I have no social media accounts; all purported ones are fake.

Reactions to a recent article: coming to terms with not being armed all the time.

Reactions to a recent article: coming to terms with not being armed all the time.

Most of the interaction we have here happen in the comments, but some folks prefer to send emails expressing their thoughts. Some of them are interesting enough to talk about.

On the recent topic of not carrying all the time (which I should have called “everyone does, but very few will admit to it”), I got quite a few emails thanking me for expressing a non-macho point of view. Glad to do it, though it’s not so much anti-macho as it is pro-intellectually-honest-with-myself (and therefore my students and readers.)

That very topic actually precipitated a somewhat heated exchange between two prominent industry members on Facebook, one of whom took the Marie Antoinette approach (so named because he was of the opinion that you didn’t need to restrict your life in any manner in order to carry wherever you go in the world. Seems that he travels in Europe extensively, and has contacts there who supply him with guns and certain “massaged” paperwork to be able to do so quasi-legally. Yeah, sure, like the rest of us can do that!)

That attitude points to a certain lack of integrity, of which I’ve commented from time to time. Many in this business tend to believe (and thus teach) that everyone can do the same things that we do: carry a full-sized autoloader in an OWB holster all day long and don a “concealment” vest for those times we run into the grocery store. This leads us to ignore certain realities, like the fact that a lot of people carry in pockets and bellybands because that’s the only way they can conceal a gun in their workaday world. Teaching someone to do something that we can and they can’t doesn’t benefit the student in the least, but it does make us feel more important to lord our abilities/advantages over someone who doesn’t enjoy the same position in life. That’s wrong, at least if the goal is to keep our readers and students safe.

Oh, my prediction about being ostracized by the more absolutist crowd in this business? It has apparently come true, as I got an email indicating that some folks on the, shall we say, “warrior” side of the matter have decided I’m not really one of them. (Apparently they aren’t regular readers, as I think I’ve made it abundantly clear over the years that I don’t think of myself as any sort of warrior. I don’t even own a thigh holster or a plate carrier!)

-=[ Grant ]=-

  • Posted by Grant Cunningham
  • On April 8, 2013

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