THE EAGLE STREET MILITIA
The other afternoon, as I was backing the minivan out of the driveway, I saw my neighbor walk to his car, his big Glock in a holster in the center of his back.
At the time, I had a small Beretta in a camera case on my hip and, out walking his dogs, the neighbor on the other side wore a bulky fanny pack that had among his necessities a .45.
We are the Eagle Street Militia.
And it’s not just us.
If you skip over a block, there’s a guy who bought a Ruger pocket gun a couple of weeks ago, to go with his .40, and his neighbor not only has guns he’s also unusually good with a sword.
And those are just the ones I know of. Many of the neighbors I’ve not met and the odds are they are firearms owners, too.
And we’re all the Eagle Street Militia.
The guy with the new Ruger jokes about the name, and an actual organization is only a joke, but as a group of people we are pretty much the militia the Founding Fathers envisioned and relied on.
We are armed and free. Armed because we are free, and free because we are armed.
And should anything untoward come along, I imagine we have the wherewithal to handle it.
In fact, our police chief once joked that if anything really bad happened, his officers would have to come borrow our guns. He’s right. And he might want to borrow some of us to use them. The neighbor on the one side is an armorer second to none, and the neighbor on the other side is a rifleman with combat experience.
And the fact is that our homes are better protected than our school, or even our village. And if there’s ever a sniper on a tower it’ll be a citizen or an out-of-town cop who takes him down.
And I’m fine with that.
Because my safety is my responsibility, and an armed community is a polite community, and this is the American way.
Those who feel differently mock gun owners. They call them paranoid and dangerous, unstable and compensating. Not completely grasping the heritage of American liberty, they belittle those who do.
And they have allies in the media. The notion of firearms ownership is stigmatized or ignored, and a conspiracy of silence hides the common culture and common choice of this country.
Because this country was born with a gun in its hand, and it lives today with a gun in its hand, and that is not a precursor of violence, it is a protector of liberty. The liberty to walk down the street without fearing a thug, the liberty to sleep at night safe in your bed, the liberty to know that an oppressor’s might is limited by the people’s ability to fight.
I find comfort and peace in having a gun close at hand. And while publicly many will scorn that sentiment, privately many more share it and live it. And it’s time for those people to be heard.
Not in a boastful way, or in a fashion to invite conflict or thievery, but as a growing social understand and acceptance of that which political correctness would hide away.
We are the Eagle Street Militia. A line of houses with something in common. And there are plenty more streets in the village, with their own lines of houses.
There are 12-guages with slug barrels and .38s with snub noses, old rifles from the Second World War and new rifles from the battlefields of today. Guns owned by our grandfathers and guns we’ll pass to our grandchildren.
It is a culture not of the implement, but of the heart. A freedom-loving, self-reliant heart that beats in the heart of men and women alike and taps out a patriotic tune.
There are sporting-clays people and defensive-carry people and deer-hunting people and target-shooting people and they all have one thing in common – you don’t want to cross them. Because, push come to shove, they have the means, the tools and the temperament to stand up for themselves.
Because they are Americans.
And Americans own guns.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2010
