Tell a Friend Why You Hunt
These days, we American hunters and gun owners are facing more and more threats against our rights. Even with all the pressure exerted by the Clinton regime via their wide-sweeping gun ban in his early days, and recent moves using school tragedies to further their unconstitutional anti-gun agenda, there are still more forces at work. Recently (late 1998), the same self-serving lawyers who pounded the tobacco industry so relentlessly (and won!) announced that their next target is gun manufacturers. More and more, our future depends on the general populace of this country. And the fact is, the vast majority of our population doesn't hunt or own guns. That means they don't know why you and I hunt and shoot, and when they're being assailed by the news media nearly every day with misinformation, they need to hear the truth from some source. You and I are that source.
Imagine: you are subpoenaed to testify in a hearing. The issue at stake is your use of guns for target shooting, self-protection, and hunting. The jury consists of all the folks you work with every day. What are your chances of convincing these guys and gals that you are in the right? If you can say that you'll win hands-down, I'll be very happily surprised. What I'm trying to say is that you and I need to impress upon our friends and acquaintances not only that we hunt and shoot, but why we do it and why it's good. All the input most people ever get on guns and hunting is overwhelmingly negative, thanks to the biased media in this country. If you and I can get a good word in, make them think a little about it, we'll come out ahead more times than not.
There's a lot of anti-NRA sentiment out there also, and every bit of it is inappropriate. The National Rifle Association (NRA) was formed by U.S. patriots who wished to provide safety and marksmanship training to the general public, with (get this!) the support of the U.S. government. Now they've evolved into a largely controversial outfit, because they take a hard-line stance on constitutional rights. They believe that there are more than enough gun laws and restrictions on the books now, and that more laws will only hamstring the law-abiding citizen. They're right. They also believe that the folks who founded this country meant what they said when they guaranteed the right of the individual to own and use a gun. They're right. The biggest fear our founding fathers had was that our government may get rather too big for its britches, and the populace wouldn't be able to fight back. That's where the Second Amendment came from; it wasn't some kind of National Guard recruitment. Without the NRA or a similar advocate, we'd be disarmed and vulnerable by now, like the German Jews just prior to World War 2 (Adolf Hitler disarmed his countrymen via nationwide gun registration in the early 1930's).
I'll wrap up by saying that I don't dwell on these issues 24 hours a day, but I do speak up when I see our rights being slighted. When someone whines about you shooting a poor little deer, just smile and tell them that without hunters, the deer would overpopulate and starve themselves. If a co-worker voices concern about having guns in the house with his or her kids, tell him or her about growing up in a house with guns, which you could see and touch under the close supervision of a parent. My Dad made sure that the guns weren't a mystery to my sister and me, and he also let it be known that we could see them anytime he was there to show them to us, but if we ever touched them otherwise, we'd be punished. In those better days, punishment meant a belt across our behinds. Fear being the Great Motivator, we never did wrong, in the area of the guns.
Believe it: if we gun owners remain silent, we'll perish, or at the least become outlaws. So, tell a friend what's good about hunting and shooting. Heck, take them out to the target range the next time you go!
-Russ Chastain
