This past week has been mostly spent showing loyal sidekick Rat, up from Colorado, around the Great Land. The intention was to do some grouse hunting, but as is often the case with our first-time guests from the lower 48, he became enthralled with how each bend in the road revealed a new and wondrous vista, so we spent a lot of time sightseeing and rather less bird hunting, or as Rat puts it, "walking in the woods with guns."
But much as I love writing about the Alaska outdoors, it is the "walking around with guns" part that I intend to cover now.
The Old Man had guns in the house, and all of his kids knew it. He held to the firm belief - as do I - that if there are guns in the house, every member of that household must know, at a minimum, how to handle them safely; how to clear them, to load and unload them, and what it was like to fire one. My wife and I followed that same path with our four daughters.
It always seems to be the parents who try to hide their guns, to keep them a mystery, who have kids who eventually find them, and, all too often, tragedy results from that lack of familiarity. It is as my grandfather used to say, "The kids who grow up along the river are never the ones who drown."
As best as I can recall at this distance in time, I was about five or six when Dad started me shooting at empty pop cans with a BB gun. A few years later I graduated to a .22 rifle and a .410 shotgun; the .22 rifle later became a near-constant companion all summer long. In time I moved up to more serious pieces; by the time I was 14 or so, I was borrowing Dad's old 12-gauge Stevens pumpgun to go out after grouse or pheasants.
To this day, every time I pick up a firearm, I hear the Old Man's voice:
"Treat every gun as if it is loaded, all the time."
"Whenever you pick up a gun, check the chamber, even if you just checked it."
"Never point a gun at something unless you intend to shoot it."
"These aren't toys. A moment of carelessness and someone can be seriously hurt or killed. You have to handle these tools carefully, just like a chainsaw or an axe."
"Don't touch the trigger until you're ready to fire."
My wife once commented on watching me and my old buddy Dave looking over a revolver Dave had just purchased. Dave took the piece out of his safe, opened the cylinder, examined it, confirmed it was empty, and handed it to me with the cylinder open. I re-verified the cylinder was empty, closed it, examined the revolver - and then opened the cylinder, verified it was empty again, and handed it back to Dave with the cylinder open - upon which he re-inspected to make sure the cylinder was empty before putting the gun back in the safe.
Every time I take a gun out of my safe, the first thing I do is to clear it. I don't care that it has been in my safe the whole time. I don't care that I cleared it myself when it went into the safe last. These are important habits to develop.
These are what responsible, law-abiding gun owners do.
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The left likes to talk about "gun culture," and, as they do so often, they expound at length about something they know nothing about. There are two broad "gun cultures" in America today. One is, sadly, part of the savage, vicious, toxic urban "thug" culture that has infested too many of our major cities. These are the people who generally obtain weapons through theft or the black market, who use them to intimidate, threaten, rob, and kill.
Then there is the "gun culture" I grew up in, which sees guns as tools essential to a rural lifestyle, for the defense of self, family, and home, or for hunting, competition shooting, or collecting. I have done all of these things, as have many of the legal gun owners I know and have known. We are not the ones who commit crimes with guns, nor are we responsible for those who do.
And that is the fundamental disconnect liberals and "progressives" make when they wag fingers at law-abiding gun owners after a tragedy. Every policy, every piece of legislation they propose, and every act they attempt, is aimed at the law-abiding.
We aren't the problem. The criminals and the mentally deranged who commit mass murders are the problem. There is no such thing as "gun violence." Violence is an act; an act requires an actor; a gun cannot act.
A couple of days ago, loyal sidekick Rat and I were out and about, looking for some Alaska spruce grouse. We arrived at the view shown at the top of this piece. That's the Alaska Range. When we were standing there taking in this view, we were well-armed; both of us carried shotguns for the birds and a major-caliber sidearm against the big, sometimes aggressive critters that live in that landscape. We are part of that latter gun culture, people who use guns legally for our own purposes, and handle them safely and responsibly. We're the people who are guaranteed the right to do so by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.
We will continue to do these things - and to fight to preserve that natural right to do so.
