Thoughts on Carryng a Gun

Beretta Stampede in cal. .357 magnum
for when I need both hands free to do chores

Somehow it just doesn't feel right.  Carrying a weapon everywhere I go on my own property sort of un-nerves me.  And yet it is a necessity in the short term.  The severity of the drought here has seriously disrupted animal movement patterns in our part of the country.  We always have raccoons around the barn and trap twelve or thirteen in an average year.  Occasionally, the terriers will drag in a possum who has made his way up to the barn.  Groundhogs are a regular issue in the gardens.  Whitetail deer move through seasonally after the corn is cut.  But the drought has brought skunks out of the bottoms in search of water.  They are notorious for spreading rabies and then there is that ever present problem of how they protect themselves from the dogs, whose job it is to keep unwanted animals out of the gardens and outbuildings.  All three dogs have been sprayed at least once in the last week.  And so I carry a gun everytime I go out in order to dispatch skunks should they appear, which they often do in times of drought, even during the day.

Stoeger's 12 gague side by side Coach Gun
my barn gun of choice
 

I don't really have a problem with weapons.  I grew up with them, and they are just another tool of country living and field sport, much like a chainsaw or a post driver or a jon boat.  I figure that like baseball bats and kitchen knives, they have legitimate uses.  People who use them illigitimately ought to go to prison.  People who use them legitimately should be left alone.  But carrying them all the time because you must still leaves me a bit uneasy.  If we get rain from the hurricaine this weekend, my skunks will probably move back to the bottoms where they belong, and the shotgun will go back into it's safe.  But there are so many places in the world, some of them right here in my own country, where people never quite feel safe.  Some of them are probably just paranoid, but many of them really do live in places where legitimate authority is unable (or unwilling) to restrain bad guys and inhibit bad behaviour.  Folks there carry weapons not to shoot skunks and other vermin, but because they fear for their own safety and that of their families, often with very real cause.  Carrying has caused me to think about those folks a lot this week.  I think of an elderly person living in public housing in an American city.  I think of members of religious minorities in several countries across South Asia and North Central Africa (or even in a Milwaukee, Wisconsin suburb.)  I think of a Bosnian farmer or an Afghani shepherd.  The list goes on, and is as long as the list of how and where we homo-sapiens have chosen to mistreat each other.

Living in paradise here in Fairfield County as I do, it seems strange to think about things like this- but stranger things do abound in the world.  I find myself offering a prayer this day for those who feel afraid, and especially for those who have good reason to be afraid.  May God bring us all to reason and mutual respect, and hasten the day when our weapons can be used to kill a rabid skunk or fill a freezer with meat- instead of on each other.