Nestled at the base of Emigrant Peak is Chico Hot Springs, the best place to beat 'cabin fever' here in the valley during the long Montana winters.  Locals often meet here to eat, dance or soak in the outdoor hot pools. I often soak before my weekend ‘cardio workout’, so I don’t pull any muscles while swing dancing to live music at the Chico Saloon.

Many years ago, I climbed to the top of Emigrant Peak when my world of 'married with kids' was falling apart. I felt abandoned and powerless… and thought I had nothing to lose if I died trying to get on top of things.

"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
  Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.
  The winds will blow their own freshness into you,
  and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you
  like the leaves of autumn."  ~ John Muir

There are thousands of mountain valleys in the Rocky Mountains that run through Western Montana. In all of those valleys are generations of families who grew up with guns to protect their livestock and feed their families.  Responsible gun ownership is an integral part of rural Montana on the edge of wilderness.

This is how I raised my family here, shooting elk and deer in the mountains, hanging them in my shed and cutting them up on the kitchen table. That always grossed out my wife who spoke fluent Italian, lived in Florence Italy for years, modeling for sculptors and painters while she worked in a language school.  Not being a 'local' who had grown up here, she wouldn't gut the fish I caught, and didn’t like processing game, so I hired a lady to cook-up the meat in big pots of stew which we froze and ate for months.  Not that we were wealthy, but we did have two outhouses. You just had to look into them first to make sure there wasn’t a rattlesnake ready to bite you. Wouldn’t want to moon those buggers if they’re coiled up on the warm heap in those shallow crappers. Found one coiled up on the front porch once.  You can see why my wife left me… but I digress.

My point is that gun safety is taught early to Montana kids. I was teaching my 11 year boy to shoot a 22 while my 14 year old boy was shooting a 30-06.  Most kids out here learn early, and I knew teenagers who went elk hunting on horseback with high-powered pistols.  Others target-shoot 3 inch patterns from half a mile away. It gives kids confidence when they can target their personal power accurately in formative years.

My first-born daughter once shot-gunned a turkey after crawling 50 yards on her belly in full camo. She also danced on her toes in the Nutcracker with guest performers from the Bolshoi Ballet in a local production of the Yellowstone Ballet Company. Best of both worlds out here. You can have ‘high culture’ yet stick to your guns.

I had a next-door neighbor who grew up shooting barrel-mounted balloons on a quarter-horse while barrel-racing in rodeo competitions. Lorna kept her revolver in her holster, hanging by the door. She’s also one of the best country-swing dancers in the region.
‘Lorna-doone’ taught me ‘country dancing’ for the Father-Daughter dance at my daughter’s western-style wedding.

It is love for family and country folk that has shaped my perspective on:

'The National Gun Control Issue'

Local Sheriffs have the Constitutional right to refuse
federal jurisdiction over all gun control issues.

Paradise Valley Montana is like a microcosm of the ‘cultural clash’ in America. In rural America, where there is far less crime, there is a great respect for gun rights. Big cities like Chicago have outlawed guns, but Chicago has more gun homicides than any other US city. 

When guns are outlawed, something goes haywire.  In the name of reducing violence, ‘crime rates’ go up for three reasons:

(1)  Honest individuals are criminalized for keeping their guns, and honorable gun-owners, especially returning veterans, feel dishonored, to say the least, for disarming their intent to protect and defend;

(2) Real criminals have less resistance from unarmed people. It’s easier for them to get away with murder. That’s why crime rates skyrocketed in Chicago and Australia when they outlawed guns.

(3) The public is demoralized when treated like they don’t have common sense for their own self protection. That's when the moral imperative of freedom is challenged to take heart, wise up, and rise up with righteous indignation. Only in tyrannical society are the ‘good guys’ branded as traitors, or domestic terrorists for resisting domestic tyranny.

When small government fears the public, there is liberty.
   Founding Father’s intended this with ‘limited government'.

  But when government gets big and ‘full of itself’,
and runs roughshod on public self-governance,
 then there is public fear of government tyranny.

Have you noticed that national gun sales have gone ballistic as the feds push gun-control?  Is it true that the Constitution was forged by a war against tyranny?  Would you agree that Founding Fathers honored gun rights for shooting tyrants as fair game?

Rural America is naturally indignant, and that's just one symptom of a far worse ‘dis-ease’ in
the public body. Gun control is a ‘trigger issue' that represents a widespread public resentment of federal government interference with health care, state rights and personal sovereign rights.

‘Gun fever’ is the consequence’ of encroaching tyranny. True patriots are not ‘domestic terrorists’. And the more we see core Constitutional freedoms assaulted by anti-gun policies, the more that true patriots stick to their guns.

Common sense may be uncommon, but ‘gun control’ strikes a nerve with well-informed people who know of this last century’s history of government gun control. The governments of Russia, China, Germany and Cambodia ruthlessly murdered more than 47 million of their own citizens after guns were registered and confiscated for ‘gun control’. That was the policy of Lenin, Mao, Hitler, and many other tyrants who committed domestic genocide.

It was Thomas Paine’s COMMON SENSE that sparked the American Revolution, and all the other U.S. Founders knew that gun rights must be part of the Constitution, NOT for shooting deer but to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Tyranny and freedom are like oil and water. They don’t mix. And conscientious Americans know that something is seriously wrong when the federal government orders 1.2 billion rounds of hollow-point bullets, and 7000 assault rifles, while trying to outlaw them for us.

The only thing scarier than, "We're from the government and we're here to help you"
is "We're from the government and we have guns and You Don't!"

It all makes sense when you connect the dots to the big picture of imminent Earth changes of catastrophic proportions. The Feds are understandably afraid of the social chaos that will come, as you can read at, ‘The Shift Hits the Fan’.

We are wise to remember the history of the 1950 Chinese invasion of Tibet with 1.2 million Tibetan's killed, most of them Buddhists who lived in recluse mountain monasteries.  The Chinese claimed that Tibet was theirs, but if so, this was mass murder of their own people. In fact it was cultural genocide too, murdering pacifist Buddhists who literally would not hurt a fly.  But they were massacred, year after year, while Western powers ignored their plight and denied complicity in destruction of an advanced spiritual culture here on Earth.

And yet the exiled Dalai Lama continues to smile while preaching the 'dhama' of "Love is for giving" in the West.  He knows that most of those meek and modest massacred Buddhists were reincarnating in the West for these 'Latter Days' as the Mormons call it.

Or as the enlightened Tibetan Lama, Padmasambhava (aka Guru Rinpoche), said in the 8th Century, after remote viewing the future: "When the iron eagle flies and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered over the earth and the dharma will return to the land of the red man."

Back in the 8th Century, America was the land of the red man. In 1950, automobiles could have been seen as ''horses run on wheels" and the "flying iron eagle" could been the Chinese migs invading Tibet's skies and blasting their mountain retreats. The Tibetans that didn't escape with their lives, escaped with their souls, "scattered over the earth", and incarnating in America: "the dharma will return to the land of the red man".

If I had not been killed fighting with Patton in the Battle of the Bulge,
   I might have been one of them.  Patton also believed in reincarnation,
   saying, "Just kill 'em and let God sort 'em out"... and here we are.

This is the time when spiritual warriors become well-armed
with the power, wisdom and love ordained to fulfill the
divine destiny or 'dharma' of western civilization.