Hi, gang, and welcome to an aging Luddite’s first blog, done at the request of my old friend Dave Duffy.

I’m gonna need you to bear with me, here, because I’m totally new at this. On the information superhighway, I’m roadkill. To you, it’s a computer, but to me, it’s a typewriter with a silencer.

With a more informal structure than a newsstand magazine, it seems to this newcomer that a blog can go more into personal feelings. I’ll do that here from time to time, with personal opinions that I don’t foist on people on the printed page.

For instance…

The Presidential Campaign

As you’ll notice in the forthcoming edition of Backwoods Home, it seems to me that the only viable choice for gun owners is going to be McCain. Obama and Clinton both have very strong anti-gun-owner histories.

Obviously, as firearms editor of Backwoods Home, my niche at the magazine is gun issues. I’m becoming more and more of a one-issue voter. It’s not narrow-mindedness: it’s the litmus test factor. None of us can be experts on every important issue from health care to national security to international diplomacy to the economy. But each of us probably knows at least one issue very well. That one issue becomes a litmus test. If the candidate shares our position, it’s one indication that the candidate looks at things the way we do and can more likely be counted upon to carefully and logically weigh the other issues they’ll be taking care of for us. But if the candidate takes a position that goes against logic, common sense, and the Bill of Rights, it’s a warning signal that our vote should be withheld from them.

It’s sad that a nation of more than three hundred million people can’t field a better selection of leaders than what has been put before us in this race. The candidate I would have taken a sabbatical from work to campaign for, isn’t running. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice would have been my candidate: brilliant, self-made, never impeached in any way, and with more hard experience in international statecraft than all the rest of the field combined, she would have been a natural. Interviews have shown her to be a strong supporter of gun owners’ civil rights, a woman who grew up black in America at a time when the adult role models in her family had to arm themselves with guns to protect them all from night riding Klan types.

It’s sad that Barack Obama hasn’t researched this issue sufficiently to realize that gun prohibition laws in this country didn’t proliferate until after the Civil War, when disgruntled white Southerners pushed through carry permit laws designed to keep firearms out of the hands of the newly freed slaves. It is sad that Hillary Clinton didn’t more deeply study another strong First Lady of the Twentieth Century, Eleanor Roosevelt, who always had her Smith & Wesson .38 Special revolver with her when she traveled. Mrs. Roosevelt was said to be quite good with it, and practiced constantly. Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, seems to feel that handguns should be reserved for the bodyguards of the rich, famous, and electable.

Looking through the prism of my particular issue as a one-issue voter, John McCain is the only one for whom I can cast my ballot this time around.