Gov. John Kitzhaber says he won't lead the charge on tougher gun control laws in Oregon, but he expects the Legislature to take up the issue and will support what he considers to be reasonable changes. ......." [emphasis added]
Nonetheless, he said, he has no objections to laws aimed at restricting the kinds of weapons and ammunition used in the shootings at the Clackamas Town Center mall and the Connecticut elementary school. "I don't know why anyone would need an assault rifle in this day and age," Kitzhaber said. "I don't know why anyone would resist a ban on guns in schools."
I am so disappointed by the way that Oregon has skewed its perception about how to live.
This is my state. This is the state where I was born, where I grew up, and where my family has loved for the better part of a century.
Let me give you some sense of what the political climate in Oregon USE to be:
During The Depression (and this is my family's Oral History), my grandfathers and my father and my uncles use to go out during the fall and kill elk, and deer .. regardless of whether they had a "tag" ... which was the state's official permission to take game in the wild.
They poached game. They did so on a regular basis. And when the "Revenuers" .. the state employees, the Fish and Game Wardens .. came to search their homes, they lied for each other. It's not as if they were actually making alcoholic beverages. What they were doing was, they were feeding their families.
Times were hard then. They ... my family .. were providing sustenance for their wives, and their children. This was before I was born, but not before it might have been such a terrible economic situation that I may not have survived if my mother had not been able to get enough food to sustain the lives of my self and my sisters, as fetuses.
Men did what they had to do, and they passively resisted governmental regulations, because the alternative was literally too frightful for them to accept.
They were men, and they did what they had to do.
I know, this all sounds terribly "John Wayne-ish" ... but perhaps you did not grow up on stories of what extreme measures men were willing to adopt to ensure the survival of their progeny.
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It's not all that different today.
Today, we see men and women and children being murdered .. either during their most product years, or during their youth ... by men who are senselessly slaughtering total strangers in public places.
I don't know who they are, I don't know way they do it; I only know that they are animals who need to be taken down to preserve the lives of children .. perhaps children yet unborn.
My father found himself obliged to poach game "off-season" to feed his wife and his children.
Today, we .... you and I ... discover that we are faced with similar difficult choices; whether we must use firearms to preserve the lives of our mates, and our children... Either the children we already have, or the children which we may someday have.
And The State is conscientiously determining for us that the steps we must take to achieve this genetic goal are not, in fact, legal.
Governor Kitzhaber is much younger than I am, and perhaps his family history is different. Perhaps he doesn't KNOW how powerful the urge to preserve your family is. Maybe he doesn't realize that laws, and law-enforcers, are not always merely enforcing "the Rule of Law" but are, in fact, undermining the ability of the citizens of Oregon .. which he took an oath to protect and preserve ... to protect their families.
All *_I_* know is that my father did what he had to do to provide an environment which produced me, and my sister .. my older brother died as an infant, and I have never been told why. I can't say that it was because he (my father) was, for a while, unable or unwilling to feed his family.
But what if that WAS the reason, and the cause, for the death of my brother?
Or, what if it could have been?
Wouldn't that have been justification for ignoring laws which undermined the proliferation of The Family?
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I don't know what's right and what's wrong. I only know that because my sister and I survived, our 21 children and grandchildren are alive today. I only suspect that laws which protect game rather than allowing men to feed their families are .. not WRONG, but worthy of being ignored for the benefit of the families.
I also know that laws which deprive honest, God-fearing people, from having to do the unmentionable aggressive necessaries, are -- not WRONG, but worthy of being ignored for the same reasons.
Our lives are not threatened by my uncles, and men like them. They're threatened by men who are driven to insanity, and insane acts. We cannot predict them, we cannot intervene. We can only react to them, and stop them cold. Dead.
We cannot act against these insane people if we are rendered defenseless by The State ... which promises faithfully to protect (and serve) us, but which cannot deliver in a timely fashion.
And .. hey, Oregonians?
The next time this person who professes to love guns, but who obviously disposes his fellow citizens ... comes up for re-election?
Let's vote for the other person, instead of this Total Asshole.
As the Democrats say "Do it for the children" ...
Okay?
No .. do it for OUR children! We're better than he is, and we deserve better leadership!
