I'm against gun control

This shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone who read my other posts. I am a redneck after all and I'm pretty sure you get banished from the countryside otherwise. At the minimum your Elk's Lodge membership would get revoked.

I'm pretty safe from the laws changing where I live because North Carolina is a relatively conservative state as far as that is concerned. Like anywhere else, the metropolitan areas like Raleigh and Charlotte tend to have masses of people that want only the police to have guns but I would venture to guess that more than 90% of the rest of the state votes based a great deal on how a particular candidate is going to protect our right to bear arms.

A story recently popped up in the news about how the city of Baltimore tied a record that no city really wants to break. The number of murders in a year. It is unclear from the article whether or not all of these murders were committed by firearm but the implication is that this is the case. I'm not going to dig into it.

The reason why this is troubling is because Baltimore is one of the few large cities in America where the population has been declining for years as people flock to move out of the city - Yet, the number of murders is increasing.

So what is the point of me talking about this? I am talking about it because Baltimore has some of the strictest gun laws in the country... which is all meaningless when you consider that criminals don't really concern themselves with what is legal and what isn't.

North Carolina on the other hand, has some of the most lax gun laws in the country and has significantly less gun crime. The stats that some media try to show is that there is a lot of "death by firearm" in North Carolina but what they fail to show is that a majority of these are suicides and while no one can say for certain, it is pretty conceivable that in the absence of a gun someone who is suicidal would use some other method if a gun was not accessible. You do have to have a criminal background check to get handguns, but as long as you have ID, you can get a rifle at Wal-Mart if you simply have enough money to purchase one. North Carolina also honors gun permits issued in other states, meaning that if you have a concealed-carry permit from any other state, it is valid here as well. Ironically, Maryland, and therefore Baltimore, will not honor a N.C. concealed carry permit.

The local Elk's lodge, which i am a regular at, is a private club and therefore has no restrictions on guns being brought on premises even though it is a bar. Let me tell you... there is zero chance that anyone is ever going to rob that place since all the men, and a great deal of the women, are always packing. There has NEVER been an instance where anyone brandished a firearm in there, regardless of how drunk they got. There have been fights in there, as is typical in such an environment, but no one has ever pulled a gun on anyone.

Us rednecks were brought up differently. A gun is not a method of gaining an advantage over someone when deadly force is not necessary. That would be a real pu**y move and I don't know how to describe it, but there is a certain honor among us country folks and that might surprise you but yeah, we have honor an it is very important to us.

My friend told me this article is too long and if that is the case, so be it. I feel passionately about this issue and wanted to talk about it.