The health benefits of firearms ownership.

By the time you're finished reading this, I hope you'll be calling your elected officials and demanding reduced health-insurance premiums for firearms owners.

Many years ago, some numbnuts came up with an atrocious piece of twisted logic that tried to claim that if you owned a firearm, it was forty-three times more likely to be used against you if you tried to use it in defense of yourself or your family/loved ones.

The liberals jumped on this and adopted it like a stray kitten.

For the record, I consider anti-gunners little more than cowards or power-mongers, depending upon their station in life. Elected officials and government employees who favor gun control are power-mongers and wannabe tyrants.

All else who favor gun control are simply closet cowards. Such people lack the fortitude to defend themselves, their family, their community and their nation from the wolves that prowl every society known to civilized man. They mistakenly think that if we are all disarmed, then we can all cower together--giving the appearance of a much larger flock of sheep to the wolves, and hopefully the wolves will only pick off a few bleating, fearful sheep and leave the rest of them alone.

Doesn't work that way. Look at the wolves in Montana and Idaho that have been protected and allowed to run loose. The elk population is being decimated and the wolves are moving in closer to (human) populated areas. We see more and more stories about the wolves snatching family pets and domestic dogs, killing them and moving on.

Our government has done much the same thing with human wolves, known as criminals. The cowards (liberals) began giving criminals additional rights and privileges in hopes of gaining favor with these two-legged predators so as not to become victims themselves. The result? A burgeoning prison population explosion with more felons and as-yet-to-be caught and tried criminals prowling our communities than ever before in this nation's history.

The cowards (liberals) seem to think that if we all turn in our guns, the criminals will turn in theirs. That is like thinking that if the elk give up their antlers, the wolves will give up their fangs.

Fat chance.

But back to the health benefits of firearms ownership. In no particular order, here are some examples in which firearms directly benefit and contribute to our overall improved health.

1. Go shooting and lower your blood pressure. Nothing calms me down more after a stressful day than a few hours at the range or out in the country doing some shooting. Shooting requires concentration and this means you have to push whatever has stressed or upset you to the back of your mind so that you can concentrate on that front sight.

There is also the satisfaction of feeling the recoil, hearing the pop/bang/boom that a firearm makes and subconsciously transferring your stress to that minor explosion and imagining it eradicated in a puff of glorious gun powder igniting as it pushes a projectile down the barrel of your firearm.

And finally, you can transfer your problems to the target you're shooting at, then destroy the target. The cowards (liberals) will be aghast at this, but too bad.

2. Your confidence and self-esteem builds as you continue to improve your shooting skills. Like anything else we do, when we get better, we feel better about ourselves. Good shooting takes practice and commitment. When your groups get better, you experience the satisfaction and fulfillment of self-improvement. It's no different than a baseball player who improves their batting average or a basketball player who improves their free-throw percentage. When we get better at something, we feel better about ourselves.

3. You can build better social relationships with people who share a common attitude. Most folks who own firearms and shoot them regularly share a considerable number of similar attitudes about life as we know it today. Thanks to wacked out media loonies and Hollywood weirdos, right is now wrong and up is now down and so on. Nobody knows what is real anymore. This is not a problem with the overwhelming majority of firearms owners. A little social time spent shooting or hunting and our internal compass and GPS is reset back in its proper course heading.

4. If you're a hunter, you're eating a lot healthier. I'm not sure how many firearms owners are also hunters, but I'd wager at least half of those who own shotguns and rifles also use them to hunt with. Wild game has none of the problems with domesticated beef and pork and fowl that we buy in the grocery stores. Nobody is running around giving hormone shots to whitetail deer or stuffing wild pigs with the latest genetically engineered grains. In fact, one of the challenges in cooking wild game is that there isn't very much fat (in most cases) to work with and I often have to supplement the skillet with a little lard to help sear and cook the meat without scorching it. I never have that problem with ground hamburger I get at the grocery store. Just the opposite--I have to drain the fat.

Your firearm is like a shopping cart--you can use it to fill your freezer and fridge with meat that is far better for you than anything you buy at the corner market. Why isn't the First Lady promoting wild game in our children's school lunches?

5. The biggest health benefit of firearms ownership is being able to preserve your own life. My wife and I are proud and loyal NRA members. As such, we receive the publications and the first thing we read each month is The Armed Citizen where excerpts from actual news stories across the country document incidents where a firearm was used to defend the owner's life or someone else's life.

What could possibly be more beneficial, health-wise, than being able to stay alive when some wolf is trying to rob or rape or kill you?

So the next time some coward (liberal) tries to convince you of the dangers of firearms ownership, refer them back to these five simple, factual examples of how beneficial they are to one's health.

If they're still not convinced, encourage them to go play with the wolves.