GUNS, GUNS, GUNS
I 'm a professional salesman, and as I traveled the highways of America, I didn't look for trouble. I drove 40 to 60 thousand miles a year traveling the 10 western states as an artists' agent selling fine art, long lonely miles daytime or nighttime. I was always aware that there were risks, and I'd had friends who were forced off the road and at gunpoint made to drive a few miles off the beaten track, their ignition wires cut, and then robbed of everything they carried. All the time, the two young men and four women were at the mercy of the gun-toting bandits.

That was a warning to me, so after that I carried a loaded gun with me in my car, and whenever I had to pull over to rest during a long drive I kept that gun under my pillow. It was a .22 S & W, not too much of a gun, but enough that I felt I could either scare off an intruder or do some damage with it if the situation called for it. It was also inexpensive for practice plinking now and then, and not too noisy.

I was (am) neither a tough guy, nor a gung-ho gun nut. I simply realized that under most circumstances if I ran into trouble on the road, that it was going to be up to me and me alone to resolve it. My money, hard-earned money, was with me in those cars and vans in the form of a collection of fine art, and I was not going to trust my livlihood nor my life to the good-will of a crook with a gun. That, to me, would have been stupidity. It was most likely stupidity not to carry my 7.65 Mauser or the Czech pistol acquired during WWII, a bit larger bullet with more stopping power. The S & W was my selection though, and it due to my choice not to act in a stupid manner by allowing myself to become an unwilling victim.

I'd read enough articles about salesmen being robbed, and some killed, to understand what my options were. The police may be hired and trained to protect us, but each and every murder you read about in a newspaper, magazine or book, or see on TV, is simply more stark-naked proof of the general inefficiency of the police, no matter how much they'd like to protect everyone. The truth is, they cannot. They cannot predict where trouble is going to occur, nor be there in even 5% of the cases when it does.

There is no way we can be 100% safe, in fact no way we can even be 10% safe under the law. We're always at risk, but we can put the odds more in our favor if we understand those risks, what the odds are, and do what we can to shift them more in our own favor. In order to do that you must have a weapon of one kind or another, and know how to use it if you find it necessary. All in all, while lacking experience, I still felt confident enough to resist evil or peril if it should come my way because I had a weapon.

A friend, who was a jewelry salesman, had two cases of expensive turquoise jewelry snatched from his hands in Los Angeles, CA. one morning. He grabbed a gun from his boot (he had just returned from Arizona), fired a shot into the air, while shouting, "Stop, thief." The thief dropped both cases and they came open, but by the time Paul had gathered up the jewelry, three police cars were there and he was roughly handled, bruised, and arrested for discharging a weapon within city limits. Well, where were the police when the thief grabbed his jewelry cases? He was sentenced to probation for a year and spent some money for a lawyer, but he also kept his hundred thousand dollars in jewelry intact, and didn't lose the three weeks it had taken him to drive the remote reservations of Arizona to buy it.

The previous summer several indian jewelry salesmen had been robbed and then killed. Paul had made the decision that he was not going to be the next victim, and he was not. You can drive for three hours down some of those roads in Arizona and not see a single Sherif's car or Highway Patrol officer.

Paul's son was followed one day by three guys, watching him visit jewelry stores in one town, and then out onto the highway in Arizona, a long lonely track of road. Finally, deciding to confront things head on, he pulled over. They stopped behind him and the three rought looking guys got out and headed towards him from both sides. Suddenly flinging open his door, he jumped out with a .45 in his hand, then quickly fired one shot in the air and as he brought the gun down they were suddenly heading off into the brush as fast as they could run. He fired two shots into the radiator of the parked car and one into the tire of the car and quickly drove off. Extreme, you bet! You can suggest a hundred different answers to that one, but obviously they didn't turn him in to the Highway Patrol, because he drove all the way back to Phoenix without being stopped.

One evening I apprehended a man who had just taken more than $1,000 worth of my things from my van, and I got them back. If I had not been mentally alert and prepared for it, I would not have recovered my belongings. Did I take a risk? You bet.

Was it worth it? You're damn right it was. At one time the American people were that type, independent and self-sufficient, but today we're shifting over to laws and rules that favor the crooks and hand them all the advantages. Well, you may do so, but not me, buster, believe me that isn't my way.

I don't look at it as taking the law into our own hands. I look at it as assisting the law when they just happen to be absent from the place where the real action is, that it is my duty as a citizen to keep the criminal at bay or to apprehend him so that he won't be stabbing ny neighbor in the middle of the night.

There is a class of people who are thieves, murderers and scam artists by choice; it is their vocation in life. We have to recognize that fact, live with it, and face it. It is our responsibility to thrwart them at every turn. And, it is our duty, if they threaten our lives or those of our family, to take whatever steps are necessary to stop them. If that includes killing them, it is justified. Law and order do not prevail unless each citizen helps to enforce the law.

All the preachers, all the churches, and all the good-will in the world is not going to make evil disappear from the face of the earth.

When the good honest citizens give up their guns, the crooks will be the only ones armed No matter how many times this is repeated, it bears saying again. Crooks simply do not comply with the law, especially a law which requires them to disarm themselves. Their stock in trade is guns. Their means of earning a living is through guns. Your means to resist them is also guns, not simply guns in the hands of the law, but guns in the hands of private citizens. The 2nd Amendment assures you of your right to keep a gun, not only to defend yourself against mauraders, but also to supplement those trained by the state to defend the Union.