I just read this story and I couldn’t resist the urge to pollute the internet with my own story. I find it interesting to read how other people got to where they are now. Maybe you do too.

I am a tweener when it comes to generations, born right on the border of Generation X and Generation Y, or the Millenials, or whatever the fuck. I’ve heard and read dozens of descriptions of the characteristics of these two generations and I guess I believe two things, the generalizations are pretty much full of shit and I fall pretty much right between those generalizations. This is important to my story in some way that will become more obvious later, I’m sure.

I grew up in a relatively normal world, divorced and remarried parents, step siblings, concussions and broken bones, soccer and baseball games, crack epidemics, church friends and secular friends, skateboards and vandalism, and a yard that never seemed to grow grass. My dad is a Vietnam vet and consequently has a bit of an aversion to firearms. He had some heirloom rifles stashed under the bed and when my siblings and I were left home alone we would pull them out and try to work the action. My parents must have assumed that when we weren’t busy starting fires or climbing fences that we were little angels who would never touch the guns “hidden” under the bed.

There was no ammo for these guns, so we were never really in any danger. I know I know, the 4 rules. But when you are a curious kid with guns in the house that are mysterious and interesting (and OFF LIMITS!) you could give a fuck about 4 rules. We never pointed them at each other and pretended to shoot each other or anything, we just liked to work the action and hear the click when we pulled the trigger. That was the extent of the conversation about guns in the house.

I have one vivid memory around guns from that carefree time of my life. When I was about 11 years old an older neighbor kid was bragging one day about his gun. He said that he was in a gang. I called bullshit. He went back to his house, came back a few minutes later and shoved his gun right up against my chest. He said, “I bet you believe me now”. It looked real enough to me that I just about shit my pants while trying to maintain my poker face.

Me, at 11 years old with a gun pointed at me

When I was 12 years old, I asked for a bb gun for Christmas. A friend had one and I felt like it was the most important thing in the world for me to be armed with a pellet gun as soon as possible. I’m not making this up, I used to fantasize about shooting a robber in the face, pumping the gun 10 more times and then shooting him in the balls while he was down. My parents went against their better judgement and let me get the gun. Within the first year, I had shot someone with it, been shot with it, shot out a neighbor’s window, and had the police called on me by another neighbor who thought I was shooting at him in his hot tub. It was a good start.

Over the next several years, I acquired more bb guns and some paintball guns. Occasionally I’d do something stupid with them and get them taken away for awhile. The problem was that no one ever sat me down and explained what a gun really was and how you are supposed to act around them. I was left to my own devices. And sometimes my devices were not exactly well planned out, like the time we used a friends upstairs bathroom as a sniper’s nest for a game of paintball.

The first time I fired a gun I was 16. A friend had a shotgun, a 20 ga. break action single. I was totally in love as I blasted soda cans. I came home and proudly told my dad about it. He promptly informed me that if I ever touched another gun while I lived under his roof, I could expect nothing but dogshit for dinner for the next couple years. Or something to that effect. The message was loud and clear, “Do not, under any circumstances, tell dad that I got to handle a gun.”

Ideologically I wasn’t really in tune with gun rights. I was raised in a strict, Christian, conservative home. I learned about how God made the US government and that that’s the way it should be and Satan wants to destroy it. That was the extent of it, basically.

I left for college when I was 18, young, naive, horny and a little too interested in fire and explosions. I went to a very conservative university and continued my indoctrination at a full clip. I was a staunch Conservative, believing in the Rule of Law above all else. I thought about becoming a lawyer, but went with a Social Science degree instead. However through all of this, I knew that there was some bullshit going on. Some things just didn’t make sense to me, and as I neared my senior year, I was becoming quite the closet Liberal. The model that was presented to me seem to intrinsically disadvantage huge groups of people, especially people who had no recourse to protect themselves.

I got married and had my first baby right around the time I graduated. As a result of my education and the natural tendency to believe that I knew everything, I adopted a strict passifist ideology, primarily because of my Christian faith. While I still fancied guns (though at this point didn’t own any), I believed that the path that Christ called his followers to was a path of love and nonviolence. Even though since then I have become agnostic, I still believe this is the message of the New Testament and argue regularly with Christians about this issue.

A friend of mine was into guns and had a few. Occasionally we would go find a deserted spot and blow through some rounds. The noise, the recoil, the shattering of targets, all of these things fascinated and thrilled me. So when he needed to sell some guns off, I bought my first firearm from him. It was a Hi Point 995 9mm carbine. I still have it. That was in 2005. My wife demanded that I not keep it anywhere near her or the baby. So I kept it with a trigger lock and unloaded in the garage. I had no interest in using it for self defense. A couple years went by uneventfully enough. Ideologically I was starting to swing back to the Right again, though with some reservations, especially about social issues.

In December of 2009, I was out with a friend on a Sunday morning, skateboarding for old time sake. When I got home, I noticed my living room window screen laying on the porch, cut. There were boot prints in the snow and finger prints all over the window. When I got inside, my wife told me that two guys had been knocking on the door for awhile. She didn’t answer and took the kids upstairs. She was not aware that they had tried to get in through the window. I proceeded to, as they say, “Lose my shit”. My ideology of passifism could not stand up to my instinct to protect my family.

That was the start of my real obsession with guns. That was when I joined online communities and took an active interest in buying guns both as a sporting hobby and as a serious measure for self defense. I spent every extra penny buying guns and ammo. I think I bought 8 guns in the 18 months following the attempted break in. My wife fought me on the issue every step of the way. But since I’m a motherfucking alpha, I used the back of my hand to sway her opinion to a more reasonable position. For all you pussies out there, yes that is a joke. But I did assert that I had a responsibility to provide for my family, and that included protection.

I ended up helping to start this blog and to build a small online community as a way to continue to associate with the kind of people I like to hang around, both online and in real life. I’m a gun blogger, but I’m not an expert on guns by any stretch of the imagination. I blog for fun, for information and as a way to spend my time on a subject I happen to enjoy. Oh and maybe some free shit along the way, though that hasn’t really worked out yet.

Ideologically, I am radically pro 2nd Amendment. I am essentially radically pro individual liberty. I have given up on naming my ideology because inevitably when I open my mouth, one side calls me a raging Liberal and the other side calls me a heartless Conservative. In reality, there is plenty of truth to go around. Nobody has a monopoly on it. I’m not even convinced Truth exists as we like to try to understand it. But I am convinced that I have an instinct for self preservation and the preservation of my tribe. It’s not hard to understand that. In my 30 years I have learned a few things, one of the most important being that no one is looking out for me. It’s my job to handle my business, and life has a way of constantly showing you that it doesn’t give a fuck about the way it’s “supposed” to work. People aren’t “supposed” to try to break into your house when your wife and kids are home without you. Motherfuckers aren’t “supposed” to slide you at the ATM. You’re not “supposed” to have to worry that there may be a day you will have to defend your home from hoardes of zombies. But this is life. It is strange, it is beautiful, it is unpredictable, it is dangerous and weird. I own guns because I understand that. And because I enjoy teeth rattling recoil and earth shaking booms. Fuck you if you have a problem with it.