Today if you live near one of the American coasts, you are nodding approvingly at Obama's executive action on gun control. If you own a gun shop in rural America or a small town, you are getting ready for the rush of business as people stock up on ammunition. The winds are changing. It's time to buy now, while we can.
Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, I swooned a little when Michael Douglas said in American President that he would go door to door to convince people to give him their guns if he needed to. I had never held a gun. My college professor father had gotten rid of his rifles when we were adolescents.
Then I moved to California's Gold Country, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. My neighbor on one side also owns a ranch outside of town. He mentioned to me once that he had 150 guns at the ranch. He has brought guns into my house when he didn't want to leave them in his truck. I wondered if I had stumbled into the Unabomber.
Not long after, I was staying with a friend in Florida who grew up on a ranch in Arkansas. He mentioned his gun collection. I asked him how many he had had. 160. He said it like some people collect Victorian tiles, some collect guns. And while these may be inordinately large collections, ask around this region and it's hard to find someone who doesn't have at least three or four guns at home or in their cars.
Note to the West and East Coast: this is the rest of America. If you think California is the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, drive three hours East, to where California becomes a Red State. The men talk ammunition, guns and hunting over the dinner table. My neighbor to the right is a 9/11 Truther. My attorney tells me Donald Trump is the next Harry Truman.
In practical terms, we are rural, a sparsely populated area with understaffed law enforcement. If something does happen, you can call the sheriff's office, but there's no telling when they'll get there, or if you are out on the ranch, how they'll find you. Sometimes when people call the sheriff around here, they say they don't have the time to come. Particularly if you are out alone working 400 acres, where it might be a poacher or it might be a mountain lion, it's not stupid to be prepared to take care of things yourself.
Both of my neighbors are expert marksmen; one is a Vietnam Vet, the other was an Army Ranger. Their marksmanship probably started with hunting at a young age. As they grew up, this region, and others like it across the country, made fertile recruitment ground for the armed services. For some, the armed services were and still are their only ticket out. For others, the military is a secure, honorable way to care for your wife and kids while serving a larger cause, your country. The Bay Area? Two of my brothers were Conscientious Objectors during Vietnam. Hell no, they weren't going anywhere that involved a gun slung over a shoulder, they said from their UC campuses.
When your bumper sticker thanks the veterans, more and more, the people driving up and down the highway in Jackson, California are the ones you are talking to. They are the ones who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq.
When they were in the field their assault weapon was more than a tool of their occupation. If was, if the time came, how they would keep their brothers in their unit alive. The better they knew it, the more adept they were at handling it, the better their chances of making it home in one piece.
So when they come home, we are surprised to find them at gun shows holding up an assault weapon and admiring it? A gun show is to them what Mac World is to us. Their local gun shop is our Apple Store.
We can't laud these veterans with our hands over our hearts one day, and deride their gun culture the next. When we need to put boots of the ground in Syria or elsewhere, we are glad to have them.
The people with full gun safes in the rural areas and small towns are not, for the most part, "militia men" who stage armed takeovers of Federal Buildings. Outside of Texas, they're not carrying machine guns into Target to prove what big men they are. They are also not the people who are going into a school and shooting 14 kids. The only time you are really likely to be threatened with a gun around here is when you are breaking into a house or car, stealing someone's crop or harming the livestock. Even then, you are most likely going to hear a shotgun blast in the air and take off. Their guns are for defense, not blood thirst.
The same holds true for those who keep assault rifles. Whatever it is they imagine could come across the horizon, those rifles are for protection and defense. They are not using them against their neighbors.
By the same token, most Americans don't pretend that we are talking about the government going door to door and collecting 350,000,000 guns from American hands. If you're going to own guns, we just want you to not leave them lying around for your alienated adolescent kid who spends all day in the basement playing blood-splattering video games. Or your three year old. If you hear voices in your head, crack your wife's ribs when you're mad or have pledged your allegiance to ISIS, we'd like you to not be able to stockpile guns.
85% of the country, which includes a whole lot of the guys with NRA stickers on their trucks, agree that closing the loopholes in background checks is a good thing. Even from here, it's common ground, and common sense.
There is a conversation to be had on the issue, not between NRA lobbyists and Senators and Congressmen, but from the ground up. The people who profit from gun sales, and the candidates using fear of "the government taking your guns" to sway votes can wait in the hallway.
If that conversation could take place, we may find that the people in rural areas and small towns ask some good questions; questions that actually deserve answers. Obama's actions are starting a ball rolling. But the real issues of gun control won't be solved without bringing these men and women to the table.