No Exposure
Like many folks my age, I did a four-year stint in the military.
They handed me a rifle and pointed me at a target, and had me make holes in a silhouette once a year.
When I was done there, I moved on, figuring that the whole holes-in-the-silhouette thing was someone else's job now.
I had, in fact, grown up in a northern California community where hunting was culturally ingrained and guns were common, but my own family didn't have them. Subtle reasons I was not to figure out until later.
So, here I was, early twenties, out of the .mil, and looking to do something with my life. My education and experience inclined me away from those areas in life where conflict and a constant urgent need for self defense were common. I went off to Europe and spent several years doing the urban version of the "Peace Corps" concept.
Now I'm thirty-something, young family to raise, new geek career, and my associations still kept me away from areas where trouble simmered "just beneath the surface."
It wasn't until I was over fifty that some things changed and I found myself rudely awakened to the idea that "I am SO not prepared for that!"
Then I did what geeks do: I researched. A lot. And the conclusion was manifold. I had spent years in denial, avoiding trouble, as though trouble will leave you alone if you stay where you "belong." I had managed to convince myself that my safety was someone else's job. Yes, really. And I had convinced myself that that guns were kinda dangerous, and the people who had them were a little nutty.
It's not nice, waking up late in life, and realizing that you've allowed a thread of cowardice to compromise your family's safety.
The greatest moral shortcoming of people as a group, at large, is their inability to confront evil. An unwillingness to admit that evil exists. A denial that evil can impact their own lives.
Now, being a bit of a geek, I did what you do, researched and analyzed, shopped and questioned, and finally got a gadget of my own.
Now, some four or five years later, I have some confidence, some competence, and a few more gadgets.
But.
I was over fifty when I figured it out. I had bought into a set of broad cultural memes that had kept me ignorant and frightened for three decades.
Subtle stuff. No close association with firearms growing up. Media characterization -- uniformly disparaging -- of firearms as dangerous. And a tendency of gun owners I knew to be somewhat gruff and terse when questioned about "why."
And if you think about it, "gruff and terse" is hardly surprising. Imagine that you're just a regular guy, and you've taken the obvious step of arming yourself, and some clown who likes to debate all kinds of pointless things inquires "why" you have them?
Things changed slowly, for me, but one of the pivotal events was when the wife of my friend the dentist was murdered. They found her in her van outside their practice. He armed up. He got another pistol for the office and trained all his staff.
And I quit asking "why."
No amount of "logic" and sophomoric argument can compete with real life.
That was the beginning for me.
There are many, many people for whom that "beginning" event just never happens, and the balloon of smugness at their proficiency in debating pointless stuff is never popped.
It doesn't help that there is a discernible effort to move our society away from reality and toward a soft, smug, sophomoric existence, debating the number of angels on a carbon atom, and the best way to blame Man for that.
It's not a tremendous intellectual feat, really, to understand the basics of survival, and to grasp the threats to survival on a personal level. Heck, even I can do it!
It's not hard at all.
Provided you ever start the thought.