Witt's End

I own an AR-15. I built it from parts. More assembled it than built it. But that's how you put them together. Especially when you've spent a long time determining how you want to configure your rifle, what the use case(s) would be, and what makes sense to you as the user.  It's a facsimile of a dissipator. 16 inch barrel with full length rifle sights. But instead of a full rifle length gas system it has a mid length gas system hanging out under the handguard. Which instead of an A1 or A2 guard is a Magpul MOE. I run it with iron sights, just cause that's fun to do. Now to many people the writing of those paragraphs would paint me as holding very specific policy plans and goals. But there in lies the rub. The complexity and experience of being someone who owns firearms, really likes them, but thinks we can do more as a society to address the issues they cause.  I started writing this last year and kept stopping and starting. I couldn't ignore various events and the p...

 One third of military personnel will face a mental health crisis in their service. That’s one third of soldiers in garrison, one third of sailors on a cruise, and one third of personnel returning from a deployment. One third. I was thinking about that in light of something that will be hard to write about. Gun control. Red flag laws. We have to be ultra careful in how we discuss mental health and firearms access.  I keep hearing it's not a gun issue it's a mental health issue. What's that even mean? What mental illness, what specific set of diagnoses in the DSM is causing the issues with guns. I say this because I have spent time with severely depressed, anxious people in high stress jobs I trusted to have a gun around me. I knew both their mental health status and their capability. With the constant nature of deployments, and the strain of constant training, mental health. We need to be honest about what aspects of mental health result in someone being a danger to themsel...