New Group

I've decided to start a new group. This is nothing new for me, I've started a few groups before, mostly just to be funny, like Tim and Eric Awesome Show: Great Job: Sucks Ass and We Think Lazy People Who Use Mart Carts Suck. In the past it's always been a rather trivial thing. Something would happen one day and knowing that there are already millions of facebook groups out there for practically everything, I would search for it, and if I couldn't find it I would make it happen. In most cases a small cadre of my friends and maybe second and third-order friends would join and I would probably never actually update it ever.

There are even times that I would stumble across posts made months ago that I was completely unaware of. On my own group. That shows you how disinterested in most of that kind of thing I've been. Always a spur-of-the-moment gag and then I'm onto the next one.

Over the moths and years I've been vaguely compelled to create something a bit more meaningful. One issue that I've always felt very strongly about, an issue that's withstood the various ebbs and flows of my own political self-adjustments, is that of personal ownership of firearms. Yes guns.

Cute, but I'd like to know she's taken a gun safety class.

Let me get one thing out in the open: I am not an extremist. I'm not a kook or a reclusive weirdo or an aspiring terrorist or a lock-step follower of everything else that a significant percentage of people might think when they notice that I'm a gun enthusiast.

That being said, I feel ill-represented. Not necessarily by my elected officials (here and there maybe) but by the groups and organizations that mostly currently exist to encompass gun owners. Notably, the NRA, but there are other groups. Nearly all of which are political action committees first and representatives of gun owners a sometimes distant second.

I fell prey to a system in which, like many divisive issues, my interest was used to keep me neatly segregated into a distinct, purportedly homogenous political group by convincing me that the only other option was a distinct homogenous political group that believed the exact opposite of everything I did.

• They hate your race, and they hate your guns.
• They hate your diet, and they hate your guns.
• They hate your marriage, and they hate your guns.
• They hate your heritage, and they hate your guns.
• They hate your religion, and they hate your guns.
• They hate your income level, and they hate your guns.
• They hate your mode of transportation, and they hate your guns.
• They hate your opinions, and they hate your guns.

They hate everything about you that you care about, in some form or another and they want to take everything from you, AND they want to take your guns. In many arguments, your gun is all that keeps them from taking everything else. They often run the gamut from petty criminals all the way up to the federal government itself, or various incarnations of a proposed "new world order" global government. For a while, growing up, at some point after I had been successfully convinced that there was no boogeyman, I was re-introduced to the concept in a new form. They are the new boogeyman, one that adults aren't embarrassed to admit to believing in. I believed in the new boogeymen for a while and then I learned something shocking.

They don't exist.

That's not some sort of nihilistic exploration of the nature of reality or anything, merely an observation. They don't exist as a proper they, not a homogenous powerful group hell-bent on stealing away all that you hold dear and leaving you both broke, dead and without a family (but remember, they want to still be able to tax you!). Sure there are individuals who can be found that hate everything about a given person in some form or another. If you find someone who actually, honestly hates more than about 3 of those things on that list about you, and they hate it so much they want to do something about any of it, at all, you've actually found the next Jared Lee Loughner. Not the next Nancy Pelosi. Not the next Barack Obama. You've found a psychopath, not a politician. Regardless of how you have felt about any politician, from whatever political party ever, it's extremely uncharacteristic for the psychotic ones to receive sufficient votes to take office.

Ah, but Matt, there IS a gun control lobby and they do have an agenda. Yes, yes made-up internet contrarian, they exist, and yes, they want things. Take a moment to actually dissect what you believe to be the modern gun control movement. What are their goals? Is it an outright ban on all firearms, or a ban on semi-automatics? Well, both actually. How about a ban on rifles with barrels of a given length, or firearms that have magazine capacities in excess of a specific number of rounds? Both of those too. There are groups who feel that hadguns should be banned and there are groups that feel that the only legitimate use for firearms are for home defense. Some groups even are permissive when it comes to hunting firearms and many support bans for only certain citizens, be they regular joes, or just civilians, or maybe just felons or those who have been convicted of violent crime.

I've got to point out, if you've been following along and you're turning those various groups over in your head then you've already violated one of the governing principles of effective special interest groups. You've inadvertently acknowledged that there are differing schools of thought, many of which are incompatible in one way or another from the others. They are not an homogenous or single-minded entity.

This fact alone deprives them of so much potential power. "But," you, the conceptualized internet contrarian interject, "what if they all got together?" To that I say, fine, be my guest. Let's round up a person in favor of a total firearms ban and someone who would ban only non-hunting firearms and let's get them to agree. Perhaps they could come to a consensus. A compromise! It could be possible!

Sure. Yeah. I can see that happening. Oh, wait, a new episode of Knight Rider is coming on in my mind's eye. And it's a good episode even.

No. None of what just happened in the two prior paragraphs has any possibility of becoming reality. They even tried to bring back Knight Rider, but it wasn't good.

I'm going to do something that all those extremist whackos that I keep reading about do from time to time and I'll quote Sun Tsu's The Art of War:

"It is the rule in war, if ten times the enemy's strength, surround them; if five times, attack them; if double, be able to divide them; if equal,engage them; if fewer, be able to evade them; if weaker, be able to avoid them."

That gem is where we get the modern simplification "divide and conquer". I don't subscribe to the notion that any backwoods good-ol-boy with an SKS and two loaded 30 round magazines could take on (and win against) the bulk of the ill-directed United States military in some sort of American Revolution II (this time, it's personal) scenario, so don't worry. This doctrine, however, does bear out in so many situations in which the conflict is something at least in broad strokes, comparable to war. Even in our most eager competitions (no, not the Super Bowl), the Presidential election, we can see this principle in play. In recent memory, even, some credit Bill Clinton's victory against Bob Dole in the 1996 Presidential Election as being evidence of such (even though Ross Perot received 0 electoral votes, carried 0 states and took only a tiny fraction of the popular vote, that doesn't count anyway).

The enemies of the gun lobby are divided. They're all over the map and they are not making any compromises anytime soon.

This just goes to address the direct competition that our pro-gun special interest groups have with anti-gun special interest groups. You'll find that as varied as the gun control lobby is, the people are even more varied, if they would just care to get out of the compartment they've been sorted into and allowed their actual opinions to be known.

The world is full of people who all have a little bit different take on things. Thanks to Saturday's events, we know who's WAY out there now, and we should now at least be able to acknowledge (even if you can't do it out loud right now, it's OK) that even our least favorite political figure ISN'T psychotic.

We encourage our children, nay, we demand that they respect those of differing races, backgrounds, interests and so forth. Then as adults we grow up and allow ourselves to be divided and compartmentalized so that we can be effectively milked for PAC donations and keep progress to a minimum. When we teach our children tolerance and respect for others do we mean it, or are we just giving hollow lip-service to the idea just so we won't have to attend another conference with the principal?

So, back to the group, what's this all about anyway and why did you just read a 5-page introduction to the ultimate subject of this admittedly long winded (and some may call pompous) post? I once felt that political organizations could only exist to divide people. I've become aware of a growing movement toward a more meaningful dialog, free of hyperbole and outright misinformation so common among most groups today and I decided that it's time. It's time for a new direction for gun owners:

Responsible Gun Owners of America

This is meant as a sort of a reboot of gun organizations. I want to get back to basics in terms of gun ownership with an emphasis on safety and responsibility and with a no-tinted-glasses policy when approaching legislation, news and rumors. This group is going to encompass all those who believe that no true freedom with firearms can exist without some sort of governance, and that no matter how hard the PACs want us to believe in boogeymen, the only people who come close are those in charge of the PACs themselves (though, they don't even really rank).

The group is now in it's infancy, I'm looking for writers and contributors and it's a strictly non-profit entity at this time. Certain mechanisms will be put in place and donations may even be solicited to help defray the operating costs so, at least presently only members and volunteer writers of all political affiliations and backgrounds are desired. I am to create a great resource for gun owners that's packed full of useful product reviews, stories of interest to hunters and target shooters, collectors and other owners. Whether you have an arsenal that requires a special government permit, or you only own a small revolver for self defense, or if you don't even own a firearm but believe in the principles of responsibility concerning them, you're invited read and contribute.