The "Unsilent Minority"

I've nothing to hide about being a gun owner and I want to be up front about the fact that I do own legal firearms. My small collection of simple firearms is for hunting, target shooting and, to a lesser degree, protection. They were all legally purchased from FFL dealers in regular, retail shopping outlets in the late, great 20th Century. I'm not a gun lover. I'm a gun owner.

No, this isn't me. This is one of The "Unsilent Minority".

I'm one of the millions of Americans who own simple, non-military, legal firearms and who never talk about them in public and who are never scared — not for one moment — that somebody will come to our homes and take our firearms away from us. We don't think about that because we're confident that that will never happen in this country for many, many reasons, including the fact that as long as our nation has millions of sane, quiet, cool-headed citizens with traditional firearms in their homes, no foreign country will ever invade us and vanquish us. Not without one hell of a fight.

We're "The Silent Majority" and we're America's backup army. Let's hope they never need us but we'll be ready if they do. In the meantime, we'll legally hunt for wild food, break clay pigeons, plink tin cans and punch holes in paper targets for recreation. And keep our firearms quietly and securely out of sight. And the biggest thing about the right to bear arms is that those of us who take advantage of that right feel very privileged to have it. The gun owners in the "Unsilent Minority", as I like to call them because they're so vocal and often disturbingly animated, don't represent American gun owners at all. They only think they do.

So, we might not dash into the Second Amendment fray and make fools out of ourselves by waving guns around for the cameras, like the "Unsilent Minority", and holler about freedom and rights because we're already secure in that knowledge. We guarantee the right to bear arms by being good citizens who are smart enough to know that keeping a cool head is the best way to own guns and the only way to secure the freedom we're privileged to have. We're the "Silent Majority". We're the ones who keep our heads while others about us are losing theirs. (This post was updated on 1-25-13)