I'm your huckleberry

My name is Mike, and I live in Texas. 6'2", 185, Brn/Hzl and 40 in December. I run a small rental company and my wife Deirdre is in the music industry. We've been married for a little more than two years and I feel like the luckiest man in the world.

There are a lot of guns in Texas, and I happen to like guns a lot. I've never shot at anyone, and frankly I'd rather not. But I think it's a good thing to know how to do. Guns are tools, and it's a good idea to know how to use tools.

The hysteria about guns in this country is not a reasoned one. I can only imagine that the people who loathe firearms the most have no familiarity with them, so they mythologize them the way I did before my father taught me how to handle them.

My siblings and I spent almost every summer of our pre-college lives with easy access to a number of firearms, as did our many cousins and visitors, and all of us had been trained to handle guns with ultimate care and responsibility. No one got shot. In fact, I never once saw anyone point a gun at another person, or put a finger in the finger guard until about to fire, or take possession of any gun without checking the breech. I guess knowing the people around you can be trusted goes a long way toward relaxing you in the presence of a gun.

It's not that I'm not on my guard around a gun; to the contrary, I feel it like a heat source in the room, especially if it's loaded. But I am under no illusion that the mere presence of a gun is dangerous, or that it can go off by itself, or that a gun in the room will somehow drive someone crazy, make them pick it up and start waving it around until someone gets killed, like in every after school special and Touched by an Angel episode about guns. They just make you CRAZY! Let's get rid of them all, and then we won't have that problem!

Too late for that, my pipples. The War on Guns will succeed at the same level as the War on Drugs, which is to say not at all. My advice is to take a concealed-carry course, or some kind of professional firearms training, and arm yourself. You'll thank me.

So this first post is about how much I like guns, and how everyone should have one. Yippeee!!