Tag Archives: fear

Only an Idiot would Carry with a Live Round Chambered

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A rant.

I own two guns, one of which is a semi-automatic pistol. I blogged about it here.

Yes, I do keep my gun stored loaded. It has a magazine that holds seven shots and that magazine is full and inserted. The gun is in its holster, with a snap strap to prevent it from falling out (even though it fits snugly in there) or inadvertently fired.

I don’t carry it, even though I have a concealed carry permit here in Washington and had one when I lived in Arizona. I consider it a line of last defense in the event of a home invasion (which is highly unlikely where I live) and I can’t get away from an attacker. If a fight or flee situation, I’m not an idiot — I’ll flee.

Like most semi-automatic weapons, a round needs to be chambered before it can be fired. If you’ve watched any kind of movie with a good guy or bad guy getting ready to go into a dangerous situation, you’ve likely seen him (or her) chamber a round by pulling back on the gun’s slide. “Racking the slide” like this brings a round out of the magazine and into the firing chamber. The gun can now be fired with a relatively light squeeze of the trigger.

In other words, when a round is chambered, the gun becomes a very dangerous thing to hold or carry.

And this was proved (again) just yesterday. From a New York Daily News article:

Ruger Semi-Auto
I don’t know what kind of Ruger this idiot was carrying locked and loaded in his church, but it could have been this one: Ruger American Pistol, Semi-Automatic, 9mm, 4.2″ Barrel, 17+1 Rounds

A Tennessee man and his wife were hospitalized after he accidentally opened fire during a discussion about church shootings at a local church.

The unidentified man was at First United Methodist Church in Tellico Plains on Thursday when he was showing a handgun to other attendees at a dinner, according to police in the town south of Knoxville.

His unloaded Ruger was passed around, though the man in his 80s allegedly put the magazine back in and chambered a bullet when it came back to him.

Police said that another person walked up and asked to see the weapon when the owner pulled the trigger.

“Evidently he just forgot that he re-chambered the weapon,” Tellico Plains Police Chief Russ Parks told the Knoxville News Sentinel.

The bullet hit the man’s hand before striking his wife in the abdomen. Both were taken to the hospital and are not believed to have life-threatening injuries.

He forgot that he’d prepped the gun for firing and shot himself and his wife.

Why in the world would anyone chamber a round if he wasn’t ready to fire the gun?

Well, that’s something that the NRA encourages.

You see, the NRA stays strong and powerful and keeps its membership ranks full by convincing people who can’t think for themselves that danger is all around them and they need to be prepared to fight back.

I saw this firsthand when I took a concealed carry course in Arizona years ago, when my wasband bought the first gun for our household. (Back then, the course was required to get a concealed carry permit; I’m not sure if it still is. But we took the course because it was the only pistol training course we could find in our area; I had no desire to carry and still don’t.) The NRA-sponsored course had a very heavy emphasis on the importance of carrying a gun at all times to protect yourself. As the only woman in the class who made it clear she was not interested in carrying, I got special attention. The instructor and his wife came up with numerous unlikely scenarios where I might be called on to shoot an attacker. It was absurd. They assumed I was either an idiot or was looking for trouble. (No, I don’t spend my evenings hanging out on the fringes of Phoenix mall parking lots or take long solo walks in the bad parts of any town. Sheesh.)

You can see this mentality again and again. When Googling “Can you fire a semi auto without first chambering a round?” for some additional information for this blog post, the second search result was this:

Search Result
This is the kind of crap that keeps idiots brainwashed to carry guns with chambered rounds.

So yes, there are a bunch of Second Amendment yahoos running around carrying semi-automatic pistols with chambered rounds, all ready to fire at a touch of the trigger.

And they apparently do so in churches.

Keep in mind that it takes literally a single second to rack a gun’s slide. Does waiting until you’re ready to fire really save you that much time?

I don’t think so.

So yes, I’m a gun owner. But I believe the NRA is harmful to our nation and its people. And that we need sensible gun laws that include education so morons like this guy understand just how dangerous a chambered round can be.

Ladies! Don’t Be Afraid!

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4

There’s no reason you shouldn’t do what you want to do.

The tweet that prompted this post.

Yesterday, one of my Twitter friends shared a tweet that contained a list of the “Top 10 things British women would love to do but are too scared.” The heading at the top of the list asked if readers had done any of them.

I looked at the list and realized I’d done seven of them.

Which ones? Let’s go down the list:

  • Ask for a pay raise. Although I haven’t had an “employer” for more than 20 years, I have asked clients for increases in the rates they pay me — most recently just last week. I honestly can’t remember if I asked my last employers for a raise; in most cases the raises and promotions came automatically and I didn’t need to ask.
  • Travel or holiday alone. I do this all the time — and have been doing it since I began driving in the late 1970s. Hell, I remember taking a train to Canada by myself with just $20 in my pocket when I was 20. One of my Top 10 vacations, in fact, was the “midlife crisis road trip” I took in 2005. I spent 19 days cruising around Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Washington, Montana, and Idaho in my little convertible with no destination or reservations. I had a blast!
  • Get a tattoo. I have two of them on my right ankle. I got them in the 1990s, before everyone and their kid was getting them.
  • Have a bikini wax. Check. ‘Nuff said.

  • Short Hair
    My hair was actually growing out in this photo from 2012.

    Get your hair cut very short. The first time was in the early 1980s when I got a perm cut out down in Greenwich Village in New York City. That was quite a shock to most folks. After that, I wore my hair short much of the time, getting a few super short haircuts in summer months. My hair is shoulder length now for the first time in more than 30 years. I still haven’t decided if I like it this way.

  • Ask someone out on a date. Still doing that once in a while. Sometimes I’m disappointed, sometimes I’m not.
  • Quit your job. Not only did I quit my job way back in 1990, but I quit it to start a freelance career. That takes courage. But sometimes you need to cut ties to move forward — a tip for any kind of relationship, including employment.

What about the other three? Let’s take a look:

  • Sing in public/karaoke. I’ve never actually seen live karaoke and haven’t had the opportunity to do it. Not sure if I would, though. Is it cowardice? Probably some version of it. No one likes to look like a fool in public.
  • Do a naked photo shoot. It isn’t fear that stops me from doing this. It’s common sense. Women who have naked photos of themselves — or near-naked photos of themselves — out there are just asking for trouble. Do you really want photos of you like that circulating around? My advice, ladies, is to keep your clothes on when a camera is present. Those pictures can and will come back to haunt you. (Ask my wasband’s girlfriend about the ones she sent him that I got my hands on. I’m still wondering whether the playing cards were a hit with his poker friends. My friends sure got a kick out of them.)
  • Have cosmetic surgery. Again, it isn’t fear that holds me back from this one. For years it was the simple fact that I didn’t think I needed any. But as I age and gravity begins to take hold, I’m reconsidering it. It’s on my list but at a low priority. Need to get settled into my home first.

Now I’m not sure if British women — the group supposedly polled for the list — are more cowardly (for lack of a better term) than American women. I suspect they might be. I’m also not sure about the age of the women polled and would have to think that very old and very young women would be more cowardly than those of young enough to be “modern” and old enough to have conquered most of our fears.

But now it’s your turn. How many of these things have you done? What’s memorable about any of them?

And if you haven’t done something you really want to do, why not? Tell us what it is so we can talk you into it. Never let your gender hold you back!

Atychiphobia

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11

The fear of failure.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why some people — including someone who was once very close to me — don’t achieve the things they purportedly want to in life. I’m talking about people who have dreams or goals and don’t work toward reaching them.

As anyone who knows me or reads my blog knows, I’m not like this. I’ve been called an “overachiever” (meant as an insult, if you can believe that) and a “Renaissance woman” (which I assume wasn’t referring to my Renaissance painting full figure). I set a goal and do what’s necessary to achieve it. Sometimes I fail but, more often, I don’t. The point is, I do what it takes — or at least try to — to make things happen.

Being like this puts me at a disadvantage when trying to understand people who aren’t like this. People who claim to have dreams and goals but then do very little or even nothing to make them happen. It’s almost as if they believe that just telling others what they want to achieve is enough. They don’t follow through — and they often don’t seem to have a problem with it. Or, worse yet, they blame others for holding them back — when, in reality, the only person holding them back is themselves.

Learned Helplessness

I was talking to a friend about this yesterday and how it relates specifically to a certain person no longer in my life. This friend was also in a relationship with a man like this — a man who never managed to achieve anything he supposedly wanted to achieve. Instead, her guy relied on her to help him through life, like an emotional and financial crutch. She said the condition he suffered from was learned helplessness and suggested that my guy had the same problem.

I looked it up on Wikipedia:

Learned helplessness is the condition of a human or animal that has learned to behave helplessly, failing to respond even though there are opportunities for it to help itself by avoiding unpleasant circumstances or by gaining positive rewards. Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses may result from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation.

This didn’t sound right to me. The person I was trying to understand did fail to help himself when there were opportunities to do so, but the rest of the description just didn’t fit. I thought for a while longer about what was likely holding him back and I realized that it was probably a fear of failure.

Fear of Failure

Wikipedia has an entry for that, too. It’s called Atychiphobia:

Atychiphobia (from the Greek phóbos, meaning “fear” or “morbid fear” and atyches meaning “unfortunate”) is the abnormal, unwarranted, and persistent fear of failure. As with many phobias, atychiphobia often leads to a constricted lifestyle, and is particularly devastating for its effects on a person’s willingness to attempt certain activities.

A person afflicted with atychiphobia considers the possibility of failure so intense that they choose not to take the risk. Often this person will subconsciously undermine their own efforts so that they no longer have to continue to try. Because effort is proportionate to the achievement of personal goals and fulfillment, this unwillingness to try that arises from the perceived inequality between the possibilities of success and failure holds the atychiphobic back from a life of meaning and the realization of potential.

By definition, the anxiety of any particular phobia is understood to be disproportionate to reality, and the victim is typically aware that the fear is irrational, making the problem a largely subconscious one.

This describes the problem perfectly: constricted lifestyle, unwillingness to attempt certain activities, unwillingness to take risks, unwillingness to try to succeed. The sad result is indeed that the sufferer is held “back from a life of meaning and the realization of potential.”

I think a lot of people suffer from this in varying degrees. But it really depends on the person’s imagination. Someone who lacks the imagination to come up with goals worth pursuing and does not pursue goals can’t be said to suffer from atychiphobia because they simply don’t have anything to potentially fail at. But someone who does have the imagination to come up with achievable goals and doesn’t pursue them — well, what can be holding them back if it isn’t a fear of failure?

You Can Only Blame Yourself

Failure is a part of life. While no one likes to fail, there’s no reason why a fear of failure should hold someone back.

If a goal is achievable and a good plan is made to work toward that goal, why not give it a try? By weighing risks and rewards — and the potential for each — a person should be able to make the decisions necessary to move toward any achievable goal. And by measuring levels of success, failure, and risk along the way, a person should be able to determine, on a day-by-day basis, how he’s doing and whether he’s likely to succeed.

The person I’m trying to understand shared many dreams and goals with me throughout his life. I was as supportive as I could be, actually helping him with brainstorming, writing, designing, and doing web work in a few instances when he began attempts to achieve some of these goals. But in the end, he simply stopped trying, abandoning file folders of incomplete notes in favor of “unwinding” in front of a television.

Being blamed for holding him back was particularly painful for me, especially since I was working so hard to build my business so it would support both of us. I wanted badly for him to achieve the kind of self-satisfaction that I achieved throughout my life. I wanted to see him free from financial burdens so he could have the time to chase down one of his dreams and make it a reality.

Unfortunately, I would never get to see that happen.

Move Forward

Meanwhile, I’ll continue formulating goals, evaluating them, and either discarding them or chasing them down. I’m looking forward to rebooting my life in a beautiful place that I love, surrounded by friends with plenty of work to keep me busy. I’m facing the challenge of designing and building a new home that exactly meets my needs. I’m building my apiary with solid plans for producing comb honey and other bee products by next summer. I’m forging new friendships and new relationships to take me forward in my life.

I’m not afraid to fail so I’ll throw everything I have at every goal I want to achieve.

How about you? What’s holding you back?