Oh, and to be clear, I by rights should be a MetroCon. It's how I was brought up. I am a child of the suburbs, and my gaze was focused on downtown, not the outer farm belts.
My Boy Scout youth was pretty much devoid of firearms. Even though we met weekly at an Isaak Walton League chapter. There was never any mingling of organizations while I was there. Pity. The Isaak Walton types could have done some serious recruiting that way.
I had the standard boyhood fascination with all thing military, but that didn't translate to actually USING guns. And many suburbanites simply grow out of that and leave it behind.
Guns were something rednecks had. They used it for hunting and to scare people off their land. Also, police and Army soldiers had guns. But I didn't want to be either of those. Guys in the suburbs didn't have guns. Unless they wanted to be cops, maybe.
Heck, I didn't get my first deer until I was 40!
None of my closest relatives were pro-gun. They were decidedly neutral. Cousins and Aunts, in some cases, were actively ANTI-Gun. Wouldn't even let their kids play with toy guns. And this was in the 1970s.
My fascination was toward aviation. Since 5th grade I wanted to be a fighter pilot. That expanded to wanting to design fighter planes. That desire led to trying to be an engineer and a Naval Aviator. I came by my aviation enthusiasm honestly. BEFORE Top Gun came out. But none of that interest is to conducive to shooting.
I guess my back-up college degree, the study of History, after failing out of Calculus and Aerospace Engineering, was a bit of a firearm seed. Particularly since I concentrated in military history to complement my officer training.
How the hell did I become a gun enthusiast? Jimmy Carter's (History's Greatest Monster!) obvious failure made me a conservative, but I should be a MetroCon and care little or nothing about firearms. Maybe that tenuous link to my military service contributed. Certainly the History study.
I guess I am just lucky. Run into a few gun enthusiast friends and there is no telling what can happen. Like MBtGE.
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As an aside, that pretty much really is why I became a conservative. Carter's failures and Reagan's successes was the start. My family didn't go to church much, so social conservative currents don't carry my course too much. No offense to the Super-Religious, but a subset of your cohort can be off-putting to me by coming on too strong. I know you generally mean well, though.
Hell, given my family environment, you'd have expected em to have come out anti-gun and smellign faintly of patchouli oil (I love my parents, BTW - but they were reformed hippies, and my father was in the foreign service and later the state dept - grew up overseas and in the DC area).
ReplyDeleteExcept - my father served in the USNR, and is a life member of the NRA. He did (and still does) get American Rifleman, and I would monthly read the page of firearms self-defense incidents. Got sent to a summer camp where we learned to shoot .22lr rifles (and I would trade off my archery session with other kids to be able to shoot more). So, you never know
Yes! There is hope for me!
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