It's not an unfair rant.... there are a lot of things in my life right now that make me want to start going to down to the gun range on "ladies night" (yeah, you heard it here first... ladies night at the gun range) and start learning how to disassemble/reassemble, load, operate and generally handle one of the beasts, because at some point (as with vehicles) I know there may come a time when I'm going to have access to one, it's going to be needed (for whatever reason) and knowing how to use it could save someone's life.....
My Mum taught me that about cars as soon as I was old enough to drive. "Learn to drive everything on wheels and keep up with it. There is every possibility that over the course of your life, someone will need help of some kind and if you can't drive everything available, they may not be able to get the help they need because no one could drive the only vehicle available at the time." Was she out of date in an era of cell phones? Maybe, maybe not. Does it really apply to weapons? Same answer. Because we live in world where
some religions are built around books with elements in them that advocate for conversion or death.... or death in general because that makes the "warriors" heroes in the eyes of their gods and things like this have existed since the beginning of organized religion. The Spanish Inquisition wasn't just a really funny sketch from Monty Python... it was a mass assault on other innocent humans and other religions of every shape, size, gender and color.
Convert or Die is the history of the world and it's
all written in blood! The blood of the innocent, the blood of the armies of believers who "were only doing their duty" and the blood of the observers "who had to have known about it because this simply couldn't happen in a neighboring town without that town
knowing exactly what was going on here"
Those were brief, simplistic examples from the many assaults courtesy of "Major" religions (The Spanish Inquisition, The Middle Eastern Holy Wars, the oppression of women via "The Eradication of Witchcraft" and let's not forget the vilification of the German public in general after WWII (
as if each one of them, personally, raised a weapon against the Jews and the Homosexuals and the Gipsies). Do you really think that everyone in our country knew about the Internment of the Japanese? Do you really believe that after they had converted the mostly useless acreage of King's Valley in CA to the fertile growing region it became (using methods handed down by generations of families who lived and worked on soil that was equally useless in Japan) that the Govt. of CA would release the Japanese they had interred and then
give them their land back? OF course not! CA farmers had seen what could be done on that land and they wanted it for themselves. So the Japanese, many of them first and second generation, got a "really sorry but:
you could have been spies" and sent back to whatever lives they could make for themselves on land that they held titles to but could no longer access because the paper it was written on was useless to them.
How many lives were ruined when Sen. McCarthy went on his own personal witch hunts looking for "the danger within"? How many people lost their livelihoods because McCarthy & Hoover were paranoid freaks?
How many lives are being lost right now because the POTUS has closed our borders to refugees who are being murdered all over the world for what they believe?.... Maybe he loves the bloody Russians so much because they live under a leader who doesn't believe in anything but power and money either....
But all of a sudden we seem to be living in a world where knowing how to operate any gun I can get my hands on, safely and legally, doesn't seem like such a crazy option anymore. Because we live in a country where our POTUS wants to employ the National Guard on our own Governors for disagreeing with him and (like China, England and France before him) thinks "building a wall" will "keep us safe".... well, Mr POTUS... Hadrian's Wall is rubble now and you can ask France how safe The Maginot Line kept their land and their works of art and I'm thinking that just because you can see it from space, The Great Wall of China didn't do them any good either. But what the hell do I know? I'm just a woman who has made some observations about history that no one in The White House have ever even considered...... You think ISIS is bad? Give our POTUS a couple more years.... Because his first four months are almost a mirror of what happened in Germany during Hitler's first four months as Chancellor and if he takes a political party (or anything else he thinks is "against" him, has been "mean" to him or just doesn't like in general) "out for a ride" in July and they never, ever come back.... Well, all he'll have left to do is grow a little mustache and start ejecting national, world-wide and other publishers of news and events in our time out of "his" country, so he can take over the news, turn it into propaganda and
presto we get a dictator of our very own!
These problems are not just about groups like ISIS and they don't live, survive and thrive in a vacuum. They are being fed by political decisions made by idiots in offices all over the world.... just like our POTUS. Or did you really think that The French Revolution evolved on it's own and came out of nowhere with no signs of warning whatsoever? Which is not to say that I wouldn't find some small sense of comfort in seeing a guillotine being erected on the White House lawn...... just sayin that nothing, in the history of the world, has ever come down to
just one thing and innocents are always going to be involved because they are often the fodder that feeds the machine.
This was not a happy post. This is not a happy world right now and, much as I love them, I don't think even my DBs can save us from what else we will face in the future.....So gun lessons?..... I
never, ever truly thought it would come to this.......
I don't begrudge anyone else their right to believe whatever they want (and defend themselves however they want)..... But I'm pretty sure I
never believed it would ever end up involving me.... which probably makes me part of the problem too....... Wow, so now I suck just as much as the situation does.
CS.... you know that none of this was on you buddy; right? It was just my "rave" that happened to follow your "rant"! Cause every good rant needs a rave to go along with it........
