Another thread mentioned http://www.packing.org./ as a good site for CCW info. It is also a first-rate site for articles. Here's one from the Charlotte Observer. It makes you wonder how that anti-gun weenie reporter got printed (yet another thread).
http://www.charlotte.com/observer/opinion/pub/progun0519.htm
Published Friday, May 19, 2000
A right to bear - and love - arms
My firearms are not just weapons; they are things of beauty and reminders that not all power resides in the government.
By ROBERT LEE MAHON
San Francisco Examiner
I'm 53, white, male, middle-class and an English teacher with a doctorate.
I'm married (twice) and come complete with kids, stepkids and an attitude so liberal I almost carry the cards: I vote left, think Gore Vidal and the ACLU are fine American institutions and get junk mail from Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Federation.
And I'm a member of the National Rifle Association.
I am a lifelong shooter and gun collector. At one point I even had a federal license that permitted me to deal in firearms.
In other words, I'm one of "them."
Most firearm enthusiasts are not competitive shooters, professional gunners of any sort or even hard-core hunters. Instead, like me, they're part-time plinkers, casual collectors and occasional nimrods.
We do not keep our assault rifles loaded in expectation of making the National Rifleman's "Armed Citizen" column, and the closest most of us want to get to violence is a Clint Eastwood movie.
So why do I love guns?
Let me count the ways.
My firearms are more than just weapons; they are things of beauty.
And before you snicker, consider. In an age of all things shoddy, the handgun, the rifle and shotgun remain benchmarks of craftsmanship, reliability and that marriage of form and function that hallmarks superior design.
The guns hanging on my wall will outlast me, as some of them have already outlasted previous owners; further, they have done (and will do) so while doing supremely well what they were made to do.
If a Louis XIV chair is a work of art, then why not a Winchester Model 70 or a Colt .45? Pick one up sometime. Hold it. Feel its balance. Imagine
Feel. Imagine. In other words, guns are also the ultimate toys. They go bang - big-time bang. And since that bang is potentially deadly, guns also succor all sorts of fantasies that go all the way back to the first hominid who picked up a stick and realized he could club something - or somebody - with it.
As the anthropologist and author Loren Eiseley once put it: "The hand that hefted the ax fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit (whose) roots go very deep."
Human males, like it or not, are drawn to weapons, and the firearm is simply the ultimate weapon. Modern man, as has been pointed out hundreds of times, has no rational need of weapons. And so, logically, you argue that access to guns should be limited to those officials, like the police, who do.
But nothing could be further from the truth. Having no need of weapons for actual defense or legitimate aggression does not mean having no need of weapons. That need, in fact, may be even greater when its only legitimate expression comes from blowing away beer cans on a Saturday afternoon.
And since we're talking need: Beyond all that food, clothing and shelter stuff, beyond even sex, how about that need where both beauty and fantasy meet?
How about power?
It is the sine qua non of firearms; and of course, it underpins much of human life, private and public, especially the social contract.
A weapon, like an AR-15, in the hands of a private citizen, alters that social contract in favor of the individual. (One of the truly revolutionary things about the American Revolution was its resultant establishment of a government forced to share power, real power, with its constituents.)
My AR-15 is a concrete reminder that my government's power does, indeed, spring from me. In retaining it, I retain some of the power.
In a century in which power has accumulated like lead in the organs of the state, in its experts and its agencies, where an individual is scarcely deemed fit to raise or school his own children without the "assistance" of all of the above, a weapon in his hands may remind both him and his masters that he has, indeed, only delegated, not abrogated, those powers that make masters.
I once watched a female Chicagoan, born and raised to hate and fear firearms, after hitting her sixth can in six shots look appraisingly at the revolver in her hand and state flatly: "You know, this puts a whole new perspective on equal rights. You boys have been hiding something from us."
She might have been echoing the scene from the TV series "Holocaust," when the elderly Jew looks down at his submachine gun after killing his first SS trooper and says, wonderingly, "They can die too." In Chairman Mao's blunt synopsis, "Power flows from the barrel of a gun."
Nothing sums this up better than the current assault-rifle melee. An assault rifle is one of the supreme expressions of the gunmaker's art, a perfect meld of function, fantasy and power. I look at it, admire it, dust and heft it from time to time. Hey, I even fire it occasionally - once or twice a year.
And while it gratifies me, of course, it scares the hell out of you.
And it should. Because it is, potentially, dangerous. But that's the price of power; of, in many ways, beauty; and even, for that matter, of fantasies.
That's the price I'm willing to pay. Or, to be candid, that I'm willing for everyone to pay.
One bumper sticker I recently read expresses the nut of the problem perfectly: "They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead hands."
Inelegant and hyperbolic.
But the sentiments of lovers are often thus.
Robert Lee Mahon teaches English at East Central College, 1964 Prairie Dell Road, Union, MO 63084.
http://www.charlotte.com/observer/opinion/pub/progun0519.htm
Published Friday, May 19, 2000
A right to bear - and love - arms
My firearms are not just weapons; they are things of beauty and reminders that not all power resides in the government.
By ROBERT LEE MAHON
San Francisco Examiner
I'm 53, white, male, middle-class and an English teacher with a doctorate.
I'm married (twice) and come complete with kids, stepkids and an attitude so liberal I almost carry the cards: I vote left, think Gore Vidal and the ACLU are fine American institutions and get junk mail from Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Federation.
And I'm a member of the National Rifle Association.
I am a lifelong shooter and gun collector. At one point I even had a federal license that permitted me to deal in firearms.
In other words, I'm one of "them."
Most firearm enthusiasts are not competitive shooters, professional gunners of any sort or even hard-core hunters. Instead, like me, they're part-time plinkers, casual collectors and occasional nimrods.
We do not keep our assault rifles loaded in expectation of making the National Rifleman's "Armed Citizen" column, and the closest most of us want to get to violence is a Clint Eastwood movie.
So why do I love guns?
Let me count the ways.
My firearms are more than just weapons; they are things of beauty.
And before you snicker, consider. In an age of all things shoddy, the handgun, the rifle and shotgun remain benchmarks of craftsmanship, reliability and that marriage of form and function that hallmarks superior design.
The guns hanging on my wall will outlast me, as some of them have already outlasted previous owners; further, they have done (and will do) so while doing supremely well what they were made to do.
If a Louis XIV chair is a work of art, then why not a Winchester Model 70 or a Colt .45? Pick one up sometime. Hold it. Feel its balance. Imagine
Feel. Imagine. In other words, guns are also the ultimate toys. They go bang - big-time bang. And since that bang is potentially deadly, guns also succor all sorts of fantasies that go all the way back to the first hominid who picked up a stick and realized he could club something - or somebody - with it.
As the anthropologist and author Loren Eiseley once put it: "The hand that hefted the ax fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit (whose) roots go very deep."
Human males, like it or not, are drawn to weapons, and the firearm is simply the ultimate weapon. Modern man, as has been pointed out hundreds of times, has no rational need of weapons. And so, logically, you argue that access to guns should be limited to those officials, like the police, who do.
But nothing could be further from the truth. Having no need of weapons for actual defense or legitimate aggression does not mean having no need of weapons. That need, in fact, may be even greater when its only legitimate expression comes from blowing away beer cans on a Saturday afternoon.
And since we're talking need: Beyond all that food, clothing and shelter stuff, beyond even sex, how about that need where both beauty and fantasy meet?
How about power?
It is the sine qua non of firearms; and of course, it underpins much of human life, private and public, especially the social contract.
A weapon, like an AR-15, in the hands of a private citizen, alters that social contract in favor of the individual. (One of the truly revolutionary things about the American Revolution was its resultant establishment of a government forced to share power, real power, with its constituents.)
My AR-15 is a concrete reminder that my government's power does, indeed, spring from me. In retaining it, I retain some of the power.
In a century in which power has accumulated like lead in the organs of the state, in its experts and its agencies, where an individual is scarcely deemed fit to raise or school his own children without the "assistance" of all of the above, a weapon in his hands may remind both him and his masters that he has, indeed, only delegated, not abrogated, those powers that make masters.
I once watched a female Chicagoan, born and raised to hate and fear firearms, after hitting her sixth can in six shots look appraisingly at the revolver in her hand and state flatly: "You know, this puts a whole new perspective on equal rights. You boys have been hiding something from us."
She might have been echoing the scene from the TV series "Holocaust," when the elderly Jew looks down at his submachine gun after killing his first SS trooper and says, wonderingly, "They can die too." In Chairman Mao's blunt synopsis, "Power flows from the barrel of a gun."
Nothing sums this up better than the current assault-rifle melee. An assault rifle is one of the supreme expressions of the gunmaker's art, a perfect meld of function, fantasy and power. I look at it, admire it, dust and heft it from time to time. Hey, I even fire it occasionally - once or twice a year.
And while it gratifies me, of course, it scares the hell out of you.
And it should. Because it is, potentially, dangerous. But that's the price of power; of, in many ways, beauty; and even, for that matter, of fantasies.
That's the price I'm willing to pay. Or, to be candid, that I'm willing for everyone to pay.
One bumper sticker I recently read expresses the nut of the problem perfectly: "They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead hands."
Inelegant and hyperbolic.
But the sentiments of lovers are often thus.
Robert Lee Mahon teaches English at East Central College, 1964 Prairie Dell Road, Union, MO 63084.