My Christmas rounds encompassed Morton Grove, Illinois and Kennesaw, Georgia this year, which is a little like a Cold War combatant going from Moscow to Washington, DC in the same week. Advocates of gun owners’ civil rights well remember that Morton Grove was the first municipality to ban private ownership of handguns, “back in the day.” But we also remember that after the landmark US Supreme Court decision in Heller in 2008, Morton Grove was among the first such communities to buckle and rescind the law. Significant Other and I were on Mark Walters’ radio show on 12-27-09 (downloadable from “Armed American Radio” at iTunes, or from Armed American Radio and I said on the air that folks like us speaking from Morton Grove with handguns in our hotel room felt like General Sherman doing a talk show from occupied Atlanta, ‘cause our side WON, dammit!

A couple of days later we stopped for a hot dog at an iconic Georgia restaurant in Kennesaw, a satellite community north of Atlanta and the first municipality to pass a law requiring all law-abiding citizens to own a firearm. It was as symbolic as the Morton Grove law – no one to my knowledge has ever been brought to court for NOT owning a gun when they lived in Kennesaw – but after that law was passed, violent crime against individuals plummeted there, and has stayed down. Another victory for our side? You bet!

Our Christmas rounds had taken us through six states, with my girlfriend legally carrying a concealed, lightweight Colt .45 automatic in five of them. Before we crossed into the sixth, Illinois, we pulled over and I put on an additional holster to carry her .45 as well as mine. You see, gun laws in our fifty states are a fifty-patch crazy quilt of separate laws. She didn’t go flaky in Florida, didn’t go ape in Atlanta, nor coo-coo in Kentucky. She didn’t do anything idiotic in Indiana or terrible in Tennessee…but apparently the Chicago-influenced legislators in Springfield thought she’d become mentally ill in Illinois.  And it wasn’t just us visitors: Illinois, like Wisconsin, allows no provision for its own residents to carry concealed guns in public.

(Fortunately, Illinois allowed out of state cops to carry even off duty long before the 2004 enactment of LEOSA, the Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act, which allows us to carry nationwide on our own time. Had there been an exigent circumstance – an extreme, life-threatening emergency – she would have been legal under Illinois law to access one of my .45s while I went for the other, under the legal principle known as the Doctrine of Competing Harms in the common law.) And, frankly, on dark and stormy nights in Chicagoland, I did not feel at ALL inconvenienced carrying two lightweight Colt .45s.

LEOSA has worked out well for half a decade, and the next logical step is to pass legislation that will allow law-abiding armed citizens with concealed carry permits to go discreetly armed nationwide. We came achingly close to that in the past year, missing by only a couple of votes. It needs to come up again – and be passed. But LEOSA took more than a decade to become law, so long that the current law, LEOSA, is still more commonly known by its name when it was only a hopeful bill, HR 218.

From Morton Grove to Kennesaw, we’re winning. We’re on the side of the protective angels. But it takes a long time, and our New Year’s Resolution still needs to include fighting for the rights of all Americans to protect themselves and their loved ones.

From this end, to you – may you have a happy, productive, and safe 2010!

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I spent Christmas in the Chicago area, and returning to warmer climes for (most of) the rest of the season reminds me of why I have lately wintered as much as possible closer to the subtropical zone.

Most of my life, though, was spent in Northern New England where winters are long and cold. From there to Canada to Alaska in winter, I learned that careful planning can make guns a lot more manageable in sub-freezing and often sub-zero temperatures.

Cold hands get numb, and numb hands get clumsy. Gloved hands can be warm, but warm gloves are thick enough to reduce the sense of feel and make gun-handling clumsy…a potentially dangerous thing. Snow, freezing rain, and even a rime of ice on the gun when you’re outdoors with it long enough in inclement weather won’t help, either.

As to gloves, you want the one on the hand that works the trigger to come off quickly, smoothly, and silently when you need to shoot. I tried the old woodsman’s trick of a thin, lengthwise knife slit on the trigger finger portion of the glove to let the warm index finger sneak out when it needed to work the trigger. Imperfect. Snow got into the glove and froze the finger as soon as you had to grab a snowy branch or catch yourself in a fall in the snow. Also, the palmar surface of the glove wants something rubbery for traction.

Traction helps on the gun itself. Consider skateboard tape. Yes, it’s ugly…but it’s efficient.  Most lubricants thicken and get sludgy in arctic temperatures. Oil in the firing pin channel that “gels up” can cause a misfire when you desperately need to make a shot. Some of my colleagues swear by graphite. I found that thin watch oil worked great.  I learned to put masking tape over the gun muzzle to keep snow out of the bore. If the bore plugs with snow, unnoticed in a fall or when a branch dumps snow over you and the muzzle-up rifle or shotgun (or catches unnoticed in the muzzle-down long arm), the stage can be set for a blow-up when the gun is fired with an obstructed bore.

I learned that a heavier trigger pull was a good thing to prevent premature discharge when working with cold-numbed or gloved trigger finger. I learned that a rifle or shotgun that fit perfectly in T-shirt weather was too long, and needed a shorter stock, when there were thick, multiple layers of winter clothing material between the shoulder and the gun butt.

As a handgun hunter in my teens, I learned from my predecessors to carry the gun under my coat, protected from the elements. With a long coat, a cross-draw holster let me reach it quick, but I found a shoulder holster worked best of all: if I fastened the outer coat up to just below the pectoral muscles, the upper part of the coat would stay closed to keep out cold and wind, but the hand could knife right in to gain immediate access. The coat-protected shoulder holster also gave the best protection to the handgun if you fell face-first in deep snow. I learned from experience that gloves would block the trigger return of double action revolvers. And I learned in the worst inclement weather to carry “beaters” – true rough duty guns, not “safe queen” guns – that wouldn’t make me worry more about the gun rusting than about spotting the deer in the thicket.

Plan ahead, and get practice manipulating your guns with gloves. You may have to do just that in a fast-breaking “shoot now or forget it” situation.

There are lots of folks reading this who have tons of experience shooting in deep cold. Please – chime in and share what you’ve learned about that!

Judiciously applied skateboard tape can greatly increase gun traction in cold-numbed, wet, or gloved hands at the expense of esthetics. Here, we preserve good taste AND good grasp with champion shooter Jerry Barnhart’s “Burner” grips, seen here on Colt .45 auto and available through Barnhart Performance at www.jerrybarnhart.com.

In seriously inclement weather, nothing protects an all-day-outdoor handgun better than a good shoulder holster. Here, Bianchi X-15 rig carries one of author’s Colt .45s under a quilted winter overcoat. Gloves are Thinsulate.

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It’s a special time of year.

Time to thank the countless Americans who are overseas, not able to share the family time that the rest of us can at homes and hearths. Time to thank the emergency service personnel stateside who are sacrificing their special time with loved ones to be there to take care of all the rest of us, 24/7.

For some, it’s a deeply religious holiday.

For others, with other belief systems and even for the skeptics and atheists, it is a time American society sets aside for a short vacation, and an opportunity to visit those we care about, in an atmosphere of giving and caring. It’s a holiday that makes people happy, especially kids, and that’s OK too.

Belief systems aside, let’s all take time to make someone feel good. To share a memory or celebrate a personal bond. There’s a reason why secular people still exchange gifts in this society at this time of year, and why you don’t need a particular belief system to drop some green stuff into the Salvation Army pot for the less fortunate.

Celebrate core human values. Love. Not just appreciating others, but taking the opportunity to tell them how much you appreciate them, as we at the Backwoods Home group appreciate all of you. Values that include the strong helping the weak, and the protection of the innocent from evil.  Amidst the Christmas wreaths that adorn this park in Skokie, Illinois, we find the Holocaust Monument…

It is significant that the dominant figure in the Monument, standing tallest, is the Jewish Resistance fighter…note the bandoleer of ammunition across his chest. And remember that when bordering Morton Grove banned possession of handguns, Skokie voted not to.

Whether you have a white Christmas…

…or a green Christmas…

…or even a gray Christmas…

…all of us on this end wish you a peaceful, renewing, MERRY CHRISTMAS.

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“Christ, Mas, it’s CHRISTMAS!” said my Significant Other and Adult Supervisor. “Get a little holiday spirit goin’, here!”

Duly noted.

Got my holiday shopping done, and got some presents dropped off already. Noticed that some folks might have more expensive Christmas wish lists than others. Seems that San Diego PD is thinking about head-mounted cameras, kind of like patrol car dash-cams, to be worn on the head of each officer. The Bluetooth-size unit supposedly will be held on with a headband, and when the test run is completed next year, if the city wants them for the whole force they’ll give Santa a $4 million Christmas list.

Many in the criminal justice system had feared that the economy would lead to a rise in crime for the Christmas season, and there are certainly signs. In the Denver area, more than a dozen banks were robbed just last week, four of them on Friday.

In a Borders bookstore in Louisville, a bold panhandler was hustling the customers in the aisles. Outside, another one dressed like a rapper from Hollywood central casting was aggressively panhandling folks on the chilly sidewalk. I kept my hands in my pockets but wished him a Merry Christmas. He replied – swear to God – “Humbug.”  A few moments later, I watched him step into a new sedan and drive away.

I’m channeling the Christmases of my childhood, and the ones of my children’s childhood. (Don’t we all?) Another who is doing so is my friend Jim Fleming, a brilliant criminal defense lawyer in the Midwest. His reminiscence reads like Ralphie’s in Jean Shepherd’s perennial classic, “A Christmas Story,” only better. It’s shared with you HERE with his permission.

Enjoy, and feel free to share Christmas memories here.

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OMG! Only HOW many shopping days ‘til Christmas?

If there’s a shooter as yet unaccounted for on your Christmas shopping list, there’s still time. For young folks, there are scaled down sets of ear and eye protection. THIS set of safety glasses and muffs for junior shooters is 30 bucks from that old standby source, Brownell’s. Might find ‘em at your local gun shop and save waiting time.

If a reindeer hunting rifle is too pricy for the gift budget, how about some nice handles for the giftee’s sidearm? Check out these handsome stocks I just got from Eagle Grips for a favorite six-shooter.

Giving a firearm is a gift of trust, of responsibility, of protection. It can also be a huge hassle with the paperwork, in some states more than others. Well, that’s why there are gift certificates. The giver lays down the paperwork, and the recipient gets to fill out the yellow form at the gun shop.

The National Rifle Association is our strongest bastion of defense for gun owners’ civil rights. A gift membership is as low as $35 for one year. You can sign up the giftee online at www.membership.nrahq.org.

For more thoughts on gun-related gift giving, go to Podcast 41 of the Pro-Arms Podcast. Several of us got together and pooled thoughts and memories of Christmases past.

Finally, let’s not neglect the gift of laughter. This link was sent to me by bro Erich, who contributes here. My compliments to Chef D’Allessandro for cooking up the funniest piece of firearms writing I’ve seen all year.

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