Would one's fiancee who is male count here?
He's fired rifles, but he hasn't fired a handgun before. Go figure that he was told by his family that handguns were nearly impossible to own in this country. Ignorance and aloofness where commonplace with his family until I started talking to him online.
He was quite suprised to find out that I had a permit to carry a handgun issued here in Oregon. He was living in New York State at this point, about 10 miles from Brewster, in Putnam County. The difficulty in getting a pistol license in New York state (though unrestricted licenses are issued quite frequently in Putnam and Dutchess counties) probably gave his family, and therefor him, the impression that getting a handgun requires an extreme threat or need.
Being with me has been quite an education for him, considering the utterly huge amount of research on have done on the firearms laws of each state. He will not go back to New York. His family are a bunch of controlling twits who ran his life nearly into the ground, and of course, they're anti-gun (big suprise, their "little boy" having a gun license would put a real damper on their plans to use him for social security money, eh?).
To explain further, his family raised him and only him (his two brothers came out reasonably normal, I guess) to be the "lame" of the family. Someone to do housework and such, taking care of the family's young ones, and so on, and did nothing for his emotional and mental problems except give him pills and tell him to shut up and endorse checks without question. He was living in a rural area of New York when I met him. He is recovering from social anxiety disorder (which I believe was primarily caused by the abusive and neglectful environment that he was living with for all his life caused it).
When I attempted to have him leave his home (with his consent), they went so far as to claim he was mentally incompetent. This was false and found out to be lies later, but they got him back to his house before I realized what occured.
Things got so bad with his family with the legal threats and the attempts at extortion (Either you email us or you will never see him again), and the unlawful detainment, that I had to get the New York State Police involved to tell them "You can't do this crap anymore".
Needless to say, things would have been different if he were outside of New York state and around a slightly more populated area. His family has made threats because I am already in the process of gathering evidence to them investigated for the crimes that they committed against Chris and me (Chris is now at his grandmother's home, away from them while I get things arranged here), including faking his signatures on some of the big checks he's recieved from the government (forging a signature on a US Treasury check is a federal felony as well as a felony for check fraud in the state of New York), Unlawful Detainment, Kidnapping, Extortion, Assault, Filing a false statement under oath in a missing persons case. There's probably a few that I'm missing.
Just imagine your worst nightmare of Orwellian purportions, being told what to do all the time, being punished because you didn't do something against your will, being told you will never be able to leave without someone elses ok.
That was Chris' life, that of a prisoner. It took me nearly a year of talking with him before he could accept that he could truly be independent, and he's 2 years older than I am, and I'm 21! The kind of thing he went through could usually only be duplicated inside of a "cult" setting. He was in the cult of "family". Nothing particularly religious, just a member of his family who is not related by blood thinks she can get away with things with impugnity. Not anymore.
No curse word can even amount to the absolute and utter hatred I feel for that woman.