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.
Happy Birthday to The Dick Act of 1902, the controversial law that just turned 100 years old and is in essence one of the greatest arguments for the rights of military style firearms for a civilian population.
The Militia Act of 1903 (32 Stat. 775), also known as the Dick Act, was initiated by United States Secretary of WarElihu Root following the Spanish–American War of 1898, after the war demonstrated weaknesses in the militia, and in the entire U.S. military. The act formulated the concept of the National Guard and also ensured that all state military forces were simultaneously dual reservists under the authority of the Army Reserve. This last measure was to prevent state governors from using National Guard forces as “private armies”, in many ways as had been done in the American Civil War and to ensure that the President could, at any time, mobilize state military forces into the federal armed forces.
U.S. SenatorCharles W. F. Dick, a Major General in the Ohio National Guard and the chair of the Committee on the Militia,[1] sponsored the 1903 Act towards the end of the 57th U.S. Congress. Under this legislation, passed January 21, 1903, the organized militia of the States were given federal status to the militia, and required to conform to Regular Army organization within five years. The act also required National Guard units to attend 24 drills and five days annual training a year, and, for the first time, provided for pay for annual training. In return for the increased Federal funding which the act made available, militia units were subject to inspection by Regular Army officers, and had to meet certain standards.
The Dick Act of 1902 has been extensively quoted of late as gun grabbing politicians like Chuck Schumer, Diane Feinstein, and Mayor Bloomberg have attempted to use the tragedy of mass shootings to advance their private anti-gun positions. However, contrary to the belief of many Second Amendment defenders, The Dick Act of 1902 is subject to repeal or being ignored altogether. After all, many laws that are on the books currently are openly ignored by government for its own convenience. For instance, the Tenth Amendment is especially ignored and manipulated by politicians under the “commerce clause.” Thieves do not care about laws, so it should go without saying that criminals who run government don’t give much notion to The Dick Act of 1902. They will find a way to circumvent it at any turn, because they are functioning as “enemies of the state” as it as the state “should be.”
The definition of how the “state” should be is outlined in The Federalist Papers, and Anti-Federalist Papers, both books among my greatest personal literary treasures. When I speak of how America should be, I take those arguments as the original text and source of my foundation beliefs. Modern politicians are of less quality than those who participated in those arguments, and are less valid as a result. Their modern opinions hold no value for me. They routinely ignore the Constitution, or seek to manipulate the wording at every turn. So I do the same toward them—I seek to rid myself of their manipulative influence—and corrosive nature. As an American I have no intention of being pulled collectively into their degraded philosophy of centralized power.
This brings us back to the intention of The Dick Act of 1902. The intention behind the Act was to make all of America able to defend itself against all future armies, no matter what the economic conditions for the nation might be under any circumstance. The assumption was that at some point in the future, as was evident during the Spanish-American War that America may not be able to properly support a military, and that may well be the case with a debt of $17 trillion and a collapsed dollar which appears unavoidable at this point in time. As much as politicians deny the possibility, at the current spending and inflation rate, America is only about 5 years away from such a devastating fiscal collapse. When and if that happens, America’s borders will be very vulnerable to invasion from hostile regimes, such as Venezuela, Central America, Mexico, the Russia, China, and North Korea—all have elements of their governments who are licking their chops at America’s evident decline. The Dick Act of 1902 values a last layer of defense in America if the government is unable to support an organized military under federal dollars. The citizens of our nation should be equally able to have arms that can fill the void of declined military support due to poor economic circumstances. In 1902, the military had been gradually scaled back in the years after the Civil War to pay off the massive debts that had been incurred, and it is very possible that the future of America will go through the same ordeal. A strong military is not always possible, but is only a direct result of a powerful country with a strong economy. A strong economy is a fading light in present day America, so in the future, the defense of our country will fall on the citizen’s militia—which will have to function separately from a paid National Guard. Military reliability may not be reliable in the future so everything that is available to military personnel needs to be available to the back yard patriot—and that includes rocket launchers and machine guns of all calibers—for the defense of our nation in the power void left by a bankrupt military.
Modern politicians are in denial that their policies will fail, and they wish to believe that their way of governance will always prevail. They want to see that Americans have trust in their military, and the defense of the nation. But reality says something else. We can’t even trust our government schools to not abuse children, how can the government be trusted with every aspect of security for our nation? After all, didn’t 9/11 happen because lots of people didn’t do their jobs? People who believe such things are ridiculous, and impractical. It is nice to have a military, and it is nice to have a National Guard, but it is the ability to assemble a militia on call, for neighbors to organize against a domestic threat, even if that threat is an internal collapse of government, which is the last best hope dedicated to preserving the Constitution under catastrophic social failure. The private citizen army with the ability to assemble with arms purchased not by tax payers for government ends, but by their own desires for freedom with their own money is the key to real, “decentralized” freedom. Those types of people are the last line of defense that keeps America free, and requires citizens to have the ability to purchase all arms of all types in all the quantities that they can afford for the preservation of the nation.
Diane Feinstein along with her gun grabbing friends assumes that life will always be just as it is right now. They trust foolishly the premise set by the United Nations that the world’s tyrannical enemies can all be subdued by peaceful measures and words on paper. Gun-grabbers believe, as naively as their idol Woodrow Wilson believed, that the world would be better off if only academics ran everything. Yet they are as foolish as their fellow tyrants like Hitler who believed the world would be alright if only he eliminated all the Jews, or Stalin if all resisters to communism could be “purged” from politics, they all believe that centralized management is the key to a country’s success. To the gun-grabbers everything would be peaceful if only the most violent in our society were contained away and separated from the rest of the society, and guns were kept from their hands. All tyrants have the same childish notions.
Reality says otherwise–that those who are safest are those best able to defend themselves without large organizations of bureaucratic entities to act on their behalf. What separates America from everyone else is the instantaneous ability to form a militia as the third line of defense, as outlined in The Dick Act of 1902. The elements that make America different from every place else in the world are seen in the kinds of minds that shaped such laws in the first place. The reliance is not on a government solution to safety, but on the local level to react quickly, and decisively, and to overcome any enemy with mass, because such an element cannot be strategically planned for by an invading army. And foreign armies do plan an invasion of American soil, even if those plans are only a fantasy at present. They just don’t act on it because in America invasion would be impossible to achieve because there is not centralization—which is the only way to secure an area and convert it over to the invader’s way of thinking. In that spirit American enemies root for the gun-grabbers to succeed and hope to steal away the rights of Americans to arm themselves under a banner of peace. Only then can they hope to occupy America. Strategically, they are already half way there. If the military falls due to pour funding, and the politicians use every emotional crises to steal away Americans ability to purchase guns and ammunition then defeat of our continent is a forgone conclusion from all the European nations who have a bone to pick that started with the American Revolution. For those who think such thoughts are too far in the past do not know the minds of most Europeans—especially those in academia who shape the thoughts of world society. Yes, there is a plan, and the only thing that keeps it from happening is the spirit of America that is reflected in The Dick Act of 1902. It may be only 100 years old, but it is more relevant today than it was then, and for much more sinister, global tactical maneuvers.
The Overmanwarrior 