The Future for American Gun Owners

The following is a e-mail from a VA resident sent to a VA Newspaper. It reflects a perspective that may hold sway in your future.

Do you want to live in an America where you feel you
have to provide a handgun to your sons or daughters
for them to be safe in college or high school
classrooms? Would you want to carry a firearm every
time you go to the grocery store, to the shopping
mall, to church or to any public place? If not
everywhere you go, how will you know when the armed
madman or criminal might appear?

Would you and your family be willing to practice
handling and shooting a gun so that you might have
some realistic chance of defending yourself against an
armed criminal? Will you need a 9 mm handgun with a
15-round clip so you won't be outgunned by an armed
criminal? Will you need a bulletproof vest, or
armor-piercing bullets in case the criminal is wearing
a vest?

Or would you feel content to rely on gun enthusiasts
like those who write to this newspaper, hoping that
they will be there and that they will be as good with
a gun as they think they are?

If the opportunity to carry firearms in public places
is such a valuable right, why aren't more of us
actually doing it?

The tragedy at Virginia Tech is so sad and personal
that it feels wrong to talk about anything other than
the overwhelming fact that people lost their lives.
But perhaps it is more wrong now not to talk about
guns in America.

I believe the answer is fewer guns, not more guns. The
idea of an armed citizenry may have made some sense in
Colonial times. Today, it is madness.

I also believe that America is on an irreversible path
to stricter gun control similar to the paths that
every other civilized nation has followed. Demographic
changes and advances in technology are altering rural
lifestyles. The mere passage of time distances us from
the overly romanticized, Wild West attitudes that
produce these self-professed rugged individualists who
believe in self-help by gun, instead of relying on our
trained police forces as the rest of us, collectively,
democratically, have chosen.

Effective gun control will be extreme gun control, and
it may very well require the repeal of the Second
Amendment and the reconstitution of the current
Supreme Court. If it is to happen sooner rather than
later, it will require that wives and mothers and
young people have the strength of will and conviction
to oppose and stand up to those mostly old men who are
not going to change their minds about guns.

It won't happen in my lifetime, probably not in my
children's lifetimes. But it will happen, and America
will be a better place when it does.

If this viewpoint is as upsetting to you as it is to me, then now is the time to get involved.
If you don't want an America where gun ownership is considered evil then you must be willing to get actively involved to:

• Defeat any candidate for political office that does not in word and deed support an Individual's right to keep and bear arms - no matter what else you agree with them on, if they don't support this, you must work against them.
• Educate your friends, neighbors, children, grand children etc., about the enjoyment of the shooting sports and the responsible use of firearms as well as the reality that firearms are a valid means of self-defense - the right to keep and bear arms is an outgrowth of every one's natural right to self-defense.
  
• Support gun rights organization by joining the NRA, SAF or local organization.
• Be an advocate by word and deed for the responsible use of firearms. Don't foster the negative by doing stupid things with a gun.