As I, and the world, try to come to terms with the murder of a bunch of kindergarten students in the USA, I think back to the night that decided me on selling all of my own guns. I’d grown up with guns and I had a 12-gauge shotgun, a few deer rifles, a .22 pistol and semi automatic rifle, a lever action .22, and a Chinese SKS assault rifle I’d bought when I was in the US Marines. I had them all in storage on this particular night – a few days later I went and sold them all at a loss at a local gun shop. That was that.
I realized that it could have just as easily been my guns shooting at me and that if I would have had my guns with me, I would have shot back. Frankly, I like guns for shooting targets and bottles, maybe a deer – not for killing people.
At the industrial beach, my buddy gave me some LSD soaked sugar cubes. I figured it would be good to get away from everything for the weekend and asked my friend if he’d like to come along.
We loaded our gear into my bus and drove out to the boondocks. A small town called Acme, Washington. There was a free campground nearby with a nice little creek running through it. As we pulled in we noticed that there was a large number of what looked like permanent residents. Most of them giving us dirty looks as we drive up in a VW with a big peace sign on it.
We ignored them and set up our camp a good distance from anyone else. We were up on a hill, having a good view of the rest of the camp with a thick-forested hill behind us. We started a fire and consumed our sugar cubes as the sun disappeared. For about an hour or so, things went as they usually do with LSD. I had a conversation with a slug, my buddy was tripping on his parents, and the fire held our interest. The trip was pretty intense and so I brought out some white sage Lori had given me, to mellow things out. Many people believe white sage brings about a change and acts as a cleanser of negative energies.
The sage helped and as we both began to mellow out a gunshot rang out.
I looked at my friend and asked, “What was that?”
“An unnatural pause,” he replied.
Suddenly we heard a woman screaming and a baby crying. It sounded to me as if she were yelling at someone for shooting in the camp and waking her child. She was interrupted by seven or eight more gunshots. She and the child were completely silent. I looked to the right of our camp and saw a head in the bushes, watching us. I motioned to my friend who looked over and saw it to.
“What the hell? Who was that?” he asked. I didn’t know. The person disappeared.
A few moments later the guns began ringing out again. The sound was somehow different than before. I looked over the hill and saw four men, including the one who had been spying on us, firing their guns in our direction. My friend stood up and yelled at them.
“ Hey, we’re up here, there are people up here!” The firing increased in intensity.
“We got to get out of here man,” I said to him. We zigzagged our way through the thick brush. Not far into the hills we found a fallen log surrounded by thick ferns that we lay underneath. We covered ourselves with ferns and waited as gunfire continued and voices called out
“We’re gonna get you!” They yelled and bayed like hound dogs. The rednecks were searching through the woods for us. We had left camp suddenly and had no weapons of any sort. Just a nail he was using as a button to hold up his pants. We decided if one of them came upon us, I would take them down and he would stab the nail into their throat. We would then have a gun. This madness continued for about an hour and then we heard more trucks arrive, bottles begin to break, and drunken fights break out. Finally we heard the trucks all depart and we snuck down to our camp, five hours after leaving it. We quickly packed up and drove back to Bellingham.
I called the police to report the incident and they told me it was out of their jurisdiction referring me to the county sheriff, the county sheriff referred me to the State Parks Service, who in turn referred me to the Forest Service, who in turn told me they would look into it. The same night four campers were shot in a campground about 35 miles north in Canada.
Maybe some people would have decided that they needed to buy guns, but for me, this was a sign that I needed to sell mine.
Do you really want to leave the only weapons in the world in the hands of those corrupt individuals that control the governments of the people,
the evil (and I believe there are evil people BORN that way)ones, and criminals? I am just curious as to your thoughts on this. Not all of us are stealth like and young.
No Mom, I don’t think anyone should have guns. If I were a religious man, I would say that guns are the work of the devil and if you touch them, you are doing the devil’s work no matter how good your intentions. By buying guns, supporting gun ownership, or using guns – you are making it possible for those ‘evil’ people to do their evil deeds. I think all the guns in the world won’t help you against a corrupt government. The only thing to make a difference there is to stand up, without a gun, and make yourself heard. If you use a gun, you are as bad as those you fight against. Doesn’t your favorite book say something about ‘live by the sword, die by the sword’? Didn’t your main man Jesus say to turn the other cheek? How do you think Jesus would feel about you packing heat? Guns are made mostly for killing people. Admit it, you know it’s true. How would your God like you collecting people killing machines? For any reason. Yes, leave the guns with the criminals and evil people and that way we can know who they are and either lock them up or kill them when they resist arrest like the wackos at waco, ruby ridge, and the McVeigh brothers. Hopefully, we can catch them before they commit atrocities, but somehow, I don’t think good people can allow gun ownership to continue and if I were religious, I would say that God hates guns. I’m not religious though, so I will simply say that guns make it too easy to kill people. Far too easy. When was the last bow and arrow massacre you heard about? The last masss baseball bat killing? The last mass knife murders (because the Chinese guy with the knife didn’t manage to kill anyone because it wasn’t a gun). This isn’t the wild west, it’s not George Orwell’s 1984, and it’s not the end of the world or time for a race war like some nut jobs think. It’s time now to make the hard choice to give up the guns. I see your point about age – if they made a law that said when you turn 60 you could have a gun that fired one bullet and then melted, I would support that. Happy 60th. Here’s your gun and your single bullet! Use it wisely.
Do you really want to leave the only weapons in the world in the hands of those corrupt individuals that control the governments of the people,
the evil (and I believe there are evil people BORN that way)ones, and criminals? I am just curious as to your thoughts on this. Not all of us are stealth like and young.
No Mom, I don’t think anyone should have guns. If I were a religious man, I would say that guns are the work of the devil and if you touch them, you are doing the devil’s work no matter how good your intentions. By buying guns, supporting gun ownership, or using guns – you are making it possible for those ‘evil’ people to do their evil deeds. I think all the guns in the world won’t help you against a corrupt government. The only thing to make a difference there is to stand up, without a gun, and make yourself heard. If you use a gun, you are as bad as those you fight against. Doesn’t your favorite book say something about ‘live by the sword, die by the sword’? Didn’t your main man Jesus say to turn the other cheek? How do you think Jesus would feel about you packing heat? Guns are made mostly for killing people. Admit it, you know it’s true. How would your God like you collecting people killing machines? For any reason. Yes, leave the guns with the criminals and evil people and that way we can know who they are and either lock them up or kill them when they resist arrest like the wackos at waco, ruby ridge, and the McVeigh brothers. Hopefully, we can catch them before they commit atrocities, but somehow, I don’t think good people can allow gun ownership to continue and if I were religious, I would say that God hates guns. I’m not religious though, so I will simply say that guns make it too easy to kill people. Far too easy. When was the last bow and arrow massacre you heard about? The last masss baseball bat killing? The last mass knife murders (because the Chinese guy with the knife didn’t manage to kill anyone because it wasn’t a gun). This isn’t the wild west, it’s not George Orwell’s 1984, and it’s not the end of the world or time for a race war like some nut jobs think. It’s time now to make the hard choice to give up the guns. I see your point about age – if they made a law that said when you turn 60 you could have a gun that fired one bullet and then melted, I would support that. Happy 60th. Here’s your gun and your single bullet! Use it wisely.