martial arts got me into guns, in a roundabout way. i grew up in NYC, in a crime ridden area, where drugs and guns were a part of everyday life. i knew kids who were killed by guns, so at an early age, i decided guns were bad. my father decided that i should learn to defend myself, so he starting boxing with me. later on, i studied aikido, jujutsu, iaijutsu, escrima, and wing chun. i got pretty good; the couple of rumbles i'd gotten into proved it. i became confident in my skills. of course, i also acquired the classically trained fighter's disdain and contempt for firearms. "the tools of cowards and weaklings," as many of my teachers had said.
then i was robbed at gunpoint.
i was on the subway, and some punk kid stuck a SNS in my face, taking about $50 from me. all my training, all my skill, had yielded nothing. i was still a victim, to a giggling idiot with a gun.
i began to reconsider my anti gun stance.
i later moved to NEPA, a pretty gun friendly area. i live in a nice town, but outside of town, people still think it's the 1950's. being a brownskinned person makes you a target. while picking up my 5 year old nephew, i was confronted by 3 men who didn't like it that a "sp*c" was driving through their town. i got my nephew back in the store, called the police, figuring that'd be it. nope. 2 of them followed my inside; one of them had a baseball bat. all i had a spyderco chinook.
they ended up having a very bad day. the third guy ran in the store, but saw the mess, and took off quick.
after many, many hours of interrogation, and much money spent on lawyers, i was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing. then, the most amazing thing happened. one of the officers involved, a PA state trooper, asked me about where i learned self defense, and what the range of my schooling was. we got to talking about things, and he basically encouraged me to buy a firearm.
"huh?"
he alluded that in my SD situation, things might have been very different had i had a gun. in many places in PA, knife carry is illegal, which i hadn't known at that point. but carrying a gun is perfectly legal, with the proper permit. a DA might look hard at a man who used a knife in a fight, but a man who uses a gun to defend himself might not. a lot of what he told me was mind blowing, to say the least. all my life, i was told that guns were bad, that they should be illegal, etc etc etc, and now, a LEO was actually encouraging me to buy one! he even gave me the names of some shops to go browse.
shortly afterwards, i bought my first handgun, a smith & wesson SW9VE. at first, it was a little awkard, mentally, to hold. but then, so was a blade, or a sword. i started to practice with it as often as possible, to become comfortable with shooting. after awhile, it struck me that learning to shoot is not much different from learning to box or fence or grapple. it's just another tool that is integral to a fighting dicipline. just another martial art, really.
well, that's it. sorry about the ramble.