I guess that growing up around guns with a police officer father makes it pretty easy for me. It was just another tool in the home, as dangerous as any knife or power tool if abused(yet pales in comparison with such ‘extremely’ deadly weapons as a car with a drunk behind the wheel). When I was 12 there would be a service revolver on top of the ‘fridge, and I would promptly get on a chair and hide it in a cabinet if I was having friends over. Even to this day if I have something such as a toy light gun for a video game, when not shooting my finger is out of the guard and I instinctively lower it if someone crosses the barrel’s path-even if it is just purple plastic. Not to mention being hyper-aware of a bullet’s possible trajectory pending a miss or it passing through the target.
And when my male friends all turned 21, I didn’t have the same ‘gun crazy’ urge most young adult males get as a right of passage. Even though I went to the range plenty, my firearms never became a subject at a party or other gathering for show-and-tell. I have seen quite a bit of poor firearm handling in my time and nothing gets deeper under my skin. Most of the ones who seemed the most obsessed with their new legal right never made any effort to get any sort of formal training.
Likewise I have ridden motorcycles for years. And again, as most of my male counterparts wanted to go insanely fast and do as many wheelies as possible; I personally prided myself on a ‘perfect ride’. An hour in traffic with the cages that I never stalled, or missed a gear, or not noticed someone changing lanes, nor having to brake hard. Seeing every possible bad situation well in advance, being weary of every potential problem or distracted driver, proved far more satisfying then doing wheelies. Not to mention over 400k miles without being in or on any motor vehicle in an accident. As riding a motorcycle ‘properly’ can heighten skills dramatically with simpler motor vehicles, proper handling of firearms can develop heightened skills in dealing with possible personal confrontation situations, armed or not.
Having nobody ever know you even have a CCWP, let alone getting in a situation you ever need to use it, is definitely the goal someone seeking a permit should have. If you think it’s going to help you avoid trouble or boost your overall confidence in confrontational situations, it’s definitely the wrong choice. Although I would never hesitate to neutralize a person that imposes themselves in a deadly way on another person should the situation arise. I don’t even know if I would loose sleep over it, as I see people that willingly harm others for personal gain as simply ‘defective’ in the first place-as making the decision to rape and kill an elderly woman or kill you for a few dollars in your wallet-this is not something that is done by accident. The irony however, which dictates most gun laws, makes carrying where one is most likely to ever NEED it(including the entirety of the most dangerous cities in the nation)also somewhat undermines the need for a legal permit in the first place.
As with anything, you’re playing the odds. I mostly only carry to facilitate keeping a firearm with me while traveling, as my place of work and most places I go are not gun-legal to start with. That, or late night walks around DC with my girlfriend-where I end up playing a different kind of odds-gambling on the fact that I have never been frisked before once in my life.
