Incidentally (now that I’ve read all the comment here), my own training to handle firearms started when I was four. By high school, I was shooting small things out of the air with the .45 1911 I’ve packed all my life (I’m seventy-one), and giving shooting exhibitions. I now teach shooting, both combat pistol and long range rifle. During the twenty three years during which the U.S. Government (IRS – the story is on my webpage www.judoknighterrant.com) tried relentlessly to destroy me (broke up my businesses, marriages – two, when I recovered from their first assault and remarried, the did it all over again), I travelled the U.S. living mostly off the countryside (hunting, fishing, and harvesting wild plants). In city after city (three times in Chicago), I was able to defend myself and my meager possessions and money time and time again with my handgun (yup, I always had it: cops are generally not very bright and not very sell trained – which should tell you something about the wisdom of arming them with machineguns; or anything lethal, for that matter). Hounded relentlessly by the nation’s constabulary in all its forms (the IRS hoped by means of falsified public records to incite an incident like the Diallo or Belle shootings), I lived finaly in Colorado, then Texas, in order to be able to carry a pistol legally – and on a record the cops stopping me would have. As soon as I had obtained my concealed weapon license (yes, I had to fight – demand a hearing – to get it), ALL harassment on the nation’s streets and highways stopped. I have lived for six years now without a single traffic stop or other harassment by police (that’s anywhere), that after having been stopped more than one hundred nine (I started keeping a record only after a dozen or so stops in a short time alerted me to what was going on) times in less than fifteen years. As to the matter of “vigilantes” and vigilantism, everywhere I happen to go is safer because I (and my skill with a handgun) am there. I have numerous times in my life and travels prevented violent crime from happening, three times in the last few years. The Second Amendment is more, much, much more important to the freedom of the nation’s citizenry. What first seems to be needed at the moment where the issue of private bearing of arms is concerned is a public smarter than the woman on “Are You Smarter Than Your Fifth Grader” who though Europe was a country and the people of Budapest speak French. Stupidity with a gun in its hand has come to be more a symbol of the U.S. than the famed Minuteman. Have you ever compared what it takes to fly an airplane legally with what it takes to get a gun carry license? How about what it takes and is required to fly an airline compared with what it takes to be a cop? Look up an Internet site on logic, then compare it with the reasoning here concerning guns, cops, and the rest. The reason there is so much violence in the U.S. is the public’s abysmal stupidity, not guns.
