I received a nice note from Frank R. Brownell III, shown below, which meant quite a lot to me. He wanted to thank me for some of the writing I have contributed on behalf of his company, which of course have led to radio spots and other indirect support of his very fine company. I loved Brownells as a young man when one of my very first jobs out of high school was a gunsmith, and I still love them as they are the best of their kind in the world regarding gunsmithing equipment. Guns are the keys to American freedom protecting capitalism from the treachery of socialism. Governments—all governments—are inclined toward socialism so we need guns to keep those back-of-the-train bureaucrats in their pin-headed offices, and off our backs. Not from violence, but from the knowledge of equality that guns provide to individuals who are always prone to aggression from collective organizations and institutions of consensus. The only reason that socialism has been such a slow boil in America hidden behind the changed names of the Democratic Party is because Americans have so many guns. And the people who keep those guns working are gunsmiths, making them one of the most important fields of endeavor in a free society.
I have too many hobbies—entirely too many. I would need about 3000 years to develop them all. But out of them all, the one that I think is the most important is my love of guns. I’m not a person who has a tremendous number of guns. But having them, and being able to work on them is a value that to me is excessively valuable. That is why I originally wanted to be a gunsmith more than any other profession. When I was young and newly married, I was set to become a global adventurer—as a career. My experience at that time could only take me satisfactorily to such a destination. I had done just about everything and experienced so much before I even turned 18 that I was headed in that direction. While honeymooning in Gatlinburg, Tennessee with my country club oriented new wife, we picked that destination because I wanted to show her how the other half of life lived. That’s why we picked the blue-collar landscape of southeastern Tennessee to have our honeymoon instead of someplace like Hawaii. I always enjoyed the finer things in life, but I grew up blue-collar, so I was always able to maintain that balance. My wife was curious about that life, so we vacationed in a way that would show her those things while still living in the kind of luxury she was accustomed to. I found a chalet for us, took her to the finest restaurants in Gatlinburg at the time, and we drove there in our BMW shortly after the wedding. The view out our window was of the Smoky Mountains, it was very remote and spacious, and we had the whole place all to ourselves. It made for a wonderful honeymoon in the fashion a young couple would expect to entertain themselves who are newly married. She was comfortable and happy, thus she was open to the kind of places I liked to go—like leather shops, gun shops and knife stores. This was all new to her, so we wanted to capture that moment in a bottle and I decided that I’d become a gunsmith to give her that kind of life 365 days a year 24 hours a day.
That was when I discovered for the first time Brownells. They had their act together and walked that fine line between luxury and blue-collar sentiment seamlessly, which enabled me to bring a little Gatlinburg to our daily life which made my wife very happy. Soon we were on a path unique to us and making a living that wasn’t as Champaign glass specific as what was expected of us. She was raised to be a country club fashion model, and I was personally comfortable in tents, campfires, and luxury hotel accommodations anywhere on earth. We were trying to do something different and that was to fulfill a new idea we came up with during our honeymoon that combined everything into a nice domestic life that we both wanted, but had no real examples to follow—leaving it largely to us to create from scratch. Brownells made that dream a possibility that we clawed at for several years. We started having kids and from there the pressure increased and our goals as a couple become much more difficult to achieve. I took a step away from the gunsmithing because increased demands to have a more socially acceptable living, and the difficulties of being so young trying to do something that progressives were trying to destroy in the years leading up to Bill Clinton were ominous. This made the dream we had seem so hard to reach which put a lot of pressure on us as a young couple.
I am a lot of things to a lot of people—but one thing that is completely consistent across the spectrum of thought is that I am extremely tenacious and I never forget anything. It is likely the aspect of me that is most recognizable to other people. Once I get my hooks in something, I never let it go until I get what I want or need out of it. If I want to do something, I do it—hell or high water—nothing will stop me. Nothing. That means I sometimes put things off for a few decades until I have the time or means to get back around to them, and that is what I did with gunsmithing. I took some time to catch things up, deal with the encroachments of modernism seeking to impose itself on our married life, and keep the coals of gunsmithing warm in the back of my mind always with that vision of a life created in our imagination at Gatlinburg during our honeymoon alive no matter what was going on.
During our honeymoon we went to several leather shops and looked at boots, cowboy hats, and gun holsters and we wanted a lifestyle that incorporated all those elements. For a country club girl, someone who was actually being groomed by the John Casablanca modeling agency to do photo shoots for Cosmopolitan in New York and whose parents were members of the very prestigious Becket Ridge Country Club at the time—this life of leather, lace and red, white and blue Americana complete with bullwhips was something very appealing. It was a way out of the mundane conversation often conducted at power lunches—which are important for business, but often leave people short on intellectual stimulation. So she was all in if I could provide for her, which was a lot of pressure on me—it was a lot to sign up for. She literally had her pick of who she could marry, and there were plenty of up and coming lawyers, sons of business tycoons, and well-to-dos offering to sweep her away into a comfortable life continuing her country club expectations. It takes a lot to sign up with a woman knowing there is a line from here to the moon of men wanting to sweep her up if you stumble even a little bit. We determined to live a traditional life as a couple to seal the promises we made during our honeymoon—which included bullwhips, cowboy hats, and lots of firearms.
To understand that promise made in Gatlinburg, Tennessee so many years ago—the kind of America we committed ourselves to, is to understand what kind of company Brownells is. They are technically modern, traditional as a business, creative—but place at the head of their business model a sincere appreciation of quality and integrity. When you get something from Brownells it has a feel of quality to it, no matter what it is. That is because of their value system, which is the kind of America my wife and I made a decision to defend—any way possible.
We are at a stage in our life where that tenacity has outlasted many of the oppositions presented and the restrictions upon us are breaking loose. That’s why it’s no surprise to us that the first contact I made after that weight was lifted off me was back to Brownells. Sure it took over twenty years, but who’s counting? They represent the kind of America we fell in love with during a dreamy honeymoon. Brownells is the best that our country offers as a free market option that protects the Second Amendment with gun maintenance while setting the industry standard. As Cabela’s and Bass Pro expand their outdoor shopping empires—much to my liking—it is important to remember that Brownells did it first. When the nation was reeling under progressive strife, Brownells held strong so that the rest of the country wouldn’t lose themselves to the encroaching progressivism that sought to infect the only free country left on planet earth. Brownells did more than just preserve gun maintainence, it held down a family friendly business model that values good old-fashioned conduct which built the nation to begin with—and they have endured successfully in spite of the opposition against them over many, many years.
So it meant a lot to me to receive the nice note from Frank Brownell, III. He didn’t have to send me a letter, and he certainly didn’t have to type it up and mail it personally to me. He could have sent an email or a tweet. But he didn’t, he sent a well thought out letter with a personalized signature because it mattered to him to reach out and maintain personal contact with people he values, which is at the heart of why they have been such a successful company. They simply are the best in the business, and I’m so happy they are out there. I’m not only getting back into doing some gunsmithing, but I’m starting an entirely new hobby that will require a lot of work with Brownells. It is part of something I think is extremely important given what we know about the progressive attempts to attack the Second Amendment and the defense of freedom that personal firearm protection provides. We need to re-sell freedom to the American people, and the best way to do that is with firearms—and I plan to capitalize on that for the sake of marketing, and sentiment. My wife and I still have those original dreams, and we are not the kind of people who let dreams slip away. And those dreams are more possible because of companies like Brownells. They are what we are fighting for—good people, good ethics, and always striving to provide good products in a way that is specifically American. They are the foundation of that dream, and I will always cherish them.
The feeling is mutual, Frank. Keep up the good work, you guys are not alone.
Even though I felt at the time that I had lived five lifetimes before I ever hit 20 years of age and had some college under my belt along with two yeas of gunsmithing school, that a fresh-faced kid from Southern Ohio was going to struggle financially under that chosen profession. Customers after all like seasoned veterans for that kind of work and I hadn’t been around the block much in the shooting world—not officially anyway. So as a young gunsmith in a little shed behind our home, I was getting work—but it wasn’t the type of high-priced work I’d need to care for a growing family while keeping my wife home so that she could care properly for our children. The other issue was that clients who would give me a shot as such a young face were the type of people who were in trouble with the law and did not want the older, and orthodox Federal Firearms License holders to handle their needs. I couldn’t bring those types of people around the house with a one and two-year old children running around. The other issue was that I needed more experience on the craftsmanship end. So I took my acquired skills learned through gunsmithing and took professional jobs that required frequent measurements of .001 of an inch reading micrometers and calipers so that I’d develop all the hand skills of the gunsmithing trade. Along the way I’d write books, get more involved with bullwhip work and spend another five lifetimes over the next twenty-five years getting lots, and lots of experience using many of the gunsmithing skills I had to do work for various companies. Whereas I made the money to take care of my family in lots of unusual ways my love of gunsmithing never really went away. And one of the great memories from my past during the early days of my marriage to my wife before we started a family was the constant books and catalogues from Brownells which populated our home with huge stacks of shooting literature.
My love for America was shaped during my youth by a gradual introduction to Brownells through my gunsmithing school and our frequent trips to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. I loved the common sense of rural Americans who found the popular Smoky Mountain resort town such a destination of choosing. And under that culture was a love of guns, and the people at Brownells even more than the NRA loved the business side of firearms to a point that I found it easy to connect to. They are such a great organization who unselfishly taught so many neat tricks that they preserved in a way I thought greatly beneficial an aspect of American life that I could see vanishing before my eyes. Only in the gun circles of companies like Brownells was the true nature of American life being preserved in the way the Constitution always intended. The videos shown here are just a small example of how Brownells approach the business as they teach how to clean and repair a basic single action revolver. They additionally break down the care of AR-15s and SIGs with the same patient instruction and they do a lot of this for free. Also on their website is a section that offers schematics for just about every gun in production so that if you need a little sear for some obscure gun you found at a trade show, you can order it by part number and get a replacement.
When I finally bought my .500 magnum recently after many years and miles of contemplation dividing up my busy life, I took a little more time to admire the vast stock that Bass Pro Shop had to provide materials to the shooting sportsman. I told my wife that having a place like Bass Pro around would have been very helpful in my early days of gunsmithing because there was nothing like that back then. You had to go to Gatlinburg or some other exotic place to get that type of positive American atmosphere, let alone the unequivocal support. But I also told her that Bass Pro had good stuff on their shelves, but that they were no Brownells. That’s when I realized that I hadn’t visited their site since I stopped performing gunsmithing, so I pulled them up on my iPad and reconnected with an old friend.
I was so happy to see that Brownells was still going strong. They still offer their gigantic full color catalogue which was very expensive back in 1989—it must be ungodly today—but they still ship them to their customers. They offer hundreds of how-to videos on YouTube completely free of charge and have that same American enthusiasm for the shooting profession they have always been known for, which was a relief. So it didn’t take me long to reconnect with them after two decades. As foreign as it sounds, a few decades can get away from you if you don’t watch your time carefully. I am very selfish with my time because I always have so much going on. Shooting was only a part of my life, so when you get busy with other things like philosophy, politics, legalisms, economics, and raising a family the proper way, months and years fly by like lightning across the sky. But it’s never too late to come back to an old project which for me began with the purchase of my .500 magnum from Smith and Wesson.
Another thing that came up when I was younger was the stigma of shooting. I certainly felt it during the late 80s into 90s as the Clinton administration looked like it would be successful in banning military style firearms after the Brady Bill. I didn’t know at the time if the shooting profession itself was going to be banned all together—it looked that way at the time. I wasn’t sure how long a company like Brownells would be able to continue doing what they were doing. When it comes to gunsmithing, they are the primary supplier. They are the backbone to keeping the shooting industry humming along. As progressive political activists like George Soros attempt to buy up American gun manufacturers to strategically end the supply of guns in America to private residence, it is the many years of commitment to building a client base of gunsmiths all across the United States that will ensure that shooting never dies out in the only free nation on earth—at least free in principle. So long as there is a Brownells, there is a gunsmith somewhere who can build a gun from scratch. Gun manufacturers are not necessarily needed. But gunsmiths are—and because of Brownells, there are still a healthy number of them around who can keep the sport alive.
It’s easy to forget what America was always supposed to be when you watch the nightly news and read from its newspapers—particularly those from New York and Los Angeles. But America is quite alive and well in the stores of Bass Pro and the pages of Brownells. Of that later, Brownells is in a class by itself, and if you are a shooter, it would be a good idea to know who and what they are. They are a tremendous resource for the modern American shooter—which is a unique company specific to the United States. You won’t find an equivalent company anywhere else in the world. Sweden can make tables and chairs for their IKEA stores, Germans can make their cars, France can breed women with unshaved armpits, and the Chinese can continue to make the stuff that Americans want to buy at Wal-Mart but there is nothing like a Brownells in Mexico, Brazil or Australia. They are specific to the culture of Americana that we all know and love and are the backbone of our lifestyle of freedom.
My return back to my roots is the awareness that strategically progressive activists have sought to end businesses like Brownells and its customer base. After what I’ve learned in all the other aspects of my life which has filled these pages with so much color and candor is that the best way to defeat that strategy is with an unapologetic embrace of the American art of shooting and caring for our guns. And when it comes to caring for guns, Brownells as a company are the experts. A look through their catalogue is enough to make a grown man weep. There has never been a better collection of tools and gadgets anywhere between the covers of a big catalog. Brownells does everything right and are a treasure from my past that I am happy to see just as strong today as they were then. Brownells is the blood behind the body of the shooting profession. They are what helps keep an interest in the NRA and other shooting organizations so robust, because Brownells keeps guns working and passed down from one generation to another constantly building a client base that has not be snuffed out by activists hell-bent on making America into a restricted nation like Europe. Brownells keeps the gunsmithing profession alive and is the best source out there for keeping those family treasures functioning and robust. And if you didn’t know about them dear reader, well, now you do.
The Overmanwarrior 