What did I plan to do with this past weekend? Two things. Visit a friend who was recently diagnosed with cancer. And sort the master bedroom into donate/keep boxes. I didn’t aim high. I was reasonable with my time. But did either of those happen? No. It was a productive weekend, just not at all how I planned it.
The recently diagnosed friend isn’t feeling well after last week’s treatments, so we had to postpone. The last thing I want is to take what little energy she might have, when her time is better spent with her family.
I guess I should back up a little. We also got a surprise visit from a different friend last week – she’s leaving on an international work trip on Monday and won’t be back until after we move to Thailand. So we had an impromptu visit during Skipper’s soccer practice. It was great to see her – she’s an amazing person with a beautiful soul and we’ll surely miss her. She also happens to be one of the people we ride motorcycles and shoot with.
I know, I know – many of you may be anti-firearms. But hear me out. I’m not looking for a debate (I’ve had my fair share of those) – just trying to explain my stance before anyone assumes.
I have very strong feelings about our 2nd amendment rights in this country – half of me is with one side, the other half with the other side. I actually agree with a lot of what both sides say. To an extent. The left talks about more gun control – usually preferring no guns at all. I agree with more and better controls, I do not agree with banning them completely. The right talks about our rights – generally preferring we not be limited. I agree that we have rights for a reason, I do not agree it should be limitless. I believe government is generally focusing on the wrong things – they are focused on what looks scary rather than what is ACTUALLY scary. An AR-15? Looks totally scary. A pistol? ACTUALLY scary. The first may be a more accurate weapon with generally higher capacities. But the second? Fits hidden in a backpack. Nobody is going to walk down the street with an AR and not be noticed. But any backpack can hide a pistol. They’ve limited the number of rounds a pistol can hold – but nobody is talking about how fast it can be to swap mags, thus entirely negating the limited number of rounds. The term “assault weapon” is used very liberally – and the exact definition of what that actually means is vague. We shouldn’t be vague. These are potentially deadly weapons. We should be VERY specific. My family loves to shoot. We don’t condone violence of any sort. But this is nothing more than a sport to us – we don’t even hunt. We hunt paper targets. Nobody gets hurt, human or otherwise. We are very strict in our rules around the use and storage of firearms.
Our right to own firearms is there to protect against a tyrannical government. And pistols are rarely, if ever, going to enter that picture. I think we should be more heavily regulating pistols than “assault rifles,” but I’m not the one with the power to legislate, so here we are.
Regardless of my stance or yours, we have to sell them all. And the laws in Washington have changed since we purchased these. A lot. Many are no longer legal to sell in this state. We are going to do everything on the up and up. It sucks to have this process be so difficult and convoluted, but we are going to make sure we do the right things, and remain fully legal in all of it.
When our friend mentioned that she would be happy to pass word of our coming sales to her coworkers, we obviously jumped on that opportunity to potentially sell most of what we’ve got. Unfortunately, many of them are also going on this business trip, so we had to move fast. We hadn’t even begun inventorying everything yet (ADHD working memory is not our friend… and ADHD hobby-stacking isn’t either lol). So we had one night to inventory everything – firearms and ammo. We managed to sell two pistols and some ammo to one of her coworkers before she left (through a licensed firearms dealer). And her brother lives out of state and is interested in some of the other items that are not legal here. This is definitely a breath of relief, but still took considerable time to inventory and research each item to ensure we were acting within the law.
None of that was in the plan. But that’s how I spent all day Friday and Saturday – in between communicating with potential buyers for one of our cars. No work at all on the master bedroom. And that’s a real bummer, since that is going to be one of the more difficult areas in the house to get through – it’s going to require a lot of emotional decisions and a lot of time. But, I’m going to choose to embrace the madness that surrounds relocating an entire family with ADHD across an ocean, and thank the stars that we were pushed with an immovable deadline to inventory things that we had been avoiding.
And that was just Saturday.
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