After Parkland and the March for Our Lives, I wrote a post about my impressions of the organizers of the March, and their heartfelt speeches and remarks about how they viewed the tragic event that had such an impact on them.  While I disagreed with their stated solutions, their story that day was poignant, moving, and sincere.  It no longer appears quite so innocent and sincere.

Unfortunately, many political groups on the Left of the political spectrum have high-jacked the students’ sentiments and growing grass-roots following.  Calls for more extreme gun control measures quickly followed, culminating in former Supreme Court Justice Stevens’ calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment.  Justice Stevens, as you may recall, was on the losing side of the historic Heller decision that confirmed the long-standing American principle that firearm ownership and the concept of self-defense was individual in nature, and not just collective.

The high-jacking of the students’ calls for measured reform and the resulting transformation of their fledgling movement into an all-out assault on the Second Amendment has mobilized many individuals to action in defense of the Second Amendment.  Many of those now mobilized were previously inclined to rationally consider the students’  initial proposals.  That middle ground is now rapidly dissolving. The Second Amendment is not just an NRA talking point.  It is a real and necessary part of the Bill of Rights, and a right that is held in deep respect by many Americans.

I am one of those Americans.

Some of my fondest memories involve the enjoyment of firearms with my father, grandfather, and, yes, my mother and grandmother.  Grandma was a dead-shot with her .300 lever action Savage, and my mother’s Winchester 30-30 is my all-around favorite firearm and go-to deer rifle to this day. My father’s .32 revolver, with its birds-eye walnut grips, sleeps next to my bed almost every night.  My grandfather harvested his final deer before he died with his semi-auto 30-06 Remington, a rifle that I inherited on his passing now greatly cherish.  He had an amputated left leg at the time, but still managed to balance his prosthetic leg, and spot and take that nice buck from over 200 yards.  Summer camping and hunting trips, and forays into the hills for recreational shooting, were what I looked forward to all school year.

But firearms have never been just about nostalgia and hunting in my family.  On all sides of my family history, we hail from the hinterlands of Tennessee and Kentucky, with a little of far western Virginia thrown in for good measure.  Of course, at the time my ancestors arrived there was no “America”, and those regions did not have the present-day borders.  We came to that hard-scrabble area of what is now known as Appalachia straight from Lancashire, England on the Irish Sea, as well as Northern Ireland and Scotland.  Welsh has made an appearance in the family tree as well.  Those areas of the British Isles, at the time of our voyages to America, were racked with religious and political violence.  Defense of oneself, and of one’s fellow villagers and neighbors, was paramount.  The danger came not only from other individuals, but from government forces enlisted to enforce unjust government policies, as well.  People fought and died for the principles of religious and political liberty.  When the American Revolution began, people again did their share in that regard.  The price paid was dear.

After the Civil War, much of my family migrated overland by wagon train to far Northern California and Southwest Oregon.  The Flournoys, O’Connells, Clarks, Worthingtons, and many others, settled that part of the country with guts, hard work, and, yes, firearms.  As recently as 1991, at the annual Memorial Day picnic in Fort Bidwell in Modoc County, many ranchers and cowboys arrived on horseback with a rifle and handgun on their person or on their saddle.  No one looked askance or blinked an eye.  The reality and the reason behind the carrying of firearms at all times while outdoors was intuitively obvious and unquestioned.  It still remains a vast and harsh land, just as it was in 1925 when my father was born.

I remember mining with my father on Little Rattlesnake Mountain. Yes, places in America still allowed that type of thing and places in America still had those types of names.  Little Rattlesnake Mountain is in far Northern California, and near a major city, Crescent City.  Crescent City is steeped in law enforcement, as it is the location of the infamous Pelican Bay State Prison, a super-max facility.

From the main road (gravel) to the top of the mountain it’s a mere 2.5 miles or so. However, due to the terrain, it often took 3 hours to reach the “airstrip” where most of our mining took place.  As was told to me, I believe the airstrip was a stretch of the mountain shaved off by the Army Corps of Engineers after WWII to provide an emergency landing area, but never used because they were never able to grade a true access road, thus the 3 hour trip to the top.  To make it up the mountain, we cut and removed fallen logs, navigated mudslide areas barely as wide as the truck, and used the “come along” to hand winch the truck over obstacles we couldn’t move.  However, we liked the airstrip because it made digging holes easy, and made the tent set-up much quicker as well.  The view from the top was spectacular.

While on the mountain, we often encountered other individuals who were not “miners”, as I would define them.  They appeared more likely to be persons who had escaped the life down below for reasons of their own, and likely for reasons Pop and I didn’t want to know.  Pop and I were always armed, he with his .32 H&R, and me with my Ruger Single-Six in .22 rimfire.   There were no cell phones in those days, and the CB radios (remember them?) couldn’t reach anyone.  Law enforcement assistance was a pipe dream if things went south.  At best, the nearest Sheriff deputy would take 4 hours or more to get to us, even if they could be notified.  I can tell you that there were many times we were glad we had our firearms with us and knew how to use them.  The confidence and security of being able to defend yourself, if required, provides a sense of your own measure, and a sense of self that is uniquely American.  Out West, this self reliance and personal capability is not derided as it is in the more urban areas of the country.  In fact, it is rewarded and looked upon with respect by others.  It is expected.

This dynamic is not isolated or unusual in much of  America.  Even in the more settled areas of Northern California, and many rural areas in other parts of the country, including Illinois where I now live, you are on your own in case of a true emergency or threat and are expected to be able to protect yourself and your family.  The only law enforcement  tools needed by the time officers arrive are a camera and a notepad.  Despite their training and good intentions, any true law enforcement assistance will be far too late to do you or anyone else any good in much of the country.  Indeed, even in urban areas, where a 4 minute response time is considered professionally acceptable by most agencies, the action is long since over by the time they arrive. The threat appears in seconds in most instances, and the objects that produce death or injury are usually travelling at 1200 feet per second.  Your response to that threat must have a similar timeline to have any chance of being successful.

If one doubts that logic, the next time you have a kitchen fire from cooking too much bacon on a hot stove, instead of reaching for the handy fire extinguisher, step outside with your cell phone and call the fire department.  Let’s see how much of your kitchen or home is left by the time they arrive, even 4 minutes later.  When they do finally arrive, make the firemen wait outside the driveway for another six minutes before applying water or entering the building.  Doesn’t sound like common sense, does it?  Why do we continue to insist that timeline is appropriate when there is an active shooter situation and fight all efforts to immediately introduce the means of force that will  have the best chance of stopping such a tragedy? Why do we ignore the reality of the facts on the ground that to stop a shooter force is required?  Utter nonsense.

Many of the Parkland kids, and now others on the Left, have called the Parkland tragedy “preventable”.  In that they are correct.  It was preventable by the armed security officer, who could have introduced force at the onset, as per Sheriff department policy.  It was preventable by the school district and the local Sheriff’s office, if they had not signed an intergovernmental agreement with the local courts to defer students like the shooter away from criminal punishment in order to protect the students’  post-secondary collegiate opportunities.  It was preventable by the State and County agencies, including child services and the Sheriff’s office, who had multiple calls to the shooter’s home for instances of self-harm and armed death threats to students and other family members.  Lastly, of course, it was preventable by the shooter, who made an intentional decision to cause deadly harm.

None of the solutions proposed by the Parkland students, or their now legion of supporters on the Left, would have had any impact on preventing the tragedy.  Individual responsibility and the acknowledgement of the nasty truth of humanity that evil intentional acts can never be prevented by legislation, are tough truths to swallow.  Sometimes, as tragic as it sounds, bad stuff happens to good people and there isn’t a way to prevent that from happening.  But in a failed effort to ignore that truth, and to disarm the law abiding in order to stop the actions of the unlawful, you are running a fool’s errand.

Let’s not take a hatchet to the Second Amendment just yet.