denwego
Regular Member
imported post
I went to New York two weeks ago to visit my brother, a fellow ex-pat Texan, and his girlfriend, who both go to school at SUNY New Paltz on the cusp of the Catskill mountains in upstate. My brother has the Texan philosophy on guns: the more and the bigger, the better. He applied for a CCW the day after he turned 21 this past February; a non-required NRA course and a very sympathetic Ulster County court means he'll, amazingly, almost certainly get an unrestricted lifetime license as soon as the 8-10 months of bureaucracy is finished. In the meantime, he still has his 12-gauge, his 30-30 Winchester, and his 10/22 Ruger to keep him occupied.
His girlfriend, however, is a native of Albany, and has always endured his owning any guns as a necessary evil and only barely tolerated it; she's refused to let him keep any guns in their bedroom if they're loaded and doesn't like him taking them out of his gun cabinet as a rule unless he's going shooting in Phoenicia. The past two days, I found out tonight, has turned her into the stereotypical adage that "an anti-gun advocate is a pro-gun advocate who hasn't been robbed yet."
On Tuesday, my brother came home from work around 7pm to find the front door of the apartment ajar and a few items missing: computer parts and some spare cash, but no missing TV/VCR/video game console, etc., nor any missing jewelry. However, when his girlfriend came home, she noticed that several pares of underwear were missing out of her dresser, which is a sickening experience if there can be one.
This morning, as they were eating breakfast, his girlfriend suddenly jumped up from the table, pointed at the kitchen window, and said, "There's someone in the bushes looking in at us!!" My brother turned to see him, grabbed the Winchester (I don't know why he went with that and not the shotgun, but it doesn't matter in the end), and he rushed outside to confront this guy while his girlfriend called the police. New York isn't a friendly state when it comes to lethal-force laws or citizens detaining suspects, but it turned out to be the move to make. When the police arrived, they found this guy had a 6-inch fillet knife, gloves, and a crowbar, the same tool used to jimmy the door open two days before. The guy was arrested, and while I haven't heard if they had found any of the stolen property, I can't believe that this would just be a coincidence and unrelated to missing underwear.
Of course, his girlfriend is deeply freaked out by this whole thing. Since then, she's come around to wanting to move to an apartment with no ground-level access without a key, wants the shotgun in the bedroom, and says the first day she has off work this week, she's going down to the Sheriff's office to file a CCW application herself; the sergeant on the scene said he'd forward a copy of the report for this labeling her as "the target of a potentially violent sexual deviant," which guarantees her all the more to get an unrestricted license herself.
I know ultimately a New York story isn't related to open carry, but it's the first time in my own lifetime's experience that a gun might have been the only thing that kept two people in my family from being killed. And the fact that a staunch New Yorker can be won over instantly to carrying something she aforetime hated gives hope to people in red states everywhere. The more lives that are saved by being prepared and armed, the harder it becomes for the remaining anti's to find ground to stand on.
I went to New York two weeks ago to visit my brother, a fellow ex-pat Texan, and his girlfriend, who both go to school at SUNY New Paltz on the cusp of the Catskill mountains in upstate. My brother has the Texan philosophy on guns: the more and the bigger, the better. He applied for a CCW the day after he turned 21 this past February; a non-required NRA course and a very sympathetic Ulster County court means he'll, amazingly, almost certainly get an unrestricted lifetime license as soon as the 8-10 months of bureaucracy is finished. In the meantime, he still has his 12-gauge, his 30-30 Winchester, and his 10/22 Ruger to keep him occupied.
His girlfriend, however, is a native of Albany, and has always endured his owning any guns as a necessary evil and only barely tolerated it; she's refused to let him keep any guns in their bedroom if they're loaded and doesn't like him taking them out of his gun cabinet as a rule unless he's going shooting in Phoenicia. The past two days, I found out tonight, has turned her into the stereotypical adage that "an anti-gun advocate is a pro-gun advocate who hasn't been robbed yet."
On Tuesday, my brother came home from work around 7pm to find the front door of the apartment ajar and a few items missing: computer parts and some spare cash, but no missing TV/VCR/video game console, etc., nor any missing jewelry. However, when his girlfriend came home, she noticed that several pares of underwear were missing out of her dresser, which is a sickening experience if there can be one.
This morning, as they were eating breakfast, his girlfriend suddenly jumped up from the table, pointed at the kitchen window, and said, "There's someone in the bushes looking in at us!!" My brother turned to see him, grabbed the Winchester (I don't know why he went with that and not the shotgun, but it doesn't matter in the end), and he rushed outside to confront this guy while his girlfriend called the police. New York isn't a friendly state when it comes to lethal-force laws or citizens detaining suspects, but it turned out to be the move to make. When the police arrived, they found this guy had a 6-inch fillet knife, gloves, and a crowbar, the same tool used to jimmy the door open two days before. The guy was arrested, and while I haven't heard if they had found any of the stolen property, I can't believe that this would just be a coincidence and unrelated to missing underwear.
Of course, his girlfriend is deeply freaked out by this whole thing. Since then, she's come around to wanting to move to an apartment with no ground-level access without a key, wants the shotgun in the bedroom, and says the first day she has off work this week, she's going down to the Sheriff's office to file a CCW application herself; the sergeant on the scene said he'd forward a copy of the report for this labeling her as "the target of a potentially violent sexual deviant," which guarantees her all the more to get an unrestricted license herself.
I know ultimately a New York story isn't related to open carry, but it's the first time in my own lifetime's experience that a gun might have been the only thing that kept two people in my family from being killed. And the fact that a staunch New Yorker can be won over instantly to carrying something she aforetime hated gives hope to people in red states everywhere. The more lives that are saved by being prepared and armed, the harder it becomes for the remaining anti's to find ground to stand on.
