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Nobody in my family taught me either. As a kid, the area I grew up in was sort of transitional from rural to suburban. There were still open fields in the area, and lots of orange groves, but suburban expansion was gradually intruding into those areas. My siblings, friends, and I grew up toting everything from Wrist Rockets to pellet guns to .22s. I really enjoyed it, but I grew up in a very liberal and anti-gun family, and my brothers and I didn't even have BB guns, let alone anything more powerful than that. My dad had two guns, but they were hidden away in the attic, and were both sourvenires of his past life. For years, we didn't even know that he had them. One was a .22 rifle that had been his when he was a little boy. The other was his WW2 sidearm, a 1943 Ithaca 1911A1, which I still have today. When he died in 1990, my brothers and I inherited the guns. I got the .45, and my youngest brother, who already owned a couple of guns, got the .22. (My middle brother didn't really have an interest in owning a gun at the time.)

At the time, I was very into motorcycling, and was involved in road racing. There seems to be a lot of crossover between the gun world and the bike world. (And the flying world too.) A couple of my motorcycling buddies were still serving NCOs in the California National Guard, and so I asked them to take me out to a range, teach me to shoot the 1911, and to show me how to safely load and unload, and to fieldstrip the gun for cleaning. They, like many of us today, were all too willing to jump in and help. The first time I shot the 1911 was the first time I ever fired a pistol. That was 1990, and I was 38 years old. When I shot through the first 7 rounds in that magazine, I turned to look at my friends, and I had a yuge grin on my face. I was hooked.

Becoming a gun owner and shooter was a HUGE part of my growth as a citizen. I had learned about the Constitution as public school student, but I never really thought much about its application in my own life until I got a gun. I knew what the 1st and 2nd Amendments were, but I had never personalized or internalized their meanings because they weren't important to me. It is worth noting that, at the time, I was still a registered democrat. My concept of the Constitution was that it guaranteed my right to vote (it doesn't), to have an abortion (somewhere in its penumbras and emanations, it allegedly does), and the right to not have to testify against myself, and that was about it. I HAD read it, but somewhere along the line, my teachers had failed to communicate just how important it was to know everything about it. That's why I had no problem with a massively expanding federal government. As a liberal democrat, I thought that was a good thing. I am flat out going to apologize to all of you for that right now.

Becoming a gun owner got me interested in the 2nd Amendment because my NCO friends were sure to include that when teaching me about my newly acquired gun. Getting interested in the 2nd Amendment got me interested in the rest of my rights. That led to me getting interested in the limits that the Constitution places on gov't, and it led to my have a much more expanded understanding of what liberty means. Becoming a gun owner changed everything. There were other things going on in my life too. I came to faith in 1994. The time between 1990 and 1994 was a time of transition for me. I was still a registered democrat in 1990. I voted for Clinton in 1992. In 1994, in the wake of the AWB, and as I began to have a different understanding of morality due to my new faith, I changed party affiliation to republican, and after more than 20 years as a democrat I cast my first vote as a republican for Bob Dole in 1996. Since then, as my journey brought me to the point where the liberty of the individual has become my highest political value, I've evolved into a libertarian-leaning independent. But ALL of that begins with my first gun. My youngest brother's political evolution is similar to my own. My middle brother, who to this day has never owned a gun (and who is a Cal Berkeley alumnus), has remained a liberal democrat in the same mold as my parents were. I think if he had gotten one, he would have changed too. Why? Because it is gun ownership that teaches someone whether their gov't regards them as — to quote Susanna Gratia Hupp — "as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of." If your gov't treats your gun ownership as if you were part of that unruly crowd that "needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of", then you ought to resent the heck out of it and vote accordingly.....irrespective of which party is responsible for doing it.

THAT is why I've always been more than willing to introduce other newbies to shooting. I consider it a form of paying it forward. New gun owners become converts to individual liberty, and they replicate that highest of political values in their children, and try to convince their friends.