Dana Loesch - Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America

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For Chris, Liam, and Ewan, truth isnt mean, its truth.

In memory of Howard Scaggs and Chip Gerdes. Rolltide.

When I was a little girl, my grandpa took me out in his backyard. He showed me how to shoot food cans with a BB gun, then he graduated me to playing with my male cousins little green army men. He was obviously the kind of person who Barack Obama had in mind when he famously and derisively mocked gun owners and other rural Americans as bitter clingers. Talking about visiting small-town Americans as if he were on some kind of safari, the elitist Harvard-trained community organizer, believing he was talking to donors in a private setting, confided his total contempt. Its not surprising then they get bitter, he said. They cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who arent like them.

Well, I guess you could say my grandpa was an OBC, an Original Bitter Clinger. The man thought bankers were crooks, doctors were quacks, and that the only things you could count on in life were God, family, and a shotgun. He probably wouldnt care much for Barack Obamanot, as Obama apparently assumed, because anyone who disagreed with him was a racist. Instead, it was because the president lacks what my grandpa had in abundance: common sense. Obama organized communitieswhatever that means. My grandpa actually lived in a community, and my visits there really changed my life.

Their little bolthole in the Ozarks was a sanctuary for a kid like me. The nearest supermarket was forty-five minutes away. If you needed beer or cheese in a pinch, the Mini Mart had you mostly covered; otherwise you killed it, milked it, caught it yourself, or distilled it in a bathtub. My grandparents ate everything they killedraccoon, squirrel, fish, deer, turkeyand were grateful for natures bounty. They kept goats and harvested fresh eggs from their chickens most mornings. Grandpa would take his grandsons hunting with him and bring back whatever they killed, then let us granddaughters watch him skin and clean it in the backyard. One time he made me hold a squirrels legs while he pulled the fur off.

When I stayed with my grandparents during the falls and winters, I loved to curl up with blankets by their wood-heated stove. That often meant Id wake up with whatever Grandpa killed last night carefully laid out as a joke beside me, their lifeless eyes staring straight into mine.

Nothing my grandpa killed ever went to waste. Thats how bitter clingers work in a community: They live in harmony with nature because they rely on nature to provide and sustain them. Hunting out of season or thinning a herd too much meant destabilization. Bitter clingers are conservationists, not environmentalists. They dont need bureaucrats in plush offices in Washington lecturing them about how to protect the land; the land is essential to their way of life.

My grandparents always had some of us grandkids staying with them. Bless them, they were never left to their own devices, and Im not sure they would have known what to do if they ever were alone. They had a few bedrooms in their tiny house, but it didnt matter: The youngest grandkids would all somehow find their way into Grandma and Grandpas bed and they slept there, much like a little kid crowds their bed with stuffed animals. As a result, Grandpa was always falling out of his own bed or some kid was falling and getting stuck between the mattress and the wall.

One summer night I slept in their bed with my younger cousin as the cool valley breeze blew through the window, rustling through the curtains. The chorus of frogs and crickets outside was broken by the sound of someone sobbing and running up my grandparents gravel drive. The storm door slammed and there was commotion. I learned at a young age that you hear more if you pretend to be asleep, so I did just that when Grandma rushed down the hall to check on us before hurrying back down the dark hall toward the light of the living room. The late-night visitor was their daughter, my aunt, clad in nothing but nightclothes. She had been assaulted by her estranged husband. In between sobs, she told them that she had escaped after her husband tried to take a knife to her throat. When he had gone for his gun, she managed to flee. As she sat in her parents house, shaking, she was terrified that hed come for her. Grandma called the law, but in a rural county such as these parts, the law could be miles and miles away. While Grandma dialed it in, Grandpa silently strode into their bedroom. His every step rang simultaneously with anger and with careful purpose. He quietly opened his glass-and-wood gun case, removed his shotgun, and strode back through the living room. From there he went right out to the front porch, sat on the swing, and cocked it.

As I listened to him rock rhythmically, creaking back and forth in that swing, I never felt safer in my life. I fell into a sound sleep.

I later learned that Grandpa sat on that porch swing until a deputy arrived nearly forty minutes after Grandmas call. People were expected to be able to take care of their own, with prejudice. I didnt know it at the timeit was really the only world I knewbut the Ozarks were different. It was a place different from other parts of the country where you cannot be prevailed upon to do anything without the aid or permission of the government. Where my family is from, it never occurred to us to outsource our self-defense to a distant law enforcement entity that had huge rural counties to cover with just a few deputies. It also never occurred to me that our grandparents or parents firearms were toys with which we could play. We knew what firearms were and that you cant unpull a trigger; we were taught that lesson from the very first moment we could walk. Guns arent toys. The lesson about guns was so ingrained in our communities that people had them in gun racks in their pickups, without any fear that a child might grab one. That was unheard-of. My grandpas own handcrafted gun case didnt have a lock and was used more to display his collection than to keep them locked away. Our parents taught us not to touch a hot stove, not to run into the street, not to play with guns. Most important, we were taught a respect for life.

You dont put your finger on this unless youre fixin to kill something, my Grandpa once sternly told me as I trained the barrel of my cousins BB gun on a He-Man action figure. When we moved to the city I was shocked at how many of my friends werent taught this. My mom kept a loaded .38 revolver in her nightstand; I knew it was there, and I knew that I was to never mess with it except as my last hope of defense. I mentioned it once to a girlfriend during a sleepover. She was shocked and wanted to see it.

No, I told her. My family also taught me respect for privacy. My mother will ask you to leave. And that was the end of that.

Living in St. Louis, I didnt need to hunt for my own food, since supermarkets were minutes away. We had a few guns in the house for security, but that was the extent of it.

It wasnt until I got active in politics that my life and the lives of my children were threatened that I got angry. Kids can tell when their parents are afraid. They can sense when their safety isnt assured. I never wanted my family to have that feeling. I wanted my children to feel as secure as I did that night at my grandparentss house, with my grandpa keeping watch on the porch, creaking away on his porch swing all night long.