armed liberal

It’s not politically correct for one as left-leaning as I am to admit to owning guns. I do, though. Lots of them. I didn’t come to this point on my own, though I was brought up in the home of a WWII vet, a gun collector, who took me with him to Saturday morning target practice at the VFW.

There I learned how to handle a gun, how to clean it, how to be safe. I was just a child, but there was none of the nervous nelly “what about the children???” attitude we get these days. Guns were a fact of my life growing up. At 17, a newly wild-eyed radical, I donned the full cloak of hard left liberalism, including the mandatory abhorrence of weaponry, and righteously insisted that all guns should be confiscated or, at the very least, registered to death.

In the last 15 years, I’ve changed. It started when I went with my partner to Wyoming, where all of his relatives were packing pistols. It was a culture shock and I drew myself up in my good liberal outrage, clambered to the top of smug mountain and expressed my displeasure. They looked at me as if I were mad and shook their heads and continued going armed into the world.

A few years later, at a loss for a birthday gift, I bought my sweetheart a Colt .38 Special and a box of bullets. A Wyoming boy, he felt more secure with a gun in the house. Over time, more guns came: rifles, shotguns, more pistols. I now have pistols in my warehouse, where I often work alone at night in the back of the building, 300 feet from any door. The fact of it, having a gun handy, allowed me to eject one of the crackheads who occasionally come looking for work. Most of them I hire, but this one turned aggressive and violent almost immediately and I was glad ~ yes, glad ~ to have a gun nearby that I could use to make him move.

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