Perhaps I should elaborate on why I find none of these second terms acceptable in any way. Why that I don't find it amusing even as an exercise at the thought of giving up an inch of anything to gun grabbing slime who are an unwanted side effect of having a country that doesn't deport people who try to screw it up from the inside because they ostensibly have good intentions and simply a different take on things.
I was and am a hunter first and foremost, grew up in an outdoors household. My dad, my grandpa, and everyone mentionable in family history on both sides chased dove, quail, deer, duck, and everything else around as often as income and gaps between wars permitted. Myself included. I'd rather be up in a deer stand or have a beautiful Belgian made Citori over my shoulder than just about anything else in the world. And when we weren't in the field we were on the water fishing for everything from bream to marlin. I had a very, very happy childhood and early adulthood, though it was very contained. I never bought anything for myself, rarely shot without the family there, nothing other than what my dad wanted to do except what I could read in magazines...and sit in my room and fantasize about doing someday. Everything was locked in a room and a cabinent, and only by more powerful external forces which I had little to no say did any matters of putting lead through paper come to bear. "When you get older and you can pay for it" was the answer to anything that wasn't in the plan. Only in turkey hunting was the individual me venturing out beyond that which was merely handed to me.
Then all of it vanished. I went off to school 4 1/2 hours away from my family's farm land and 5 1/2 hours from any fishing, and being encapsulated in a world of drunk 19-22 year old college kids for whom life was nothing more than hopping to the next keg, football game, and naked coed. Everything I knew how to do wasn't there, and what was there I didn't have any prior connections nor any particular fascination with spending half the time being stupid and yacking about nonsense with stuck up juvenile mentality soap opera characters with hollow lives and vapid thought and dialogue. But of course I wasn't the norm so something was wrong with me according to the rest of the world, so in attempts to reconcile things I tried to assimilate myself among the bizarre natives and their alien culture. It didn't work. My life took a downward spiral into isolation, alcoholism, depression, failure, and lack of completed version of either original and adopted/manufactured identity. I grew apart from both my origins and my surroundings having become something familiar to neither nor comfortable among much of anyone.
Perhaps in some act of grace of God my now future wife and I met, and by her being close to her family motivated me to get back close to mine. So naturally what would get me back to spending time with them and having something to talk about would be to get back to hunting, to trap shooting, to fishing, etc. And in that I re-evolved into my own. I shot more and more for practice to re-establish skills which had eroded or simply been dormant so long and had room and energy to grow. But something else was there. Though I had liked very much to do so as much as anyone, there was the new feeling of being able to expand beyond what merely existed by mandate and by manna, but much farther into the realm beyond...what I WANTED. What I could create. What was on MY to do list. ANYTHING. And I wanted more. Not merely to be essentially a tourist on land that I only incidentally happen not be a foreigner, and not to continue being a repeated novice every year, but to become instead a master at riflecraft, wingshooting, and taking of game for original purposes of fun and sport and family but now something much deeper. To enjoy the most pleasurable shooting there was, be it from an AR, a beautiful 1911, an old Smith revolver, a garage project 10/22, a pre-64 model 70...all of the above. The more to practice the more to enjoy, the more to love. To have it all for me, for her, for any kids that will come later. To then upon such occasion be the great dad I had, God willing, a granddad with a glass case that would hand the next Cyrus boy or girl his or her first .243 or over and under 20 gauge. To be a rare skilled person in an age where the click of the mouse, the tunes of an iPod, how much of a party animal your girlfriend/wife/mistress is, and the other meaningless idolatry of the ignorant, materialistic, trash cultured masses. And also to be master of shooting as an epicuran pleasure, the tradition of the British for whom the Rigby, the Jeffery, and the Holland and Holland were the tools and treasures of a powerful noble man who bestrode the globe as a Colossus. Not only did I shoot now as a birthright and as a hobbiest, but as bearer of the great light of civilization, as I was to read later in Jeff Cooper's words, one possessing that which is the pinnacle of that which lifted mankind out of the mud and up onto the throne of mastery of the Earth.
I had also gained an astonishing and brutal introduction to the immenent encroachment of those who wanted to take my lifelong held, now reclaimed world and smash it to pieces. I had never met anyone who didn't understand the world I grew up in, nor understood the magnitude nor mass of that which was indifferent, averse, or even of sworn hostility to it. I essentially awoke to a horror vision of an army marching upon my home. Entire cities of millions with voters, politicians, and activists--God help me, even BUSINESSES--with an aim to take from me, my newly found companion, my future kids (whom before her I had absolutely abandoned idea of ever being anything more than a distant hypothetical at best), and anyone I would ever know. Take from me everything I had, that I would work for, that my father and grandfather and uncles and great uncles had given me...everything I had growing up that ever mattered for more than a day's thought. Everything that no matter for how long had I bitterly, disgracefully, and utterly failed to sustain myself had never itself failed me. This beast has three masters. Those who sit atop it, riding upon it as a horrible mounted creature, itself a throne of power but moreover to carry them upon its back in battle for political office and influence within a system of power brokerage and influence. Those who pull its chains and cling to its hair, being powerless of their own and ignorant of those who own arms for purpose in the field, for their defense, or their leisure, pulling at the chains to have us devoured whie cowering underneath its supposed protection that its foul purpose pretends. And lastly those who merely lead it further in hopes to fill its hunger by eating others. The "Fudds" --a term I abhor because it demeans me by accident-- doing as they do out of ignorance not becoming of them, less isolated than the previous group by having some benefit of education but still a degree of isolation in their own world. The totally ignorant of cities and of the timid could be held not to know better, having not received the grace of legacy that the field men have--the traitors, however, know full well that the deal they seek to make with the devil is, intentions aside, with a devil which has not one drop of compassion for them nor a single ounce of loyalty nor a second's intention of preserving them to the last.
It was not until a significant education in history in depth and across the history of the world in addition to meeting all of her family and friends from the urbanized north east was it impressed upon me the reality of such problem and the necessity for repelling and extinguishing it. Also the almost apocalyptic problem of a government so far ahead of and omnipotent over its citizenry that almost any atrocity in history could be revisited by those of sufficient will and inclination. In short, it hit me that Sarah Brady was real, that Hitler and Stalin weren't a one shot deal, and all that separated them from being a loudmouth occasionally in a small section in the newspaper and black and white photographs from 60 years ago and being right here and now and pointed at ME is a little more than 100 million people who usually don't give a crap about anything that isn't on American Idol and SportsCenter, couldn't tell you all 10 Amendments in the Bill of Rights, and if someone wanted to take anything that was an elongated piece of steel with spiral grooves cut in it and make it a felony to touch one, they would shrug their shoulders and say "Oh well, doesn't affect me" OR WORSE "Dontcha know, Mrs. _____ down the street had one of those gang members rob her the other day. That's scary, I think they should ban those things" , 20-30 million who think "That won't happen, no way", and whatever else leftover being warring factions among themselves.
So in any case, I don't think anyone has the right to try to bargain away my rights in hopes of keeping what is temporarily theirs and if they ever had to be confronted about it would just throw up their hands, put down their guns, and go watch a football game. Don't know who you talk to, but it's not just some other occasion to do something other than watch TV--combined with fishing (which the same people who hate everything we love equally want to squelch) it's all of my life that's ever been anything to me. It isn't hypothetical to me, it's not anything other than crystal clear what is going on, and quite honestly, the idea that anyone simply sits here and takes it makes me sick to the core.
