Loving guns too much
I don't know how it began really, but probably because I spent a lot of time reading outdoor magazines like Boy's Life when I was not yet a teenager. The articles in those magazines dealt with living outdoors, camping, fishing Tiffany And Co Bracelet Cheap and hunting. Those topics inevitably led me to guns, for which I developed an avid interest and ultimately a passion. I studied antique guns and had an encyclopedic knowledge of certain types.
A Cooey single shot .22 rifle Ghd Cheap Online was my first gun.
I haunted the one gun store in a neighbourhood near home. Target Sales was in Eastview, a suburb of Ottawa, later re named Vanier which finally became part of the expanded Nation's Capital. French was spoken in Eastview's streets in the mid 50s and I mentally linked guns with the exotic feel of window shopping surrounded by a language almost unknown to me at the time.
Still more exotic was Gora's Antiques in a converted house on King Edward Avenue in Ottawa. On the first of what turned out to be many visits, I rang the doorbell beside a massive wooden front door, locked tight. Several minutes later, I had concluded that no one was home when I heard a key rattle in the lock and the sound of a safety chain drawing taut.
Through a two inch opening I made out in the dark interior a hunched, aged man wearing a pair of thick lensed glasses in heavy dark frames. Atop his bald head sat a black yarmulke, the first I had ever seen. Squinting into the bright light outdoors Jacob Gora spied a nervous undersized 12 year old standing on the stone steps.
"What do you want!" he demanded.
"I understand you sell antique guns," I replied.
The interior was not quite pitch black but dark enough to be mysterious, mere glimmers of light filtering through the thick curtains that covered every window. This did nothing but boost the appeal of dusty flintlock muskets and pairs of duelling pistols in velvet lined rosewood boxes that loomed into view in the dim light.
I loved guns for the vivid history they evoked and for the ingenious evolution of their design, from ancient flintlocks one of which I owned briefly before trading it for a German Luger pistol which I fired at targets in the improvised range I set up in our basement.
I was an asthmatic kid with loads of allergies. Those afflictions turned me away from vigorous team sports and their camaraderie, toward a place where I focused inward the bulk of my time. I could, quite possibly, have become obsessed with guns to an extent and in a direction leading me down the path to my own personal Newtown, Connecticut.
Around the age of 12, I got a subscription to the magazine Guns and Ammo. In it I found many articles that drew me in, but others that exposed me to a world that I did not recognize. A world where owning a gun was essential in order to feel safe from violent burglaries, rape and communism (the terrorism phobia has since replaced communism at the top of the list of things which should make yo very very afraid.)
The National Rifle Association advertised extensively in Guns and Ammo and their ads reinforced the scare tactics of the articles. They promised safety, a feeling of self reliance and power if only you bought a gun and joined the NRA. I thought about it, but I didn't join.
I was a kid who sent letters to Smith and Wesson, Winchester, Remington, Colt and Ruger, seeking information and brochures about the guns they manufactured. Reading the brochures, often accompanied by personal letters that came in the mail, I slowly began to realize it was the guns themselves, those superbly designed pieces of equipment, that interested me.
I didn't connect guns to any sense of fear, because I didn't have any. I was a little English speaking white kid from a loving home in a country that would shortly invent world wide peacekeeping. was both the greatest and most powerful country in the world, while at the same time requiring its citizens to be eternally armed and vigilant, lest evil forces attempt to wrest liberty from their grasp. I didn't feel attached to the stars and stripes that waved from every second page of the magazine. I lived in a country that didn't yet have its own flag.
Much later than most in our town we got a television and it was many more years before we got any channels from the USA. So, in my youngest days I Cheap Tiffany And Co Bracelets was spared the endless torrent of violent pictures on the small screen and the accompanying sound tracks filled with screams, gunfire and police sirens that are available as a bedtime lullaby to American children today. President Obama has a steep hill to climb in his declared mission to cure a society plagued by serial mass murder. A steep hill indeed.
It is a mission whose fundamental importance risks being diverted by the fabrication of reasons deemed more important than a society's collective duty to keep and bear civility toward one another.
All friends of America wish Barack Obama well in his mission. We in Canada add the additional wish that, if he succeeds, his example will convince our own government to stop heading in the wrong direction in the matter of controlling guns. Using a gun for protection results in fewer injuries to the defender than using any other means of defense, and there are 65 lives protected or saved for every life lost to a gun.
Homicide rates have actually declined in the US, except for inner city teens or young adults involved in gun violence that is relative to mostly drug trafficking type crimes. Chicago is one of two cities (DC being the other) w/the strictest gun control laws in the country, yet one of the highest muder and gun crime rates. It is already illegal for teens to own / purchase handguns and military styled rifles across the country, yet the inner city youth have easier access than honest citizens who go through the necessary Roshe Run Australia background checks.
Gun control only threatens the liberty of honest citizens, as the underground world of crime, thugs, gang bangers and criminals, will never abide by gun control laws, nor will they give up their guns, putting them at a disadvantage to rival gangs or criminals.
The Obama administration would best serve the citizens by looking at the causes of inner city violence, and the culture that is attracted Ghd Stockists Hawaii to violent video games, music video's that glorify violent gang styled criminal life styles, or the disruption in the broken families poverty, that lead misguided youth to criminal activity violence. Restricting gun ownership only restricts honest citizens in protecting themselves against a criminal cult that will ALWAYS have access to guns.
History is replete with various Le Pliage Australia governments mass killing their own citizens or subjects. Look at any country in history. The English govt was perhaps the most varied in its obsession to mass kill throughout the globe: Ireland, North America, India, the French in Canada, the Indians in Canada. Then let's not forget how the Russian Communist govt ordered its armies to slaughter their own. Nike Free 4.0 V3 35 million Ukrainians alone had died under Stalin. Was the French King any more innocent in the way he treated his own subjects in pre 1789? History teaches to any who can read that to trust the govt one lives under is not exactly wise. It's better to be armed, just in case,t Nike Free Powerlines 2 than to be naive. It's no accident that it's always the elite, or their favored minions, who cry for gun control.
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