A Practical Necessity

          On Sunday, a friend drove the school ATV with a trailer full of trash to the dump outside the village where we teach in Alaska.  As he pulled up to the stinking, smoldering mound, he noticed bear prints in the mud.  Just a few days earlier villagers killed a bear that wandered into town.  After taking a quick look around to ensure he was alone, he unloaded the trash.  Politicians and the mainstream media look at guns in the theoretical sense; here it is more of a practical necessity.  In this part of Alaska if you go on a school outing, one of the chaperones takes a gun. 

          Even when I am at my home in Washington State, having a gun is not so much a theoretical issue as a practical matter.  From time to time when you live in the forest, you cross paths with things that can hurt or kill you.  Having a gun and knowing how to use it is a life skill.

          The national media routinely ignores it, but even in more settled part of the country, a gun can be very useful.  In July, a masked man entered the home of U.S. Representative Leonard Boswell of Iowa.  The man then attacked his daughter and demanded money.  Boswell rushed to grab the intruder, but the man broke and went for Boswell’s wife, Dody.  Boswell’s 22-year-old grandson retrieved a shotgun and aimed it at the intruder.  The man ran from the house. 

          While Iowa media covered the story, if you live anywhere else I doubt that you heard how a shotgun thwarted the home invasion attack on a United States representative and his family.  Robert Heinlein, one of my favorite authors, once said, “An armed society is a polite society.”  It is also a safer society.