What made you switch from anti-gun to pro-gun?

Posted 11 May 2017.

I was never “anti-gun,” really – I just never owned any due to spending most of my career (and adult life) in the relatively anti-gun state of Hawaii. Moving to Georgia changed that… and also introduced me to my wife.

Now, with her being Russian (ethnically Armenian – this is important later), she had never had any exposure to firearms and was pretty much not really a big fan of why Americans feel the need to own firearms. However, shortly after we started dating, she told me a bit about how her family came to Moscow from Baku in 1988. If you are either a student of history and/or born early enough to know where I am going at this point, feel free to skip to the next paragraph. For those uninformed, the events in Baku at the time were as bad as any of the other justifications folks have pointed out for making such a fundamental shift in perspective. If you search “Baku Pogroms,” it will bring you to the events of 1990, but one has to appreciate the overall poor treatment Armenians have endured pretty much all over. The events of ’90 were indicative of the larger issues faced by the Armenian community in Baku for years, but it was the Sumgait Pogrom of 1988 which caused my wife’s family to become official refugees within the Soviet Union. Her experiences prior to leaving Baku were those of an 8-year old girl dealing with death threats carved into her school desk, an overall sense of hostility and anger towards her and her family, and finally, the sense of humanity and compassion shown by her Muslim neighbors who hid her family in their apartment when the situation became dire.

Immediately after listening to her experiences, I began to teach her how to shoot for a few valid reasons. First, I am of the belief that if there are firearms to be stored in the home, the knowledge of how to operate them safely is imperative. Most of the fear of firearms comes from not understanding how they work. Secondly, while I am of the opinion that the likelihood of the events which took place in Baku in ’88 are improbable here, the fact that law and order can be far from what is promised warrants a “better to have and not need versus need and not have” mentality, best illustrated by Robert Avrech’s story about his experiences in L.A. during the 1991 riots. Finally, bringing together all of these can give a person the understanding behind the concept of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Going to the range every week may be more of my thing than it is hers, but she has gained an appreciation of why it is possible to do so freely in (some parts of) the U.S. and why the problem of spin in the media is more disconcerting than most people think.

What it really boils down to in reaching across the divide to friends and family that have a certain reservation towards firearms is to present not an argument, but a reassurance that the problems receiving much of the media’s attention are not what they seem. I have taken several anti-gun friends to the range and though they are not entirely convinced, they walk away from the experience with a better understanding of the matter and an appreciation for a rational and intelligent conversation about it.