HI, I'm Jim Lawrence. I found you through Liberal Gun Club and will check out your site. I might be able to make it to the Chicago event as I go to the Oshkosh airshow every year around that time.

I'm a writer, photographer and editor, mostly of general aviation subjects. Used to play a (30-06 -wielding) cop in the tv show SWAT in the 70s. I'm not an avid gun enthusiast but am interested lately in taking it up again...but was mightily turned by the the decidedly right-wing-rant flavor of too many gun discussion groups online. So, very relieved to find LGC and you, and some rational dialogue about shooting and owning firearms.

I like the manifesto above posted by Robert Hust. That's a typically enlightened sentiment that I seldom find on the right: to actually respect a point of view you don't agree with, rather than denigrate it, throw fear bombs at it, use propaganda-like smears and name-calling to defame it. If there's a political energy extant today in our national "dialogue" that's straight out of Nazi Germany, it comes directly from the radical right, not progressives and liberals and people of reasoned thought and open minds.
Propaganda smut throwing is the way the radical right demonizes liberals - in the same way the Aryans demonized the Jews. I've had enough of that in our national discourse and in world history, and I vastly prefer civilized dialogue. Just my $.02 worth.

I like to shoot guns, but I'm not into hunting. I was a pistol marksman in the military, played the sharpshooter TJ McCabe in SWAT, and made some friends in LA Metro in that period. I respect our law enforcement guys and gals, they have a damn tough job.

I own an old Marlin 30/30 that I haven't fired for I bet 20 years! Been too busy hang gliding and flying Light Sport Aircraft in my gig for Plane & Pilot magazine.

On reflection on Robert's piece, I'm coming around to realizing it's important to respect other's rights to own all the guns they want...as long as they don't use them to hurt people, of course.

I do still wrestle with the moral dilemma of owning weapons that are clearly designed to efficiently kill lots and lots of people, and I don't believe giving in to our fears is the healthy way to go. But I live in the country, not the inner city. I feel a lot safer out here than I did when I lived in LA. So I understand the impulse. When my kids were little, I gave in to my desire to protect them at all costs and bought an HK 93 I think it was...a "high class blaster" as a friend called it. I shot it exactly once, and when my kids were old enough to find where I had it stored in the house, I got more paranoid about that and sold it.

There are reasons, valid ones, to have weapons to defend your family. And hell, I'lm realizing, after a couple decades of dissing gun owners myself, that I miss shooting, that I enjoy firing weapons, and so I guess it all adds up to different strokes for different folks...as long as they don't tell me what I have to believe or do, or shoot at me or other people (unless they're terrorists of course)!

Maybe I'm harboring a latent, "gotta-get-a-home-defense-weapon" anxiety. In truth, I'm not afraid of being pulled out of my bed by ObamaNazis, (I was a big Obama supporter from the day he announced in Illinois) but by card-carrying teabaggers and survivalists who might feel the need to rise up and run amok to "preserve" our liberty and freedoms. As a group and a national movement, too often they remind me of the general in Dr. Strangelove played by Sterling Hayden who started WWIII out of fear we were losing "our precious bodily fluids".

That's my rant for now, safe shooting everyone.

Jim Lawrence aka James Coleman