As I was doing laundry yesterday, I found a round of .223 ammo that had gone through the washer and dryer in my pants pocket. Not being one to waste ammo unneccesarily, I texted a friend to make sure the round would still be good, and he assured me that it would.

It occurred to me that this illustrates how different my life and household are now that I’m a shooter. There are some places that a single round of ammunition could trigger school lock-downs, neighborhood panic, and political pants-wetting. But in my house, in my basement, the first thing I thought of was not an hysterical, “Oh my GAWD, the whole house could have exploded with that, that…THING in the dryer!”. Rather, my first thought was “Can I still use that?”

There was no drama, there was no clutch of maternal fear, all the episode meant to me was that I had gone to a 3-Gun match the preceding week, and that some of the pockets in my new pair of tactical pants are apparently so secret, that even I couldn’t find them again to empty them out. LOL

This being Mother’s Day, and with the previous to illustrate how my life has changed, I thought I’d “Take a MOMent” to share.

http://www.juliegolob.com/take-a-moment-mothers-day-responsible-gun-owner-reach-out

Julie Golob’s Mother’s Day Campaign for firearm safety is a fabulous idea. With all of the political rush lately to turn maternal fear and ignorance about firearms into astroturf politics thinly disguised as “safety”, we moms who actually KNOW firearms need to stand up and talk about ACTUAL gun safety. Because we are the responsible ones. We are the knowledgeable ones. We are the ones who actually have the skills to back us up. We are the ones who can teach, and dispell ignorance.

The NSSF’s Project ChildSafe  

http://www.projectchildsafe.org/  

and 

The NRA’s Eddie Eagle Program 

http://eddieeagle.nra.org/ 

are both great resources for children’s firearms safety.

As mothers, we are our children’s first teacher. We teach them to be safe crossing the street. We teach them to be safe with strangers. We teach them to be safe around the swimming pool…

So let’s make sure we teach them to be safe around firearms, too.

Happy Mother’s Day!