Post-election blues

[Monkeyleg]

Yeah, I know. Monkeyleg's feeling down again. So what's new?

On election night, I didn't even stay up to watch the returns come in. I've done that so many times, and had my stomach turn as I watched the tides change as results came in from the Milwaukee districts.

2002, 2004, 2006. Same thing.

I swore I would just walk away if the results went against us. Take up stamp collecting. Maybe have Barbara teach me how to make quilts.

Something.

Instead, I awake every day reminded that the government I live under will never allow me to carry a weapon for self defense.

And I think about the years of work done by so many, and the progress we made. We were so close to being able to carry self-defense weapons that I had actually started thinking about a bill-signing ceremony with Governor Mark Green, to be followed by a victory celebration at one of the pubs across the street from the Capitol.

It was that close. Close enough to see victory. Close enough to almost be able to taste it, grab it, shake it, wrap my arms around it and dance in delerious celebration.

Five years. Five years of literally hundreds of volunteers spending hours and hours each at gun show tables, distributing literature, helping people who didn't have a clue who their legislators were write a coherent postcard to those legislators.

So many people, so much effort. And so much progress. We went from nowhere to getting within an inch of our goal.

Now the landscape looks like the opening scenes of "Patton" at Kasserine Pass.

Four more years of oppression. I'll be sixty years old if Doyle leaves office after just two terms as governor. I was forty years old when I distributed flyers warning gun owners that he was a danger to their rights when he ran and won his race for attorney general in 1990.

And that sumbitch is smiling right now.

If for no other reason, I want to live long enough to urinate on that SOB's grave.

[Strings]

gee Dick... all this time, I thought he was one of your favorite guys...

 I feel you pain... anybody in Indiana or Texas willing to help a guy find a job and relocate?

[Standing Wolf]

...I awake every day reminded that the government I live under will never allow me to carry a weapon for self defense.

Move. Take your tax and investment dollars along.

It saddens me to suppose Wisconsin may be as deplorable a civil rights basket case as the People's Republic of California, but realistically speaking, it just might be a basket case.

I'm sorry to report the vast majority of people don't care one way or a dozen others about freedom, and that includes Americans.

I work in a shooting club that's a combination indoor range and gun shop. I carry openly all day long at work, and much of the rest of the time, too. Among numerous other duties, including cleaning the place, I give tours of the club to prospective new members.

Once in awhile, a potential joiner happens to notice my openly carried .357 or .44 magnum; on the whole, people appear not to notice my gun or anyone else's even in a gun shop until I mention it's perfectly okay for members to carry openly or concealed, loaded or unloaded, as long as people don't carry guns in hand.

Eyes light up. Bells bong. Again and again, people ask, "Really?" and I nod and smile and tell them: "We're all adults. We all have civil rights. We all respect one another."

I signed up a newbie about three weeks ago. He's already taken the Colorado-required "evidence of training" course. He's been in to shoot several times. He came in yesterday openly carrying a Glock, and strolled over to point it out to me with a big grin. He'd lived here nearly all his life, but hadn't known this is an open carry state. Now he's packing openly at the shooting range. He'll be carrying concealed as soon as his permit is delivered: typically about three weeks. By and bye, he'll reconsider joining the NRA, which I have a hunch still seems too "radical" an organization to him. Sooner or later, he'll probably even start writing letters to our elected misrepresentatives.

I taught the course earlier this week to a class of one: a tiny little great-grandmother in her eighties. I doubt she'll carry everywhere, but she took the course because a.) she'd never fired a gun in her life, and wanted to make sure she didn't shoot herself, and b.) she'd like to have the gun her late husband bought her in the car when she goes on trips.

Speaking strictly for myself, I'm accomplishing a lot more than if I'd stayed in the People's Republic of California, and having 593.407% more fun, too.

[Monkeyleg]

Standing Wolf, I love Colorado. Not as much as Utah, but it's one of my favorite states.

But, at least for the time being, I'm stuck here in WI.

I had planned on resigning as the de facto head of the WCCA if the elections didn't go our way. I was just getting too burned out, and figured there would be others who would take my place.

But I just can't give up the fight. I can't let that lying, corrupt, two-faced, butt-ugly bastard son of a rotten family of dim-witted socialists win. If I walk away, I walk away from years and years of working for RKBA here, the past five years in particular. And that sounds like failure to me.

Up until Doyle's election in 2002, the gun rights movement here in WI was making remarkable progress. We have pro-gun laws on the books here that gun owners in other states would envy. We just don't have CCW...yet.

[Strings]

Like I told you on the phone Dick: it'll probably be 5 years before I'm able to move back to the US. So, in the meantime, you'll have Spoon and I to kick around...

[richyoung]

This is easy to say, as a bystander, but -
We gunowner's didn't get in this situation overnight, and it will be a long slow process fraught with disappointment and back-tracking to undue it.  Too many of our OWN SIDE are afraid to "offend" someone by carrying openly, and too darned lazy/cheap to work for a better tomorrow.  If it feels any better, many of the Founding Fathers payed a horrible price for their support of freedom, without ever knowing the fruit their efforts would bear.  Sometimes you have to do something despite it being long, hard, lonely, and uncertain of success, simply because its the right thing to do.  God bless and Merry Christmas - and thank you!

Rich Young