Growing up a city kid, we did not have guns, mostly because there were not many places to safely shoot them. I shot my first .22 rifle and first shotgun when we moved to Whidbey Island, Washington, when I was in high school. That was as close to rural as we had been in my young life. Even though we did not have real guns in the house, even our cap guns and Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy six shooters were never to be pointed at another person. When we were probably 2 and 7 years old I got a cool pistol that shot a suction cup device and you can imagine the trouble I was in when my little brother ran screaming into the living room with a suction cup stuck firmly to his forehead.
I bought my first weapon at the urging of one of my class mates in primary jet training, a Mormon gent that was sure the Communists had taken over the government with the passage of the 1968 Gun Act. “We need to buy as many as we can before we have to register them. It is going to be Hungary all over again.” It had only been about ten years prior that the Communists disarmed the population there and really bad things happened. An added incentive was the assassination of Martin Luther King in Selma, not that far away. And on the fourth of July we heard the KKK machine gunning the local Rabbi’s house. Mississippi was starting to be a pretty dangerous place. So I bought a pistol, which I still have and still shoot, a High Standard nine shot .22 revolver.
As youngsters we were taught to only kill what we would consume. This was more for protection of the local blue birds and mockingbirds from our slingshots and BB guns than anything, I am sure. In flight training in Texas, I discovered there was not much that one could shoot there with a shot gun that I cared for. While some of you will bray out loud, I will admit we only shot dove, rabbits, and squirrels. My experience with raccoon in survival training, and catching a Ling Cod that turned into a Medusa head of worms only solidified my general dislike for the process. So I have never been a hunter. I did enjoy the few times in the Navy that we got to exercise pistols on the combat range, and certainly thought I understood the concept of self defense. But it was not until moving to the Northwest, a “shall carry” state that I thought about it much at all. Then came 2008. I bought a pile of stuff thinking it was going out of style. And started to study a bit about shooting pistols. But more than that, I discovered only a few miles from my house, after having lived there for almost ten years, that there was a gun range. I had gone to the country a couple of times to practice with my pistols on recalcitrant cardboard boxes. Now I could practice all kinds of things. Plus there were people there to teach me.
I am not sure what made me decide to investigate a little more on the legal side, but I did. And over a period of a year I realized what an irresponsible gun owner I really was. At that point I became a bit compulsive, reading everything I could about the legal aspects of carrying, and the art of self defense with a weapon. And now I could actually put some of what I learned into practice at the range to improve my miserable skills. I have been a sponge since then, absorbing a lot of different aspects of the culture. As I learned things, I would reinforce my learning by passing it on at the club meeting in the form of presentations. It was fun, I learned as much as the people listening, and now I am hooked. I am still on a steep learning curve, but will pass along items in this forum as it seems fit.