CCW Story: Part 26: My Fears.

Finally the day arrived and I went and picked up the Bersa. I hade never owned a gun, I had always gone about unarmed. Since high school I have run in the early mornings, before dawn, and never had a problem with people. I have never been bitten by a stray dog, although a Collie fell on me once with his mouth open.

Over the course of 15 years, I have ridden road bicycles untold thousands of miles through the rough parts of many major US cities, and never been messed with by criminals. Cops, yes, criminals, no. I have ridden mountain bikes for thousands of miles in the woods rumored to be frequented by perverts, and never been messed with by a pervert. Angry granola crunching hikers and redneck park rangers, yes. Perverts, no. Firearms literature warns that if we are unarmed, we are at risk from criminals and perverts. I was about to arm myself against threats that I had read about, but never seen. The only people I know who had died of gunshot wounds, had intentionally inflicted those wounds upon themselves. My only fears of being shot was of goofballs plinking in the woods, with me as their Lycra-clad backstop 400 yards away, or as the victim of a stray bullet in a urban shootout.

Thus, a firearms purchase was a major change in my life philosophy, a sacrifice for the sake of my seeking the truth about American gun culture. I have been able to legally purchase a firearm for 15 years, but the idea to walk into a store and buy a gun had never once occurred to me.

To be honest, I felt that if my time came, it would come, and I would be powerless to change my fate, no matter how well armed I was. I was never worried about armed assault, death at the hands of a criminal. When I was racing bicycles, my fear was drunk drivers, or somebody looking for CD’s on the floor of their car as the hurtled down the road at 60 MPH, their car drifting towards me across the road. I had lost friends this way.

I feared the aluminum fork crown of my road bike separating from the steel steering tube during a decent. I feared my heart stopping during a race, as I held it at above 180 beats per minute for hours at a time. I feared field sprints, and motor pacing through the team cars at 40+ MPH to catch back up to the peleton after a flat. I feared criteriums in the rain, to the point that I stopped racing criteriums in Belgium.