About The Author
As you can tell by the image above, the author of this site doesn't usually take himself too seriously. And he's camera shy, otherwise his picture would be up here. "Besides," he says, "no one really wants to know what I look like, but they do want to know that I'm not some kind of kook." Yeah, like that picture is really gonna help!
The author's first name really is Bill which sort of explains the Doonesbury Bill the Cat character above. While he doesn't endorse the obviously liberal viewpoint of the creator of that comic strip, he did enjoy the humor most of the time.
Born in the 1950's and growing up in period where schools had nuclear air-raid drills --anyone remember duck 'n cover?, Tail fins? Turquoise automobiles? -- puts him smack in the "baby-boom" generation. It was a time when American principles and traditions were considered something to be proud of. He was raised by parents who were life-long Democrats in a time where being a Democrat didn't mean closet-socialist. Growing up in the "good times" of the post-world-war-two era, with two parents who remembered, first hand, the Great Depression and were determined to raise their children right, he learned lessons in tolerance, charity, manners, duty, responsibility and, of course, the sting of a few spankings.
Coming to California's Santa Clara (now "Silicon") valley in the early 1960's, he's seen the area's economy shift from aerospace (Lockheed, UTC, etc.) to electronics. He knows first hand the worry caused by recession economics during the bust times of the 1970's and the boom times of the Reagan-Bush years. During these years he began to see that the Democratic party had turned left, heading for more government power, more bureaucracy, more intrusion into the lives of Americans. Examining the Republican party he found he couldn't hold with the extreme-right agenda either. So like many Americans, he opted to register as an "Independent" and vote based on what they stood for, not on their party's platform. Sadly, that hasn't seemed to work very well either.
Today, after almost twenty years in the computer industry, Bill works as a business systems analyst for a small consulting firm. While he enjoys traveling for vacations and recreation, he finds business travel mundane, claiming that every city looks like the same kind of hotel room or conference room. He holds an associate degree in Administration of Justice as well as a number of technical certificates from the computer industry in arcane arts of system administration and programming.
Having first been taught firearms safety by his father, a former U.S. Army Air Corps officer, then by a retired FBI agent and NRA certified instructor, he has enjoyed many years of safely shooting handguns, rifles and shotguns in shooting sports and hunting sports. Several years ago he combined his enjoyment of shooting with his fondness for American history, learning about the history of the Second Amendment and the American struggle for independence. After hearing some of the "facts" put out by gun-control advocates he started researching the issue and found that many of their statements didn't quite add up to the reality he knows. Thus, this web-site was born.
Currently, Bill does not have a membership in the National Rifle Association (NRA) or any other gun rights group. Primarily, this is because many people think that membership in these organizations means you have somehow been brainwashed and will spout only "gun lobby propaganda". You will find a few tidbits of information from the NRA on this site, but a majority of the information comes from other sources. Some of these sources will include gun-rights organizations, but many more come from books, scholarly works, court decisions, other authors and newspapers. It is not necessary to listen to the NRA or its opponents like Handgun Control, Inc. and it's spin-offs to understand the debate.
The purpose of this site is to educate, inform and make people think. If you leave this site questioning what you have heard in the media or thinking that you didn't have all of the facts, then this web-site will have been worth all the effort, cold coffee and late nights.