Yosemite stole my heart many years ago – I’ve climbed its mountains and hiked at least a  hundred miles of its trails – and the central coast enchants me, but when it comes to personal liberties – the political and social quality I cherish above all others – I am most at home in Texas and the freedom states of the west (Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Montana).  To live anywhere where those liberties are constrained, would chafe me too severely to be happy.

A fine example: while browsing at for a fishing shirt at Marburger’s, Old Seabrook’s sweet little sporting goods store, I came across a Springfield XD-9 on sale.  I’ve been resisting the urge to replace my too-small carry pistol, a Ruger LC9, with something with a longer barrel and double-stack magazine (the LC9 is only a 7-round single-stack).  My budget didn’t call for splurging for another gun, but the price was right; the Marburger folks greeted me as a homeboy they know well; and I am a strong advocate for supporting local, independent businesses.

A CHL and background check later, I walked out of there with a lovely new pistol. On the case was this tag: “Not Legal In California and W/High Capacity Magazine.”  Thank God for Texas – and in your eye, California!

Light and comfortable on the hip:

How to explain this: even as I am working through a long series of books about American Indians in the 19^th century, the most recent two winnowing down to Custer, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and the iconic battle at the Little Bighorn valley, brother Kevin – unaware of my reading habits – tracks down and buys a rifle which was, in all but the most minor details, the very model used by the Seventh Cavalry on June 25, 1876.  The “Allin conversion” or “Trapdoor” model of the Springfield carbine.

Used widely by the Union army during the civil war, many thousands of the rifle were available after the war ended.  The government decided to use them, but being muzzle-loading rifles, they were already obsolete; many white settlers and Indian tribes had newer repeating rifles, including the Winchester that held 17 rounds.

Gun designer Erskine S. Allin invented a ‘trapdoor’ device which converted the Springfield into a breech-loader; soldiers could now fire up to 20 rounds per minute instead of two.  Kevin’s rifle is from the first conversion, in 1865, and bears the Union mark on the wood stock.  As if proof were needed, the muzzle rod is still with the rifle.

By 1873, Springfield was manufacturing carbines that were native breech-loaders, but all other characteristics are identical to the conversion model that Kevin has.  I recently had a chance to hold the rifle. It’s weight and utilitarian beauty seemed a palpable confluence of past and present; a connection, small and remote though it may be, with a moment in history still vivid in my mind.

When a Muslim commits a terrorist act, killing innocent people, a chorus of voices quickly arises to admonish us that most Muslims (“the vast majority” is the preferred phrase) are peaceful and oppose murder in the name of their religion.  The dereliction of one or a few believers should not cause us to cast blame on all Muslims.

Those same voices speak the same message when, for example, an illegal immigrant murders.  Don’t blame all illegal immigrants, they say; most are peaceful and law-abiding and want only to contribute to society.

I agree without reservation.  This is the only fair and just attitude for reasonable people to take.  An entire group should not be condemned or blamed when one of its members commits a crime, no matter how horrible that crime is.  Evil exists among us, but no group of people should be unfairly libeled or defined by the actions of one of its own who gives in to evil, against the wishes and temperaments of the others.

But this just and enlightened concession is not granted to one large group of people: the National Rifle Association.  Instead, after every mass shooting, the NRA, in toto, is quickly and angrily blamed and condemned, even when the murderer was not a member of the NRA (and none have been), and when the NRA itself condemns the act.

In just the last few months, following the school shootings in Florida and Texas, prominent voices on television news and talk shows, in newspapers, on social media and the Internet, have called us terrorists (that’s their favorite slander), Nazis, child murderers, racists, enemies and other epithets; a few of the most extreme even call for killing us.  We are cursed and reviled at public marches and demonstrations.

It takes only minutes of searching the Internet to find examples of this, so numerous that I was overwhelmed by them.  I selected a small sample for the video that I created to provide evidence of what I claim.

Never mind that the murderers were not one of us; they were teenagers who the NRA argues should not have had guns (Cruz in Florida should have been – could have been – restricted for mental problems; the school, sheriff’s department and the FBI had evidence and cause to stop him from passing a NICS background check, but they did not do so).  Never mind that our hearts break, too, when such tragedies happen.  Never mind that we desire just as much to find ways to stop such evil from happening again, even if our solutions differ from those who hate us.

Six million innocent people (a group almost twice as large as the Muslim population of the U.S.) who band together to advocate for a constitutional civil right for law-abiding citizens, are nonetheless cast as the first and foremost villain.  If the hate and anger were not so vehement, it would almost be funny: me, a rather quiet, middle-aged man with not a single crime to my name, possessing more cats than guns and who picks up June bugs off the driveway so they don’t get crushed, an ardent civil libertarian whose childhood heroes were Dr. Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln….I am a racist, Nazi terrorist!

But it isn’t funny.  Nor is it just or fair or decent.  It is an angry, irrational mob frenzy of hatred directed at millions of innocent Americans who do not deserve it.  It is, quite simply, discrimination.  Perhaps most importantly, it is foolishly counter-productive.  Call us such names often enough, and even the quiet, middle-aged NRA members like myself will finally be so offended by such slander that we will see little reason for cooperation and compromise.

We may be at that point already.

I write the following because my friend and piping buddy, Stuart, got me thinking about my position regarding gun ownership rights.  (In your honor, Stuart, I began writing this while listening to the Old Blind Dogs and sipping a fine 15-year-old Glendronach…all the while surrounded by the six finest cats in all of Seabrook.  And stay tuned…there will be a part 2.)

In reply to my overly sardonic blog post about my latest rifle purchase and the Florida school murders, Stuart wrote:

“I’m more or less on the other side of this argument, but at least I know this unnecessary abomination is in safe hands.”

This may seem like an unremarkable thing to say, but I was struck by Stuart’s kindness and decency.  These are times when to be an unrepentant gun owner and NRA member is to face scorn and undeserved accusations almost daily.  We are regularly condemned as terrorists, Nazis, child-murderers, racists and other slurs, by people at the highest levels of politics, journalism, entertainment, and even public school students.

It is easy to shrug off a few such accusations – I understand the frustration and despair following tragedies such as the recent school murders in Florida and here in Texas.  But they sting.  Hear them often enough – and I and my NRA colleagues do hear them often – and all understanding and sympathy are worn down, to be replaced with resentment and defiance. To someone who despises the evils we are accused of, and who opposes them on deep principle, to be accused of such vile beliefs goes far beyond tolerable derision and unfairness.

So I am grateful for Stuart’s acknowledgement that my guns are “in safe hands;” he knows that I could never commit evil with or without them.  I don’t know how many gun owners and NRA members Stuart knows, but he knows one: me.  I am not an abstraction or a stereotype to Stuart; I am not a gun boogeyman.  He knows me; and knowing me, he knows that I am none of the things that I and other gun advocates are accused of being.  He may condemn the gun, but he does not condemn me for owning it.

So, a hearty ‘sláinte’ to you, Stu.  I only wish those with voices louder than yours were so reasonable.