Bob Rae - saviour of the Liberal party in Canada.  Well, unless somebody attacks them.

“I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.

Thanks!  I missed that. 

“I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.

The lieberals should make Rae their leader.

One day three men came by my shop. They needed three. One of them owed me about 3 Grand for work I had done and I still had the items locked up, under the ‘mechanics lean act’….all approved by my lawyer. Thinking I wasn’t home because no vehicles were in the driveway one of them started to jimmy with the lock on the shop door (the reason I have security cameras). I tucked my Colt in the back of my belt and went outside. Surprised to see me they fanned out, one in the middle and one each on the left and right and all about 30 feet away. I told the one …’3 Grand or nothing leaves here’. Of course he ran off at the mouth because he had others with him. One of them I realized I knew, a brother of the ‘problem’. He was an ex-Canadian military MP that use to be stationed in NB. After he got out he hung around with fools. If things went south, he was going to be #1. As it was though….they all left….smartest move they ever made. Next day….I got the money.

Another occasion we had a long holiday weekend party. Approx a 150 guests….tents everywhere. 4am this one woman wakes me and says that 3 guys at the bar in the drive shed helping themselves. They weren’t invited guests, just heard about the party…three brothers in their late 20’s and early 30’s….locals with a wannabe reputation only good when they are together. I grabbed my Winchester scattergun and went to the shed and laid it on the bar. “Put down the booze and it’s time to go boys”. They left. Their mother and father at least gave them one brain cell.

A hot summer night. I decided to sleep in the camper trailer behind the shop. One of my dogs kept me company. In the middle of the night he jumps up and his ears are working every sound. He’s nervous and pacing. I pick up the Winchester and slowly leave the camper. Everything is quiet but I hear two voices coming from in front of the shop. Some may be wondering what the big deal is about someone coming on your property at night. Well when you own motorcycles and expensive motorcycles and Harleys happen to be the most stolen m/c in N. America, you protect your property. I knew one man who was shot and eventually died when he confronted people trying to steal his motorcycles out of his barn. Others have had garages broken into and even guard dogs taken out. Years before when I lived in another area I did have my garage broken into. Nothing was stolen because they were looking for a Harley. I wasn’t home….I was out on the road.

So I go along the back of the shop in the dark and have a fast look around the corner. Silhouetted in the lights of two cars are two OPP (you can tell by their Texas county mountie hats). I put the shotgun down in the dark behind a loader and walk out and ask them what’s going on. (they should have had their roof lights on….it’s stupid to skulk around people’s property at night time and not tell them who you are) They had come to the wrong house…..they were looking for a house further down the road where a fellow lives and he gets drunk all the time and I heard later that that night he had decided to jump all over his son-in-law and the wife called the cops.

Years ago….maybe 25 or so there was an incident up along Lake Huron. A retired professor lived in his house out in the country with his son who was a teenager. Sometime in the early evening his son runs in the house all beaten up and tells his father two men are after him. The father grabs a rifle. He goes to the front porch and there are two men getting out of a car and heading towards the house. They stopped when they seen the rifle and the father told them to leave. From reports at the time the evidence showed that the two at first did turn around to leave and then one of them for some stupid reason thought that the father wouldn’t have the guts to use the rifle so he turned around and the other one followed him and they took a run at the father. He shot and killed the one…..the other fellow got away but was caught later. The father went to court and ….walked. So ends the story of two fools.

From the OP article there is a quote….” It adds a final step a citizen can take before having to make the terrible decision to cause injury, perhaps death, to another human being.”. Well first off, it’s not a terrible decision and I offer another quote that friends of mine in Texas often use (it’s most effective with a Texas drawl)…… “he needed kill’in”   

Prior:  You can spin quite a yarn !

No yarn. I am sorry some people's lives were so boring. Maybe that answers all the attacks....the computer is all they have ever had.

My wife occasionally reads some of the posts in this Forum.  This morning she read Prior's gun stories.  She related an incident from her families past that I had not heard before.  This happened over 40 years ago:

She comes from a family of eleven.  She is one of the youngest.  Her brother, Wayne, is more than 20 years her senior.  Wayne has four boys that were like brothers to my wife as they all grew up together.

One night, Wayne was in bed when his wife poked him and said she heard voices.  He looked at the clock - almost 3 am.  He looked out his window and saw figures below him in the back yard.  He grabbed his hunting rifle and ammo from his closet and headed outside, while his wife called the police.  There is a door at the side of the house that opens onto the driveway.  The yard is fenced.  The driveway is the only access to the back yard. 

Wayne walked towards the yard and saw three figures in the moonlight.  He shouted - "what are you doing here".  There was no answer.  Instead, the three figures made a run for it - towards him, as it was the only way out.  Wayne felt sure he was about to be attacked.  He fired a low, warning shot.  It struck one of the three and he went down.  Just then, the cops arrived and shone their headlights down the driveway.

Wayne and the two other males were arrested.  The injured person was taken to hospital. 

Wayne spent 7 months in jail - initially charged with attempted murder - but eventually reduced to lesser charges.  The judge took pity on Wayne.  He let him off with time served and probation and a weapons ban.  He said the family had suffered enough.

Wayne's seventeen year old son Scott - one of the three males in the backyard - eventually recovered from a gunshot wound that destroyed his knee.  He walks with a severe limp.  He no longer plays baseball or basketball - his two passions in life. 

A tragic misunderstanding - but self-defense.  At least no one was killed.

“I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.

These things happen…..it’s called ‘life’. The true meaning of ‘gun control’…is hitting your target….but first you have to know what your target is.

Also each situation is unique. In two of my three personal situations (and there were more but they fall under another classification)….I knew what was needed. The situation with the cops….I never would have fired until I knew who was in the dark because too many people I knew also had a habit of just dropping by at any time of day. There was one guy, the Pres of a club ……he use to drive in the driveway…park….walk past and say hello….go in the house and up to one of the bedrooms upstairs….crash for 5 or 6 hours…..come back down…..say goodbye …..and leave. So I wouldn’t have done anything drastic till I knew. I’ll give you an example. One night my front door gets a bang…..lots of them!….like someone is trying to break in the door. I grab the scattergun and wait for it to open. Whoever is coming through…..is going down. I’m yelling asking who it is…..no answer. Then the banging stops and I hear a voice on the other side of the door…..it’s a club member and a good friend. As it turns out when we figured out what happened……he had got a call on his cell and it was a garbled and he couldn’t make out who it was but he did hear ‘I need help’. He thought it was my voice so he drives almost a half hour with a shotgun in his truck….parks down the road and comes up to the house as covert as he can. He thinks I need help and we take care of our own. So I’m standing on one side of the door with a shotgun and he’s standing on the other side of the door with a shotgun. Who was it that called him?…….his brother.

Guns are a tool and like any tool you have to respect them and know when to use them and on what to use them.

I can't wait to watch him harvest wild ducks at the Hullet marsh by swimming under water and pulling them under.

All you know about hunting is getting in a boat….going out to a blind with a thermos of Timmies and picking off ducks with a 12 guage. You probably have battery operated heated gloves and socks.Then you send your dog in to get the duck so you don’t have to get wet. Long before the pampered hunter there were the real hunters. You should try it sometime…..learning the old methods….it might give you a better appreciation for that thing you call a sport.  

Haven't had any of those for a long time.

I had to chase one away from the front of my store a few years ago. They moved accross the street and do their business there now.

Just for Prior: 

Doctors
(A) The number of physicians in the U.S. is 700,000.

(B) Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year are 120,000.

(C) Accidental deaths per physician is 0.171

Statistics courtesy of U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services.

Guns
(A) The number of gun owners in the U.S. is 80,000,000.

(B) The number of accidental gun deaths per year, all age groups, is 1,500.

(C) The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is 0.0000188

Statistics courtesy of FBI

So, statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.
Remember, 'Guns don't kill people, doctors do.'

FACT: NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN,
BUT
Almost everyone has at least one doctor.
This means you are over 9,000 times more likely to be killed by a doctor as by a gun owner!!!

Where's our national doctors registry?

“I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.

by Michael Kimmel, PhD

In the days and months following the tragedy at Columbine, the nation stared at the pictures of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold trying to understand the unfathomable - how these two young boys could arm themselves to the teeth and open fire on their classmates and teachers. We continued to stare at those pictures as the explanations began to pour in from the experts and the pundits alike.

We heard from psychologists who drew elaborate profiles of misfits and loners, of adolescent depression and acting out. Cultural critics on the right threw some blame on Goth music, Marilyn Manson, violent video games, the Internet. More liberal critics told us it was guns. President Clinton chimed in about violence in the media. We even heard about fatherlessness and the disappearance of modesty. The Denver school board banned the wearing of black trench coats and some lawmakers called for the posting of the Ten Commandments in schools.

All the while we continued to miss the point - even though it was staring right back at us: the killers were middle class white boys who lived in gun states.

Skeptical? Try a little thought experiment: Imagine that the killers in Littleton - and in Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon and Jonesboro, Arkansas were all black girls from poor families who lived in New Haven, Connecticut, Newark, New Jersey, or Providence, Rhode Island.

I believe we would have had a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would have been on race, class, and gender. The media would have invented a new term for their behavior, as they did with "wilding" a decade ago after the attack on the Central Park jogger. We'd have heard about the culture of poverty; about how living in the city breeds crime and violence; about some putative natural tendency among blacks towards violence. Someone would even have blamed feminism for causing girls to become violent in vain imitation of boys.

Yet the obvious fact that these school killers were all middle class white boys seems to have escaped everyone's notice.

In these cases, actually, it's unclear that class or race played any part in the shootings, although the killers in Colorado did target some black students. But that's the point: imagine the national reaction if black boys had targeted whites in school shootings. We would have assumed that race alone explained the tragedy (some would, of course, have blamed rap music and violent movies). Or if poor boys had targeted those with the fancy cars we'd have assumed that class-based resentment caused the boys' rage (that Dylan Klebol drove a BMW did not prompt the Denver school board to consider banning those cars, did it?).

That young boys with guns committed all these murders raised not a ripple. We continued to call them "teens," "youth," or "children" rather than what they really were - boys.

Yet gender is the single most obvious and intractable difference when it comes to violence in America. Men and boys are responsible for 95% of all violent crimes in this country. Every day twelve boys and young men commit suicide, seven times the number of girls. Every day eighteen boys and young men die from homicide, ten times the number of girls.

From an early age, boys learn that violence is not only an acceptable form of conflict resolution, but one that is admired. Four times more teenage boys than teenage girls think fighting is appropriate when someone cuts into the front of the line. Half of all teenage boys get into a physical fight each year.

The belief that violence is manly is not a trait carried on any chromosome. It is not soldered into the wiring of the right or left hemisphere. It is not juiced by testosterone (half of all boys don't fight, most don't carry weapons, and very few actually kill). It is, unfortunately, taught to our boys.

It is taught by their fathers, nearly half of whom own a gun. It is taught by a media that glorifies it, by sports heroes who commit felonies and get big contracts, by a culture saturated in images of heroic and redemptive violence. It is taught and reinforced by their peers.

And this horrible education is made more lethal in states where gun control laws are most lax, where gunlobbyists are most powerful because all available evidence suggests that all the increases in the deadliness of school violence is attributable to guns. Boys have resorted to violence for a long time, but sticks and fists and even the occasional switchblade do not create the bloodbaths of the past few years. Nearly 90% of all homicides among boys aged 15 to 19 are firearm related, and 80% of the victims are boys. If the rumble in West Side Story were to take place today, the death toll would not be just Riff and Bernardo, but all the Sharks and all the Jets and probably several dozen bystanders.

Some will throw up their hands and sigh that "boys will be boys." In the face of these tragic killings, such resignation is unacceptable. And it doesn't answer the policy question; it begs the question: if boys have a natural propensity towards violence and aggression, do we organize society to maximize that tendency, or to minimize it?

Perhaps the most sensible reform that could come from these tragedies is stricter gun control laws, at least on assault weapons and handguns. Far more sweeping - and necessary - is a national meditation on how our ideals of manhood became so entangled with violence.

Make no mistake: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were real boys. In a sense, they weren't deviants, but over-conformists to norms of masculinity that prescribe violence as a solution. Like real men, they didn't just get mad, they got even. Until we transform that definition of manhood, this terrible equation of masculinity and violence will add up to an increasing death toll at our nation's schools.

“I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.

It is a silly idea, but you will see "little man syndrome" all the time. These guys are usually under 5'5'', and have something to prove to the world. They have the biggest pickup you can get, the fattest Harley, the fanciest shoes and haircut too. Their boat will be foot longer than yours with and extra 20hp on back, and they will polish their stuff obsesively.

They will take karate and martial arts classes, and tell you that they can whoop anyone. They love to tell you that it is not the size of the dog in the fight, it is the size of the fight in the dog. They will poke and prod at their friends to prove how tough they are, but they know their friend wont flatten them.

They lift a lot of weights in their basement.

They play a lot of role play video games.

They will carry a full sized service handgun in a caliber they can't shoot effectively. This gun will have cost them well in excess of a months pay. It will be engraved, chrome, and have exotic wood grips.

I know this is a stereotype, but I have seen "little man syndrome" many times. It is so pronounced, it should be distinguished as a disorder by psychology! I know many of you have seen these guys in your own lives...

Yes, they are compensating for something..... the fact that they cant see over the counter at the ice cream shop!!!

“I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.