The Price Paid in Blood and Human Lives
I write this slightly off topic tale having just gotten home from my 11 hours in my concealed handgun license test. As excited as I am that I managed to actually score well on the range test using a semiautomatic despite one mixup (I hate external safeties even more now...), there is a bigger story to tell here.
My instructor was a 59 year old grandmother of four whom I shall respectfully refer to as "Vivi". This is not her real name, for I did not ask permission to tell her story, nor is she the type to want your pity.
Vivi is someone I strangely identified with. She's over double my age, female, and a South Texas girl. Her passions in life are her grandchildren and making beautiful letter art. You should see the certificate she gave me and the other members of the class who successfully passed the tests. It is jaw droppingly beautiful and I am having it framed.
We do have two things in common. For one we both feel very strongly about human rights, and we are talk about the right to responsible self defense a lot. For another, her passion in life is not guns even though she is a licensed concealed handgun permit instructor. My main passion in life isn't guns either.
Around a time when I was 15 or 16 years old, Vivi and her husband were sued by a new neighbor. Their new neighbor had just bought all of the land surrounding them and had moved onto it.
Soon, their neighbor filed a lawsuit against the firing range because she claimed it was dangerous and noisy and had no business operating. And the gun control extremists and whackjobs came out of the woodwork.
What these geniuses came up with is that any outdoor firing range should reside on 1000 acres of private land, and should meet every specification of the NRA handbook.
First of all, a family owned firing range barely makes money most of the time. Second of all, the specifications they were demanding be met were written for other types of facilities very unlike the one that Vivi and her husband have built literally with their own hands.
This was an attempt by gun control advocates to close down every firing range in the State of Texas. The head of Texas Against Gun Violence (better known as Texans Who Oppose Civil Rights) spoke out against the range.
Vivi, whose passion in life is letter art, fought this lawsuit with every fiber of her being.
It would have been so much easier to close the range, let the gun control lobby win, and sell the land and start over again somewhere else. But Vivi knew that wasn't right.
Vivi thought that future gun owners should have a place to safely learn how to use thier tools when they grew up. Vivi realized that the gun control lobby was using this as means to erode public knowledge of firearms and more importantly firearm safety.
Vivi and her husband fought this. And they won. The NRA revised its range manual, the regulations never passed, and the law was even revised to keep it from happening again.
But the price was steep. The liberal gun hating justices rules that since there was no noise ordnance in that county, then the range owners should have to pay the plaintiff $250,000 in legal damages.
Vivi lost her home. Vivi lost everything that she and her husband had worked so hard for all in the name of protecting my rights.
Thank God for people like Vivi and her husband. They are just glad they had this chance to win a victory for human rights.
She could not tell the story however without a tear in her eye. You never would hear a story like hers on any news station. No reporters showed up to broadcast their tale over the airwaves. But those same reporters can take the time to spread lies about guns and their owners.
Raped women, people murdered in their own homes, and grandmothers who have lost everything they ever had. This is gun control at its best.
