Life Gets Real

I carry a gun whenever I’m not asleep or in the shower. It’s part of the background clutter in my life. I honestly don’t even notice it any more.

I’m fifty-nine years old. I’ve needed that carry gun twice thus far. Both times things obviously turned out OK. However, it is my sincere and passionate hope that I spend the rest of my days never having to touch that thing again for real. However, you really never can tell.

I have a like-minded friend who is a retired Law Enforcement Officer. He, likewise, packs a gun whenever he is outside his home. He admitted that his family used to pick on him about that. And this happened …

Out of the Clear Blue Sky …

Like so many folks down here in the Deep South, this guy is a great neighbor. He cuts an elderly lady’s yard for her. This woman lives a fair distance outside of town. On this day, my friend was at her place totally alone.

He had finished the mowing and suited up with his goggles and muffs to do the weed eating. As was always the case, he had his favorite Glock perched on his hip. He said that he just felt like something was amiss. That weird sixth sense caused him to glance over his shoulder just in time to see a pair of enormous pit bulls charging in tandem out of the tree line.

My buddy had just enough time to drop his weed eater, pivot, and draw his weapon. His first shot landed center mass in the chest of the lead dog as it was in midair leaping for his throat. The big muscular animal fell dead. The second dog immediately turned and ran back into the trees. Despite an aggressive investigation, nobody could ascertain where the two dogs had come from. My friend admitted that, had the two animals gotten him on the ground, he most likely would not have survived.

Part Two …

A couple of years later, this man’s wife stepped outside their rural home to tend to something and discovered a woman she did not know walking out of their storage shed carrying her husband’s horse saddle. She confronted the woman who calmly explained that the man who lived there had given her permission to pick it up. This was news to my friend’s wife, so she stepped inside and summoned her husband. He shoved that same Glock pistol into his belt.

As expected, he had never seen this woman before. As he moved toward her, she leapt into her car, threw it in gear, and promptly ran him over. Things unfolded fairly quickly from there.

Taking It to the Very Next Level …

A typical modern passenger car weighs about 4,000 pounds. My buddy found himself trapped underneath this one. The wheels rolled across his left shoulder, tearing flesh and wrenching bone. However, his right arm remained free.

From underneath the moving vehicle, my buddy retrieved his weapon and did his dead level best to empty the magazine. One round punched up through the floorboard, zipped past the thief’s ear and described a tidy hole through her headrest. In a moment, the car was over him and gone.

The cops tracked the woman down without undue difficulty. Her car was both shot to pieces and filled with stuff she had already stolen from both my buddy and his immediate neighbors. As is so often the case, she was a frequent flyer. She had been to prison before and was well-known to local Law Enforcement.

In the eyes of the law, there is a broad gulf between grand larceny and attempted murder. My buddy was badly hurt and is still not completely whole now many months later. However, this particular thief is done for a while. She will be taking her mail at the state penitentiary for the foreseeable future.

Ruminations

I don’t maintain insurance on my life, home, car, and stuff because I ever hope to use it. Insurance is for those times when things go all pear-shaped, and you might lack the means to make that right. So it is also with a personal firearm.

Thirty of our fifty states currently allow some sort of constitutional carry. So long as you are of age and not a criminal, that means you can pack a gun concealed without asking anybody’s permission. If I lived in one of those other twenty states, to be honest, I would just move.

Carrying a gun is a deeply personal decision that is fraught with responsibility. Second only to raising children, that is likely the most profound choice an American citizen can make. It is, obviously, not for everyone. However, for this particular friend and me, we have made up our minds. I’ll be packing heat for as long as I am physically and mentally capable of doing so. It’s a weird old world, and luck favors the prepared.

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