Sean at An NC Gun Blog emphasizes that practicing firearms safety all the time requires self-discipline, sometimes in awkward and unexpected ways.  Read the whole post for the safety violations he describes.  Sean did us all a service by writing about his experience, and I express my gratitude.  I comment here to further emphasize his lessons to a nation awash with firearms.

Yes, I used the language of mouthy, lying, anti-gun activists.  ”Awash with guns” is most often deployed to provoke irrational fear in the audience.  I use it today simply because it is true.  I am glad it is true.  America is awash with firearms.  Since 2008, many more Americans who before either shunned firearms or who just led a life without them have bought guns and are shooting them, when they can find ammo.

The right to keep and bear arms is embraced, strengthened statistically, and recognized in constitutional law in an historic way.  Even Illinois just passed a handgun carry permit act.  A shrinking number of strident, marginalized spawn-of-Stalin still reflexively blame “the NRA” for murder, and ironically call us crazy.  Yet, this positive cultural shift favoring Second Amendment liberty brings with it increased risk.

We all owe ourselves, each other, and our country a duty to insist on safe firearms handling.  Every week, I read about tragic gun accidents.  In my own area of operations, firearms ownership is ordinary, almost an expectation.  Even with so many guns and gun owners around, firearms accidents are statistically rare.  It is not correct that these negligent discharges are insignificant: people get killed.  Pretty often.  Around here.  I know families agonized by tragic firearms accidents.  And, every time, someone violated at least one of the safety rules and caused that accident.

The violation may be explicit, like those described by Sean.  It may be a “constructive” violation meaning that no one intended the violation, but set up a situation in which the violation was likely.  Keeping a striker-fired 9mm in your drawer, outside of a well-designed trigger-guard covering holster is an example.  No one’s finger is in the trigger guard of the naked pistol, but that could easily, accidentally happen at 2:21 a.m. when you arouse from a deep sleep thinking you heard someone banging on the back door and start grabbing your pistol. Or when a child ambles into your room and curiosity sets him on a course of destruction.  Recently, locally, a toddler killed a woman when the child walked into a room full of adults looking at guns, and picked up a loaded gun lying on display.  Horrible tragedy.  Multiple constructive, unexpected, unanticipated, and unlikely rules violations that nevertheless caused a woman’s death.

When and where I grew up, everybody had a gun.  We had no crime.  No gangs.  Personal self defense was hardly a daily priority.  Hunters prized their Browning shotguns.  Others grew collections at cheap prices that would make you swoon.  Everyone had a gun.  Most had several.  But, firearms safety training in that era and area was grossly deficient.  Somebody’s dad would admonish gravely, once, “Now, never point that at anyone,” and that was the end of firearms safety training.  Even worse, it was often just assumed that because you owned guns you knew how to handle them.

Shooters, we must all not only teach firearms safety: we must inculcate, illustrate, and reinforce firearms safety by example.  It does not suffice to state the rules, and then violate them, as Sean saw happen.  The violations Sean and his brother saw committed teach the wrong lessons to people who are trying to absorb what it means to own their new weapon.

I would like to add a fifth safety rule, already applied across this country in manufacturing: All shooters are free to interrupt recreational shooting and training to point out safety violations, and all have a duty to do so.  Lives will be saved.  The right to keep and bear arms will be honored and strengthened by our insistence that people in our presence handle guns safely.

If your philosophical self-assessment came up “liberal”; if your voting history has been (D); if you see yourself as for civil rights, while those bitter clinger, religious right scary people want to tell everyone else how to live, then open your mind for just a moment and consider this.

Start from this principle: default to freedom.  While social norms and fervent speakers may say otherwise, the law should accept and tolerate the widest range of human behavior that a society can accommodate.

Why?

Because government is force.  Government is compulsion.  Passing a law is meaningless without enforcement provisions.  Sometimes, those are “civil penalties.”  Most often, yet one more “law against” something imposes a criminal penalty.  The law makes it a crime to do the banned behavior.

The criminal justice system threatens to bring the entire weight of the government’s armed enforcers down on the citizen.

Granting the government that power should not be undertaken lightly.

It is for this reason that your political opponents resist “gun control.”  They emphasize criminal laws that punish the behavior the society has decided not to tolerate: armed robbery, rape, murder.  They resist laws that make criminals out of ordinary citizens who do not use their weapons for immoral and illegal purposes.

Universal background checks, registration schemes, and even purchasing paperwork may all trip up ordinary people—your relatives, neighbors, and closet gun-owner friends, and catch them in a criminal system trap.

Perhaps you do not care about that.  If so, then what kind of heartless liberal are you?

Perhaps you believe that the end sought (reduced armed robberies, rapes, and murders) justifies your relatives, neighbors and friends being deemed felons and going to jail.  What kind of civil libertarian are you?

Perhaps you buy into the mantra that “We must do something about gun violence.”  Your political opponents agree with you that this society must not tolerate armed robbers, rapists, and murderers; we say punish them, not your relatives, neighbors and friends.  I say execute first-degree murderers in public, without 20 years of delay created by leftist lawyers trying to destroy the people’s power to exact the ultimate penalty for the ultimate crime.  If you are squeamish about that, then perhaps you are not so committed to doing something about “gun violence” after all.

There is only one reason why politicians clamor for more gun control: power.  A monopoly on power.  A transfer of power from the individual to the governing class.  Examine history.  The USA is unique among the world’s nations, in that its founders rejected all forms of absolute power in favor of government under law, law made by elected citizens, but constrained within the bounds of an agreement among the people called the Constitution.

You would give that up so easily?  Many of you are not so sure about gun control, but you want to support your coalitions and party in other matters, so you travel along the path of gun control, too.  Stop it.

Your party is wrong on the gun control issue.  You would do well to quietly school them on this issue and move them onto other “progressive” causes.  Indeed, you are for the most part expressing your dissent through your lackluster grass roots support for Feinstein, Biden, Obama, and the others trying to use current events to shift power from people to government.

Finally, we Americans increasingly understand that something is deeply wrong within our culture.  It goes beyond “guns.”  You are not going to cure what is wrong with gun control.  You will, however, move your free country yet another step closer to the kind of authoritarianism you—and your country’s founders—rejected.