Ross Um

Okay, time to explain guns to our new friends. Every day, when I leave the house, I attach a holstered handgun to my belt, under my shirt or coat. I would no more leave the house without a gun than I would walk around outdoors without shoes. Is it because I "need" a gun? No. I live in rural Tennessee, which is state in the American south. It's very safe here. The dangerous parts of America are big cities where the local government is leftist, and they shelter illegal migrant from the third world, and won't send violent criminals to prison. Places like Chicago and New York City. Yet, any time I leave the house, I put on a gun, knowing that I will probably never have to use it, and if I do, it will probably be on an aggressive stray dog, not a human. So why do I do it? Why do many other people who live around me do it? Why do we do this so much that carrying a gun is considered totally normal? If someone spotted it, it would not even arouse a comment, much less any fear. In fact, it is legal to carry a gun openly here, without covering it up. Covering it up is just considered polite. So.... why? Well, try thinking of an English nobleman, during the reign of Elizabeth the First. When he dressed to go ride to court, he would hang a slender fencing sword, called a rapier or smallsword, from his belt. He didn't expect to be attacked. He didn't even expect to fight a duel. And if he was challenged to a duel, he wouldn't need his sword right then. He would meet his challenger later at an agreed-upon place and time. No, he wore his sword because it was an expression of who he was. He was a gentleman, a person of status, with the legal privilege of carrying a sword. By carrying a sword, he asserted his rights and prerogatives as a nobleman. In Japan, you had the same sort of thing happening. The samurai, members of the bushi class, wore the two swords not because they expected to be attacked at any moment, but because the two swords were an essential part of who he was. So, in these two cases, weapons were carried by noblemen as an assertion of status. They had the right to do so, and they did so in order to assert, exercise, and retain the right. Americans carry guns because every American citizen is a nobleman. When we fought the British for our independence, that war began on April 19th, 1775, when British troops, fearing American rebelliousness, marched out from Boston to confiscate guns from people living in the surrounding countryside. Our ancestors did not submit to this. We shot them instead, and they fled back to Boston with their tails between their legs, to cower under the cover of the guns from the warship HMS Sommerset. Thus began several years of war. And when we won that war, we made a country where no government, and no man, would ever be allowed to disarm the people. No agent of the government may say to us, "I may have a gun, and you may not." Because to say that is to say "I am a nobleman, and you are a peasant. I am a master, and you are a slave." We are not peasants here. We are all noblemen. That is the most basic principle of what it means to be an American. I can be impoverished, so I can to be so poor that I live in a van down by the river. But however reduced my circumstances, as an American, I still have the rights and freedoms of a nobleman, of a daimyo, because that is the basic founding idea of the nation we forged on that day. If you come to America to visit, if you walk among us, you will pass many people carrying guns. You will not notice this. You will not see them. You will witness no violence. Everything will be normal. But the guns will be there. Because that is who we are. We don't carry guns to be violent. We don't wish to be rude, or to intimidate people. We keep our guns covered up. But they are the deepest, most essential part of what it means to be American.