My $0.02 on Gun Control - Part 1

This is a multi-part "mental dump" of something that has been weighing on my mind for a while. It is largely my opinion.

Part 1: Personal History

I once jokingly told someone that I was born on a horse and with a gun in my hand; that statement is not entirely false, after all, I grew up with guns and horses but this isn't about horses. My father was a competition rifle range shooter when I was very young and he taught me gun safety and how to properly shoot a gun. I have shot rifles, shotguns, and pistols since I have been old enough to hold one on my own but I had never thought much about gun rights, death statistics involving the use of deadly force with a gun, etc. Then I went to college.

During my first semester at the University of Utah I took Political Science 1010 from an anti-gun Democrat professor. Towards the end of the semester I wrote a paper advocating gun control. I walked away from that class a Democrat and with the belief that the wholesale removal of pistols (not all forms of firearms) from the public market and leaving them only for military and law enforcement was a viable solution for reducing gun-related crimes. I knew there were a lot of big holes in that idea. There's a lot of money in pistol manufacturing and dealing and the lack of a legal market would inevitably lead to an illegal market. Sure, pistols might be harder to come by and be more expensive, but they'd still be available to people who wanted them badly enough. At the time, I hadn't given much thought to the potential rancor that current pistol owners might have. Those were the biggest chinks in the armor of my belief.

My father, my wife, my father-in-law and certainly others thought I was off my rocker. I'm from a Republican state, a Republican family, and I married into a Republican family. Gun rights were (and still are) a big deal for them. Nevertheless, I held my ground. That is, until my father-in-law bought me a Cold War era Polizei-issue Walther P38 as a Christmas gift. I had a hard time convincing myself that it wasn't cool to own a gun. It Was Cool. It felt good in my hand. I enjoyed shooting it. Emotion started to wear away my belief in gun control. That belief wasn't entirely gone, mind you, but it was eroded.

I like to think of myself as being fairly responsible. My dad instilled in me a healthy respect for the damage a gun can do. I figured that, now that I have a gun of my own, I should have something to show to Big Brother that I can be trusted with it. So I got a Utah Conceal and Carry permit. By the time my CCW permit arrived in the mail my belief in gun control had entirely eroded and I was left instead with the belief that I had the right to protect myself and my family from anyone who would do us harm criminally. I started to see why gun advocates claim that "An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life" --Beyond This Horizon (1942). It was about this time that I made my first handgun purchase. I bought a small Sig Sauer 9mm to carry on my person wherever the law would allow me to. And I did. Fortunately, I haven't had to use it in self-defense.