Texas Monthly recently wrote an article entitled Called To Arms. It's a slick little piece of journalism that paints a picture of Texas gun ownership through a series of vignettes accompanied by short blurbs about how the subjects of the photos and their guns walk through life hand in hand.
It's a neat story, if not a little overly-romantic. But the problem I have isn't with the writing, it's that three of the subjects photographed are exercising poor trigger control.
If you read my article about the four rules of firearm safety and then read the Texas Monthly article, you'll notice that rules 1 and 3 are being broken by two of the three mock Civil War soldiers and by Jerry Patterson, former Texas Land Commissioner.
It breaks down like this: you never handle a gun like it's unloaded. Rather, you treat every gun as if it's loaded, always, without exception. Therefore, every single one of these guns is loaded. Period. Now that we've established that there is no such thing as an unloaded gun, what in the world are these guys doing holding loaded guns with their fingers resting on the trigger (or in the trigger guard)?
This struck a nerve with me for a couple of reasons. First, all of these folks should know better. Patterson, for example, was a lieutenant colonel in the Marines, for crying out loud. But never mind his particular qualifications. I'm of the opinion that anyone who owns a gun had better understand the basics of gun safety and regard them as sacrosanct. Second, if you're going to be featured in a magazine where you sort of stand on your soapbox and wax poetic about the Second Amendment, then, pretty please, with sugar on top, set a good example.
There are millions of people in this country who think we're all too stupid and careless to be allowed to own guns. Is it too much to ask that you not lend credence to their arguments?