Further notes: First, I shoot trap, not skeet. It’s possible, if you know the range, and are very good, to shoot skeet entirely blindfolded and get a perfect score. You can’t do that with trap.
Second, after consideration, I would posit that skeet was invented to allow people to show off their abilities to kill birds, as opposed to practice shooting birds. This is a significant difference. (Well, their abilities to fire shotguns in rough and manly ways, as Teddy R. would say. Not so much killing birds, as the ability to do so, being tested.)
On the other hand, so are the Olympics. The Decathlon, wrestling, and so on. Sport pretty much is all about showing off your abilities as a mighty warrior. So is the Marathon. I feel pretty okay about being in company with olympic athletes.
That said, let’s talk briefly about the right to bear arms as a fundamental human right. The government is not my master, it is my civil service, and the employees are civil servants. I am a free citizen of these United States. I am equal to any employee. I do not need to bow before the President, but can face him eye to eye and meet him with plain speech.
The right to bear arms is the nail that keeps that true. It should never be executed, but a right without the ability to reinforce it, is a right that will be violated.
Furthermore, the right to defend ones self is a simple and elementary right. The government will not do it for me. It can not do it for me. I live not far from New York City, in a town with a very famous correctional facility. Every so often, we would get an escapee, of the highly dangerous sort. We lived seven and a half miles from the police department (A new one has opened since then) and they weren’t quite sure where we were. (Geography gets funky in 200+ year old towns.) Further, every so often, we’d get a rabid animal walking down the middle of the street. (Which was one of the first signs they might be rabid. There’s a gait… and the walking down the middle of the street part isn’t normal.)
And every so often, bears. Coyotes, too. This area has been inhabited since NY was colonized by the Dutch. It still has wild animals of the larger sort. Rest of America can be wilder.
Police may or may not show in time. When I grew up, there were three cop cars. Nights of a jail break, ALL of them would be busy responding to random panic calls.
The cops are not here to protect you. They don’t need to, they have no responsibility to. The only person with a responsibility to protect you and yours, is you and yours. The right to own a gun makes that possible.
Were there crooked cops? Hell yes, one should note. Illegal gun sales to criminals, child porn, too. And one or two that colluded with the prisoners. How do you, rationally, keep your family safe when the police can’t be trusted to protect you?
Yes, guns are an insurance policy on democracy failing. “From time to time, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
(Note the patriots part.)
God willing, the insurance policy is enough to keep them honest. See the thread by Aiska about the po-pos shooting her 90 year old neighbor down on a completely false warrant. Without respect for the populace, that’s what happens, random fake warrants to increase arrest statistics. I’m sorry it happened. Deeply so. But when the police no longer respect your rights, what do you have left but threats to keep them honest?
If, god forbid, they expected to be met with force, they wouldn’t have busted down the 90 year old woman’s door. I don’t want my police to fear me. I want them to respect me and to treat me as a citizen with rights. When they don’t, what do you do?
