused and big corporations have been doing what they want with people’s lives for awhile. It had a lot of good. Morals and manners that everyone agreed upon.
Americans now want everyone to take care of them. I’m not talking about white or black welfare recipients. Here. Dr. says exercise and change the diet. What does the American want? A pill or ultimately a gastric bypass. Personal responsibility is personal. We know we should talk with our families, have dinner time. But it’s faster to go through the drive through. Now kids eat in the back seat of the minivan. Americans want the cops to take care of us. They can’t and don’t. George W. Said after Katrina that it’s not the Gov’s job to take care of us. Really? When it comes to disasters whose is it?
So I get arming to be responsible.
The Antis suddenly go soft if they hear that you won’t let someone hurt an innocent child or woman. But see, they aren’t planning on it.
One more example on my street. Neighbors tree falls down during nighttime storm. Before he’s out of bed his neighbors have cut and stacked the wood. Who’s prepared? Who has considered the possibilities? They say the most positive people have considered what if this or that happens. They’ve planned some responses and moved on with their lives. The fearful don’t want to think about bad things.
Both commenters on the father story blamed the father
Probably he experienced very real discrimination and racism that does not rate a mention, only his failings
I know those are liberal words that turn people off. But think about what would lead a man to do that despite having raised a successful son
I think there is a lot of truth to this. The more that armed people suppress riff raff, the safer it appears to be in public and the less urgent it seems to be armed. Isn’t that basically what happened in the 1940s, 1950s, and into the mid 1960s? Violent crime was at minuscule levels (so to speak) and virtually no one saw any reason to be armed in public. For that matter lots of people did not even see any reason to have firearms at home — at least not “scary” firearms (e.g. short barreled long guns and full auto toys). And those attitudes paved the way for the Gun Control Act of 1968 … and later the Hughes Amendment of 1986 and the Assault Weapons Ban of 1993.
Of course we know that violent crime sky-rocketed going up to the early/mid 1990s which started the modern shall-issue concealed licensing movement in earnest.
There was a basic shift in our culture starting in ww2. Rural folks moved into the cities. A lot of them saw their guns as not needed and put them aside. Returning soldiers in their millions wanted peace and to make up for lost time in jobs and families.
We were losing whatever gun culture we had and I believe we would have gone the way of Europe as far as guns if not for the 68 gca. It was a wakeup call, a step too far too fast by the grabbers.
That’s when I started to fight for gun rights.
The OP said, “If they lived in a world where they really needed a gun, they’d be pro-gun so fast it would make a revolver’s cylinder spin. They’re not pro-gun because we have guns. We created — and continue to create — the “safe space” from which the antis’ attack our rights.”
Unfortunately, I don’t think you’re right. This dispute is not about people’s daily lives. It is about their philosophy of life: self-determination vs. socialism. If you believe in the former, you arm up and train up to face your perceived threat. If you believe in the latter, every problem is something the government must fix. If that were not true, most inner city residents would be pro-gun and the opposite is true.
Also, we can debate the extent to which gun owners have created a safe space. I think there is some effect there, but not as much as most POTG seem to think. But regardless, I don’t think anti-gunners would ever attribute safety with owning guns, even if gangs were prowling their streets. They would want more cops, even National Guard if it got bad enough. They see gun owners as being just as dangerous as the gangs and I don’t think they see themselves as capable of defending themselves with any tools other than a telephone.
They see gun owners as being just as dangerous as the gangs
Not merely as dangerous. They see us as just another gang. And a racist white one at that.
We can trot out all the black, Asian and Hispanic gun owners that we want — guys that we train side by side with every week — and it won’t make a damn bit of difference. We are the enemy and that’s that.
Yes well, there is that. But I do believe that the Second Amendment protection of gun rights had and has a direct impact on creating the safer society in which we now live.
There are at least 50k defensive gun uses per year (some estimates put it at 1.2m). Add in the deterrent effect – consider the rate of home invasions in states where [non-drug dealing] citizens are armed compared to states where defensive guns are in short supply — and you have an indication (I realize that correlation doesn’t equal causation) that guns reduce crime.
the self-determination vs socialism mindset is a key factor, more so than having created a safe environment, IMHO.
Looking at the UK, and its absurd weapons laws lends proof to my point. Its not safe, they have a huge violent crime/law enforcement problem and they are doing more of the same still, because the lawmakers are still getting voted back in.
Our immediate struggle is gun/individual rights. Our biggest hurdle is the “I will do it myself” vs “Just give me my cut and let someone else handle the details” attitude.
The biggest enemy of socialism attitudes is laws that empower individual rights.
I think the relationship between crime and gun rights is very complex. There are some countries with nearly as many guns as we have, but much less crime. There are others with draconian gun restrictions and much more crime. If it were a true cause and effect, I don’t think you would see that. But it is an endless debate that can never be resolved.
I do think criminals can be deterred by guns, but others are attracted by them as valuable commodities and useful tools of their trade. Some people can defend themselves with guns. For far too many, having guns ranges from useless against crime to an actual household hazard to them and their families.
For me, it’s kind of irrelevant. I see 2A as an individual right and I’m confident that in my case, and probable most people’s on this site, guns are a mitigation for crime, if not a deterrent. I am safer because I have guns, even if others can’t make the same claim because they don’t have the mindset.
I would say in a complex society with large cities and large groups of people interacting who do not know each other that a professional police force and systems of government are a more reasonable and effective way of maintaining order than everyone arming up andiatristing one another
Does not work, calling police does
Arming up I have no more objection to, in part thanks to sites like this, but thinking it is a primary answer is an illusion I think
And I hear much more angry invective here and on similar sites than I generally do from any liberal friends, though I do hear some. Most of that hate and such you have people feeling i think is not real
Some of these differing opinions sound like there is no peace among us here. I agree with the veteran that wrote the initial.
Peace does not mean being friendly to everyone even your neighbors. There is inner peace and then there is functioning peace for all of us. ” Be at peace with everyone so far AS IT IS WITHIN YOU” emphasis mine.
Even God used righteous war as a means to achieve peace.
The show of, the ability to, and the willingness to defend ourselves and those we care about, strangers or otherwise does not make us “war mongers”. It is a sign of love ( willingness to sacrifice if necessary) for all as LONG AS IT IS DONE CORRECTLY.
Eh. Zeitgeist gonna do what it’s gonna do.
I’m not sure these people would be any different under most other circumstances. I guess there’s places like Mexico where people finally got fed up enough to take up arms illegally. So maybe I am wrong.
It’s an interesting question.
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