I'm a weaponsmith. I love designing guns. I love handcasting the different components. I love busting my hands open over and over again to hear the sweet "schick" or "click" of well oiled gunmetal sliding into place for the first time. This is fulfilling.
I love seating bullets. I love smell of spent gunpowder. I love the site of that small burst of light leaving the barrel during a twighlite hunt. I love aiming, and feeling my heart beat, and timing the shot between beats. I love the soft, relaxed exhale of breath as I pull the trigger. I love seeing the look on my family members faces when they see we are safe and that we will be eating well this winter.
I love melting nickel, steel, and lead. Casting bullets to reload brass in ways no ones ever thought before. I love measuring the gun powder, making sure each load is safe. Each load will bring someone food, each load will protect someone, each load can be trusted.
My grandfather was a Vietnam Weapons Specialist. He loved teaching me these things. He loved teaching me how to build weapons. I shot my first gun when I was six. I brought home ducks, geese, hare, ground squirrel and grouse at that age. He taught me not to waste anything. He taught me to have respect for things that gave their life to support the rest rest of the food chain.
He taught me to respect my gun, because it was a weapon. We didn't have a grocery store to get food from. We had no one else to protect us from bears, or to protect our dogs from wolves. Someday, like today as I sit writing this, my Grandpa knew he wouldn't be home to hunt for me. There would be a day he couldn't protect me from wild animals. It was a very important and deadly tool that we would all rely on for the rest of my life.
This way of living is fading into history. My love for the second amendment and the romance of carrying a firearm does not extend to condoning things like what happened in LA. These things are preventable. These things are atrocities, and beneath us as a society.
I'm speaking as a person who has relyed on firearms my entire life for safety, protection, and an income. I've never needed a weapon to hold more than five bullets at once. I've never condoned treating the discharge of a weapon as entertainment. I've never taken someone prone to violence, erratic behavior, or who had a jaded history hunting with me. This isn't a game. Guns are not toys.
I don't understand where the idea between respecting firearms for what they are -dangerous, lethal, and necessary in certain contexts, got lost to entitlement and the idea that they should be common commodities.
We do not need assault rifles. We do not need military grade ammunition. We do not need people carrying around side arms because it "makes them feel safe and it's their right." No one with a side arm stopped that terrorist in LA.
We can sit here and romanticize this shit all day the way Americans do best when one of us fucks up, and ignore it until the next shooting happens. Or we can fucking admit that we need better gun control laws because I'm a goddamn gun fanatic and I can reasonably assess that I have no business as a civilian member of this country understanding as much as I do about building guns which means, all things being equal, all you other gun fanatics can make the same assessment.
This is not about us. This is about the laws that govern us make what happened in LA possible because by and large the majority of our country should not be trusted to have access to these weapons. If that means I can't have those weapons either, that's ok because regular mass shooting shouldn't be the price to pay for these things. What are you doing with these guns that brings anything practical to your life? Nothing. Because you don't hunt deer, moose, elk, or sheep with a fucking AR-15. That's just stupid. Calibers designed to hunt people are cruel to hunt most game with. They're small. They're designed to kill humans. There are no deer where I live but a bolt action 30-06 is perfect for moose. You shouldn't have to fucking shoot it 12 times, your rifle does not need to hold more than 5 rounds if it does there's something wrong with you and your ability.
We need to lead by example and show people this is preventable and deplorable, and by arguing against stricter gun laws we are, ultimately, responsible because we refuse to accept what our weapons are capable of.
