{"id":37,"date":"2012-09-12T12:22:36","date_gmt":"2012-09-12T18:22:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/libertydude.com\/?p=37"},"modified":"2012-09-12T12:22:36","modified_gmt":"2012-09-12T18:22:36","slug":"on-shotguns-and-veterans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libertydude.com\/?p=37","title":{"rendered":"On Shotguns and Veterans"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an older essay I wrote that received some praise so I wanted to republish it here in a more fitting home. It could use some clean up and it probably would have been a little different if written today, but I left it unchanged.<\/em><\/p>\n

So, I bought a new home defense shotgun the other day and in the course of getting to know the gun shop owner, I showed him a rifle given to me by my grandfather, who was a Navy pilot in WWII. My grandfather was kind of gun nut and I always appreciated that he was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to protect his rights and ultimately mine, including that of owning a firearm.<\/p>\n

That of course got me thinking about him and my other grandfather, who was an aircraft mechanic in WWII, and I recalled a day when I was visiting the former mechanic grandfather at his retirement home.<\/p>\n

His room was a shared room, and he was paired up with another WWII vet, Mr. French. My grandfather wasn’t really too coherent at this point in his life, so I had more of a conversation going with Mr. French, who asked me essentially, “What do we need to do to get America back on track?”<\/p>\n

At the time, I took the question at face value and offered a few thoughts, but it was a tough question to respond to, given its complexity and the history of the man who asked it.<\/p>\n

Coming full circle, I was sitting out on my porch last night, racking some rounds through my new gun, and I had a deeper, sadder thought about that question and the man who asked it. I realized that here was a man who was willing to give his life for America, looking back at his life and looking at America as it now existed, and questioning what it was all for. I realized that for all the question’s simplicity, just how tragic it really was.<\/p>\n

I don’t think Mr. French is around anymore. Neither are my grandfathers. But I hope that never again will a veteran have to look around at the country they were willing to die for and wonder if it would have been worth it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is an older essay I wrote that received some praise so I wanted to republish it here in a more fitting home. It could use some clean up and it probably would have been a little different if written … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2PhBi-B","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libertydude.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libertydude.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libertydude.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libertydude.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libertydude.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/libertydude.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39,"href":"https:\/\/libertydude.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions\/39"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libertydude.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libertydude.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libertydude.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}