Punk Rock California Liberal buys a Gun, changes his registration to Libertarian and Moves to Wyoming

(reprint from Libertarian Republican blog.)

BUY A GUN, LOSE ALL YOUR FRIENDS. (A true story of Republitarian redemption.)
Copyright 2009, Michael W. Dean

I’m a peace lovin’ guy. I’d never hurt anyone who did not try to hurt me.

Though I used to vote Democrat. But couldn’t really tell you why. I hated authority and I hated big government. I guess I just wasn’t paying attention. I was one of those folks who thought that following the issues was too much work. So I voted by clipping out the little voting guide from the leftie City Paper.

That’s how, many years ago, I ended up voting for Feinstein and Pelosi. (Don’t tell my friends at the NRA, the GOA and the JPFO. I’m now a card-carryin’ member of all three.)

A couple years ago I was awake late one night in my home in Los Angeles when someone outside tried to pry open our bedroom window. The guy wasn’t very badass. Unarmed, I chased him away just by going outside and confronting him.

But we were shaken. The next day I told my wife, Debra Jean, “Baby, we’re buying a shotgun.” She was very against it. She said, “Buying a gun is admitting that the world is a horrible place.” I said, “Baby, sometimes the world is a horrible place, and I love you, and we’re buying a gun.”

And being the one California Democrat with his balls intact, I bought a shotgun anyway, even though my wife hated the idea.

Turns out, we both really liked guns, and we loved our dates to the range. We soon added his ‘n’ hers 9mm pistols and a couple .22 rifles to our collection. Debra Jean became a good shot in weeks. Took me a little longer.

All of our friends were lefties, and most of them were concerned about the “new us.” But they still kept talking to us, and we even took one of them to the range. Once.

I started reading up on California and Federal gun laws. I’ve never been arrested and intended to keep it that way. Debra Jean (a paralegal) and I decided that the laws seemed designed not to protect people from violence, but rather they were structured to make honest folks into criminals.

Our new view of nanny-state gun laws made us look at California (and the USA) in a whole new way. And that made us both start paying attention to government and politics.

We became Republitarians almost overnight.

I got there from “punk rock anarchist” on one end and apolitical Democrat on the other. I loved the process, but it kinda hurt. Debra Jean didn’t have as far to go…..Turns out she was registered Republican. Which if I’d known years earlier, I probably wouldn’t have married her. But it never actually came up, which shows you how much attention I paid to politics, and shows you how much she loved me to marry me even though I’d made it clear I was “a compassionate liberal, not one of those stuffy old selfish Republicans like my dad.”

My wife really liked my political “spiritual transformation.” (Her dad, by the way, had given her Heinlein books to read as a child, and he’d stumped door to door for Goldwater.)

Debra Jean and I got itchy. Being around leftists suddenly gave us hives. So it was clear what we had to do: GET OUT OF CALIFORNIA AND MOVE TO WYOMING.

Our leftist friends got really worried. The “hipper” ones said, “OK, I guess I can “get” having a shotgun for protection, if you must. But I really don’t feel comfortable coming to a house with handguns in it, and…WAIT….YOU DON’T HAVE THEM WITH YOU NOW, in MY house, do you?!!…”

Or, “Who is this ‘Bob Barr’ person you say you’re voting for? Libertarian? What’s a ‘libertarian’?” And “Obama is so cool and hip and…Wait, WHAT? YOU’RE SELLING YOUR HOUSE AND MOVING TO WYOMING? And you wanna buy a BATTLE RIFLE? What the hell is a BATTLE RIFLE?!”

Let me just say this: our outgoing Christmas card list was a lot shorter this year. And I doubt we’ll get any cards from California, but if we do, the card will not likely have the word “Christmas” on it. And it will probably be colored green and say “Reduce! Reuse! Rejoice!”

I will promptly take that “Seasonal Holiday Greeting Card” at its word and toss it in the recycling bin. (See? We did import ONE of our hippie ways from California. But we would never in a billion years try to force our new friends and neighbors to do the same, out of respect for their liberty. And we love that our new friends and neighbors are far less “in other people’s business” than most everyone we met in California. Which is partly because our new friends and neighbors are nicer people, and partly because most of them own and carry guns, too. “An armed society is a polite society.”)

We’ve lived in Wyoming for almost six months and WE LOVE IT. The air is clean, the people are sweet and we can open carry a pistol, or have our loaded battle rifle on the car seat next to us. Talk about “breathing in the sweet air of liberty”!

Carrying a gun could literally get you killed by SWAT in California. Here, people just say, “Oh, my husband has that one! Is that the .357 or the .38 special?” or “Nice rifle! Getting in practice for antelope season?”

We feel like we left California and moved to AMERICA.

Our few remaining California leftie friends who still talked to us followed this ongoing transformation in words and pictures on my blog. One by one they STOPPED BEING OUR FRIENDS. Their comments ranged from a good friend of eight years saying “Michael, I love you, but I’m really worried about you” to a good friend of 23 years (a guy I was in a band with) saying, “Michael…..Once someone gets talked into these right-wing ideas very rarely can they be talked back…..This new-found cocky way of life is very wrong, very immoral and very dangerous. I’m older than you so consider my opinion, if you still can…I doubt you will. This makes me very sad. Good luck, dumb fuck.”

Another “friend” actually talked about organizing an intervention and driving out here to “save us.” Didn’t happen though. I guess it’s easier to take the bottle out of a passed-out drunk’s hand than it is to take guns away from people who are more awake and alive than they’ve ever been.

Even strangers chimed in. Typical of the many slams I received was a fan of my older books and music who said “I can’t believe how quickly you went from being a hip, artistic guy to being a fat WalMart redneck Red Lobster-eating NRA asshole.”

The comments from strangers made me laugh, in a dropped-jaw kind of way. The comments from the actual friends hurt. But I remembered what my dear sweet mother would have said: “If they say things like that sweetie, they’re not really your friends.” And my dad told me, “Better to find out now than further down the road.”

I do not cling to my “victimhood” and you’ll never catch me at a support group or on Oprah bitching about this, (nor would she likely have me). All in all it has really just reinforced my resolve to reject idiocy in all its forms.

I just cannot wrap my head around the fact that so many people, including ones I thought were “cool”, cannot wrap THEIR heads around the fact that “social justice” is always accomplished by muggery and thuggery. And they get freaked out if I say “Guns aren’t bad, guns are good….And guns make it harder to be a victim of muggery and thuggery.”

I now have a lot more to talk about with my dad and my father-in-law. I no longer think they’re “square”, and I really love yakking with them now. They “get it.” They get liberty.

Those other folks can just stay in California, me and my wife will be in AMERICA. If you need us, we’re probably on a date to the rifle range. After that we’ll be at Red Lobster, then WalMart.

Michael W. Dean sings in the “feisty libertarian punk rock band” RIGHT ARM OF WYOMING LibertarianPunk.com

He writes books and makes documentary films for a living, they are listed here: oreillynet.com