Rather than a review or general airgun related article this time, let me hop up on my soapbox for my last blog posting of the year. My hope is I’m “preaching to the choir” here, but since we are entering an election year where our gun rights are under attack more than ever, I want to make it clear to readers – if you as an airgunner do not belong to a recognized organization that supports the 2nd Amendment, get off you’re backside and join now. The NRA is the largest and oldest, but if you like another organization that has a legitimate goal of keeping guns available to law-abiding citizens of this country, then go for it. I say legitimate because gun-grabbers have used the old “wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing” ploy in the past to masquerade as a pro-gun group. I believe their thinking was hoping to dilute membership and dues to pro-gun organizations and spread their propaganda to an unsuspecting public. Whatever their twisted thinking was if you go with an outfit outside of the known pro-gun groups, check them out carefully. One of these phony groups was the “American Hunters and Shooter’s Association (AHSA) and it was headed by a member of the Brady campaign. Its Board of Directors was a Who’s Who of the gun control cabal. They were exposed by the NRA and social media and have since closed their phony operation. I guess I begrudgingly have to give the gun-banners credit. They are a creative lot for certain. Since they’ve had a tough time putting the Second Amendment out of business legislatively, they find other ways to chip away at it.
So, bottom line and I’ll get off my soapbox: If you value the airgunning hobby and you’d like to have unfettered access to lead ammo, powerful airguns and even realistic air soft replicas, get in the game. Support pro-gun organizations and candidates anytime you can. You may be thinking “I only like airguns and nobody is after them; they even come with ‘silencers’ now and aren’t on the gun-grabber radar”. That is dangerous thinking. The gun-grabbers just haven’t gotten to them yet. Keep standing on the sidelines and they will. Some overly emotional argument will be promoted about “the irresponsible use of all things airgun”. We the People all of a sudden cannot be trusted with them because serious airgunners will be lumped into the same bucket as irresponsible and unsupervised youngsters who shoot out car windows and any other negative angle they can come up with.
There is an old saying: there are 3 kinds of people – those that make things happen, those that watch things happen and those that wonder what happened. Which kind will you be?
The above statements are my personal opinion and not necessarily those of AOA. However, for questions you can reach out to Airguns of Arizona at www.arigunsofarizona.com or leave a comment.