3
When I was nine or 10, my best friend and I were upstairs in his house playing dutifully with our Legos when we heard a loud noise downstairs. It was an extremely rare circumstance for us to be left home alone because of our age, but his parents were gone that night and the house was empty except for us. Thinking it might be a break-in, we ran down the hall into a back bedroom and climbed out the window onto his porch roof. After sitting there for several minutes debating what to do next, we decided to go back in and call my house, which was in another neighborhood but only several hundred feet away. I reached my dad on the phone who promptly came to the rescue, with a spare key my friend's parents gave him, and a shotgun. It turned out nobody was in the house, and we never identified what the noise was. But I'll never forget how proud I felt of my dad that night when I saw him in the foyer from the top of the stairs.
He didn't helplessly sit on his hands, able to do nothing else but call the police, in effect wasting their resources when there was no reason for them to come out, he took action and he defended his family himself, because he had the ability to do so. The police stayed free that night to attend to more important matters. Maybe even a life was saved.
When we consign ourselves to a collective unwillingness or inability to protect ourselves, we must rely utterly on the police to protect us, taxing them unnecessarily, unwittingly promoting a police-state with bigger departments, greater consumption of resources, and a needless drain on tax revenue that could be deployed to other areas of greater need instead.
Self defense is about so much more than defending ourselves from tyranny. it's about defending ourselves from crime too. Whether assault, burglary, rape, carjacking, kidnapping, murder, or any other violent crime, guns are the great equalizer. A woman packing heat doesn't care how much physically stronger her assailant is compared to herself. By bearing arms, she nullifies that advantage and ensures she's in a position to save her own life or that of her loved ones.
There's always some horrible back-story that frames every discussion we have about guns, and it causes people to subconsciously form a negative association with guns in their minds, especially when they don't know anything else about them due to lack of experience, and it prevents them from even thinking about guns without thinking about some tragedy. That itself, is tragic to me.
So, after all of the smarmy self-aggrandizing political correctness exhibited by Piers Morgan and other celebrities, I've decided to buy a new rifle designed for long range accuracy and reliability, and would like some advice from the community about your experiences with rifles to give me greater insight in making a purchase that's right for me. People with no experience with guns, who weren't lucky enough to grow up with guns to learn the joy of gun ownership, or ever take the time out to familiarize themselves with guns can take a break from the same old repetition as there's no sensational media event driving this discussion.
Here's a photo with a lineup of some of the most popular rifle ammunition on the left. I don't want to get a scary looking gun that frightens Obama lovers, i.e. a black plastic gun with wimpy bullets and a cheap magazine prone to jamming. I'm interested in a much more powerful weapon that also isn't generating any media buzz about getting banned. At this moment I'm considering a $900 Browning .270 but if anyone has any other strong beliefs about other brands/cartridges from personal experience, or that of people you're close to, I'd love to hear about it as it might influence my purchase decision. This firearm will need to last a lifetime, for purposes of outdoor survival, target shooting, and/or self defense. Thanks!
