Our Separate Honeymoons

I am not an outdoorsy kind of guy. I love and respect nature, but I’d rather curl up with a book and a bourbon-and-soda at home.

Not that I lack direct experience of the outdoors. My folks took their boys in Volkswagen vans and tents to Alaska and Mexico, and across the U.S. into Morocco and up through Europe. My brother Ken and I pitched a two-man tent in Norway, in Brittany, in Greece, and along the Dalmatian coast of what was then known as Yugoslavia … all before I was 15.

So when I met Carole more than two decades later, I still owned a goose-down mummy sleeping bag from U.S. Army surplus in Germany. She may have gotten the mistaken impression that I was an inveterate hiker and camper.

I did drag her up Mount Storm King in the Olympics for the view of Lake Crescent and the Strait of Juan de Fuca the fall of our first year together. We also went on an overnight camping hike up the Eagle Creek Trail (the one ravaged by wildfire last summer) with another couple, and climbed Saddle Mountain in the Coast Range east of Seaside.

We had been seeing each other for two years (more accurately, I had moved into her condo early in that window of time) when she suggested a kayaking expedition in Glacier Bay, Alaska.

The Folly of Guns Versus "Government Tyranny"

When gun owners say they keep a firearm at home for protection against “government tyranny,” I wonder: Have they thought this through?

Let’s follow the logic where I doubt most gun owners have taken it.

No government entity -- whether local police, county sheriff, state troopers, the U.S. military, Homeland Security, the Border Patrol, or even the IRS -- has any interest in in any of us UNLESS we are already involved in criminal activity, or pose an imminent threat to others.

Tasked with providing examples from history, Second Amendment enthusiasts raise extreme cases, such as the canard that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union took away people’s guns as a step toward oppressing them. In the case of Hitler’s Germany, this is simply false, since the 1938 German Weapons Act expanded gun ownership rights in general; the Nazis only confiscated weapons in the racist case of a minority: Jewish citizens.

The Bolshevik example is more accurate, so far as it goes . . . but if you study the history of pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia and the Russian Revolution, you find a population that was mostly agricultural/pre-industrial and illiterate, centuries of state religion featuring a monarch regarded as God’s representative on earth, and a collapsing domestic economy after four years of world war that left in its wake massive national starvation and millions of returning, jobless veterans -- all significant pre-conditions that enabled a tiny cadre of Leninists to effect a violent takeover of the population centers of a vast nation.