A buddy of mine sent me this article from Yahoo! Lifestyle, originally published in Parents.
How My Parenting Changed When I Moved My Family to a Place Where Most People Carry Guns
Let me guess, you became an annoying asshole?
When I became a mom of two in Manhattan, I had already lived in New York City for ten years, in a city with notoriously strict gun laws. Residents with premise permits can only carry a gun outside of their home to a firing range and it must be unloaded and stored in a locked container during travel. Otherwise, guns can’t be taken anywhere, including outside city limits.
I can’t wait for the Supreme Court to change that.
We lived in a two-bedroom apartment only a few avenues away from Central Park and the only guns I ever saw were in the holsters of officers of the New York Police Department or members of the counterterrorism division who guard high-traffic areas of the busy city.
I bolded the “the only guns I ever saw” part because this fallacy is central to all of her whining.
My husband and I definitely did not keep a gun in our home and I never worried whether there were guns in the homes that my children, then ages 3 and 1, visited for playdates. Guns were just not a part of our community’s lifestyle. Even as a kid growing up in Syracuse, New York, my family did not own a gun. No one in my family hunted and I didn’t even own a toy pistol growing up. I never had a reason to learn how to properly hold or shoot a gun.
Sheltered New York Progressive. Got it.
But everything changed in 2016 when my family moved to Texas.
Why did she move to Texas? I can guarantee the people of Texas didn’t want her to move there.
Of course, I knew before we moved that Texas has very different views on guns than New York City, but I was still surprised to see the huge billboards on the highway for buying guns and ammo. I was shocked to realize you can buy a pair of soccer cleats and a gun in the same store.
I’m so sorry that is happening to her. Having her bubble burst that the rest of the country is not Manhattan must be painful as hell.
More than 1.3 million Texans have licenses to carry a handgun, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. You must be 21 years old to buy a handgun and 18 years old to purchase a rifle. Although licensed gun dealers are required by federal law to do background checks, Texas regulations don’t require background checks for private sales of guns, such as buying from an individual or from some gun shows. Texas handgun licenses require classroom training, a written exam, and a shooting test.
All seem pretty reasonable for a pro-guns state.
While unpacking, my husband asked if I wanted to get my gun license and buy my own gun to keep in a safe in our home. I quietly shook my head, but my gut reaction was more like “hell no.” A license for a gun? Not me! I believed the last thing this world needed was more guns.
I rolled my eyes at the gush of hot air that had meant we were in gun country and we better get used to it. “Guns are not going to be all over our life,” I declared.
How dare she become one of those people.
I used to ask Manhattan parents about their favorite snack to give their kids, now I ask Texas parents if they have guns in their homes or in their cars.
That’s obnoxious. I wonder how many parents let her daughters play over at their house after that.
If she’s worried about her kid’s safety, she should ask about the last time they changed the batteries in their smoke detectors or if they have stairs or covers on their electrical outlets or a fence around their pool.
Hunting often comes up in conversation on the soccer field before a game, or talk turns to guns used at the gun range on outings with friends. At first, it was shocking how open and conversational others were about firearms—and I couldn’t join in the conversation, as I didn’t have memories of shooting my first deer or celebrating a family member’s successful duck hunting trip. The longer I lived in Texas, I’ve become more comfortable asking other parents or friends, “Do you have any guns in your home?” However, I know I’m not yet settled into the culture of my new home when I want to cover my kid’s eyes when I see someone carrying a gun in a holster.
There were nearly 300 murders in New York City in 2018. Shootings and murders are up in 2019, but we don’t have the total data yet. Clearly there are people who are not police carrying guns in NYC and because they are not permitted to do so, they are universally carried with malicious intent.
But mom here doesn’t see them so, out of sight, out of mind.
She sees good guys with guns in Texas but freaks out. This is paranoid prejudice against guns.
Of course, I had my eyes peeled in Manhattan for any concerns of violence while pushing the double stroller to and from an outing, but while riding the subway or taking my kids to a street festival there was a sense of relief in knowing it was unlikely that an individual was carrying a gun. In Texas, the odds are a lot higher that someone in a crowded setting could be carrying a gun, and that one disgruntled shopper could cause hysteria.
Ah yes, the “concealed carry will turn every fender-bender/argument into bloodshed” bullshit. Never happened, but don’t tell the mom from Manhattan that.
I glance around restaurants more carefully than I did in New York; I take in who’s shopping in the aisle with me at the grocery store. I always consider who might be carrying a gun wherever we go—the thought is always there while we order our dinner or go to the movie theater. I look for the exits and I’ve become a lot more alert to my surroundings, especially when I’m with my kids.
Those damn concealed carriers. It’s not like criminals are not busted all the time for carrying guns in New York City. It’s just that New York City isn’t gun friendly so she doesn’t think about it.
My daughter now notices the symbol for firearms in restaurants and retail stores, something she never would have seen in New York City. She will often comment on the line across a gun graphic on signage and say, “Look, Mommy, no guns.” I know we can’t control everything our kids see, and silence can often create the worst kind of curiosity. So we talk about guns. We talk about how guns hurt and can kill people; it’s blunt language but having a serious tone around this topic is important.
Did she talk to her daughter about vagrants and squeegee-men in New York City? Would she talk to her daughters about how not to get beat up and robbed on a Subway train? What about how to check public transportation seats for needles and avoid stepping in human shit on the streets?
This is the Manhattan mentality. As a New Yorker she has trained herself to ignore all the quality of life destruction around her.
The homeless bum shooting up in a park and shitting on the playground is something she turns a blind eye to.
The law-abiding Texan with a CCW and a pistol on his hip not hurting anybody drives her mad.
She hates guns and is prejudiced against gun owners. Nothing more.
Maybe she should have stayed in New York City.
“I want to cover my kid’s eyes when I see someone carrying a gun in a holster.”
Yeah, that’s a GREAT way to not get the kids interested in what you don’t want them to see.
Google her name and you’ll find there’s a Wikipedia article on her (fairly laudatory — probably *by* her) and articles on her move from NYC to Houston, one of which explains that she had never had a driver’s license and had to learn to drive. Yep, more NYC-ness.
https://www.houstonpress.com/arts/a-manhattan-transplant-gets-her-first-texas-drivers-license-in-houston-10281037
Oh, and she was 33 when that happened. Yes, 33 and didn’t know how to drive.
That’s really not uncommon for any city dweller. You have no need to drive because of public transit, and often parking spaces for your car can cost as much as your rent.
I moved from suburban Detroit to inner northeast Portland about five years ago. My Michigan Drivers License has expired just prior to the move… and I’ve never bothered to get an Oregon one.
I know how to drive and have done so (Illegally! Gasp!) in emergencies, but I live a mile from the office and public transportation (or Lyft/Uber) can get me most places I need to go. My husband still has his license and a car but there’s no point in owning a second car. Insurance is high, parking is impossible, and frankly… I’m just a cheapskate.
I can understand why someone who lived their entire life in a city like New York might never have had a license… Cannot understand why they’d never learn to operate a vehicle though. Seems like an essential life-skill to have just in case.
But, well, progressives tend to be spooked by the idea of self-sufficiency.
“Why did she move to Texas?”
Probably because of high taxes, high cost of living, a vague sense of unrest even if she didn’t “see” the gang bangers or the junkies on the streets. She will of course be a dutiful
Democratsocialist, and vote to make Texas just like Manhattan. I bet the wide open spaces outside the urban areas give her “the vapors” as well.This whole article is a fabrication. The gunbuster graphic is not a legal notice in Texas and is thus almost never posted. The legal Texas Penal Code notice is all text in minimum 1-inch high font. She obviously has never seen a 30.06 sign – and has likely not even been to Texas. I call the author a liar.
I dunno, lots of businesses (usually big multi-state chains) use standardized signage across all their branches. These signs rarely comply with specific state statutes, but they use them anyway.
Douches like her should be given a 1-way ticket back to the libtard sh!thole they crawled out from.
And to think, how many people she doesn’t know and will never meet pass her every day at a high rate of speed in 3000 lb hunks of metal
I read an article the other day about Californians moving to Boise, Idaho (not gun related, sry), and it finally clicked for me. I’ve seen this same story play out again and again.
A Coaster will move to flyover country while swearing up and down that they want to adapt to their new home and then… don’t. But they’ll think they are and will argue it to the death.
It seems in every case, they just. Don’t. Get. It. It isn’t that they’re arrogant per se, but more of an innate inability to adapt to a new environment. Almost like they fail the survival of the fittest test. My next door neighbors are like this, moved from L.A. to rural west TN and yet I never see them outside. They hire a Mexican to do their lawncare (no one outsources their lawn out here) and the first time I met the wife she was flipping her lid on finding a fast internet service provider (they don’t come out this far) and wouldn’t believe me when I told her that. Why’d they move to the sticks expecting the city?
Anyone else noticed this?
Yep. Rural Northern Michigan. Alternatively, “the sticks” are for them to recreate, whilst we deplorables are to serve them.
I was an ED RN “up north”, several years back. One chucklehead got I’ll or injured somehow. After 40 years, I remember this asshole making plain that we Hicks were clearly bumpkins, and the GOOD docs/nurses were downstate.
I looked at my (U-M educated) doc, my RN partner from Detroit Children’s Hospital, and myself from Detroit’s EMS, and said, “Yeah, it’s too bad for us Hicks that all the good ones are in the big city!”
Northern New Mexico, yep.
I *think* Mrs B and I have avoided being that. At least I hope so…
Been happening in Idaho for years. Back in college in the ’70s, Tee shirts sported “Don’t Califonicate Idaho” slogans. Califoricators found they could sell there suburban two bedroom cracker box for a six figure price (the seventies remember, now over a mil), buy a four bedroom home with a large yard for $50K or less and pocket the difference. They wanted to leave behind the taxes, traffic, and crowds. They get to Idaho and bitch that there aren’t enough freeways or public transportation, there is no public supported symphony, and all the public services they like are non-existent or limited. On top of all that, it’s cold in the winter, and this mysterious white stuff falls from the skies. Somehow they didn’t appreciate the advice to go back to LALA land, San Fran, etc
I think this entitled snowflake should move somewhere with a completely ban on civilian gun ownership like Venezuela or North Korea.
I take a rather different view on this statement: “I glance around restaurants more carefully than I did in New York; I take in who’s shopping in the aisle with me at the grocery store. I always consider who might be carrying a gun wherever we go—”….Someone should slap this ignorant person upside the head and tell her the truth.
Isn’t THIS the exact thought pattern what she should want the bad people thinking?
Instead of in NYC where the bad guys KNOW that they are looking at defenseless victims.
This person is a prime example of a victim that cares more for the feelings of the bad guys than the well being of her own family and children.
It never dawns on her little liberal brain that NYC is the anomaly, the aberration, the outlier, the city that disavows the Constitution.
The cognitive dissonance force fields that progressives / communists / liberals / Democrats erect are impenetrable by facts, logic, reason, human nature, and reality.
Same situation here in central Texas. Out in the country most of us have 100+ acres. New Yorkers moved in after someone broke up their land into 5 acres lots. We watched as the new double wide palm Harbor was brought in, the septic system put in and water and electric brought in. They spent a week moving into the house. First weekend there they called the sheriff because of all the gunfire around them, claiming it was going over their house. Sheriff deputies showed up and explained to them that the neighbors across the street, us, were having a BBQ and friends and family were over and shooting guns is a recreational thing out here. Deputies came over and told us about the call. After a good laugh we went across the street and introduced ourselves and invited them to come on over. Husband wanted to but the wife was “traumatized” by the gunfire. Long story short – after about 4 months they sold the place and moved to Austin to escape the terrible conditions.
MY wife, who is from New York (upstate) has to constantly roll her eyes while I complain about New Yorkers who move to other places and then promptly begin voting and lobbying for the very policies that made them leave New York in the first place. When you ask them why, if they loved New York so much more than here, did they ever move, and they always say “taxes” without even realizing that the policies they favor are what cause the high taxes they are fleeing from.
So, whenever I go to any sort of meeting (HOA, city commission, etc) where some New Yorker begins preaching about how much better they did it “up north,” I just tell them to move back where they came from.
This woman is writing about culture shock and how she dealt with it. If you moved to New York (or any New England State), you would be experiencing culture shock too.
No, this woman is writing about cultural imperialism.
If she wrote an article like this about moving to Chandigarh or Ludhiana, you’d be calling her all sorts of –isms and –ists.
Ma’am (…or, so I assume…), uh, I HAVE lived, as an adult, in Taxachusetts. For 4 or more months, as I helped my mother care for my dying father. I did, indeed, note several cultural differences between my parents’ neighbors, and my associates in Michigan.
On the other hand, I did NOT feel compelled to lecture those neighbors, directly or indirectly, about how benighted they were/are. I did NOT feel compelled to go into “Condition yellow”, because the “EEEBIL LIBRALS!” were lurking behind every bush, seeking to besmirch me with badthink. In this regard, among others, Ms. Jade and I differ.
Identifying that other people may have different opinions than you, and might seek to actually enjoy specifically enumerated rights, that you find scary, or offensive, or perhaps do not care about, is not “culture shock”. Well, not among well adjusted people. It’s simply exposure to different people who do not exactly share you personal value bubble.
Nothing more and nothing less. If you have any sort of coping skills whatsoever. .
I grew up bouncing all around the state of Michigan, from rural towns that literally only had one stop-light, to the suburbs of Detroit, to the capitol of Lansing, to the “inner city” of Detroit itself. Now I live in Portland, Oregon. Despite living all over the Wolverine State and now living out here in Portlandia, I have always considered my heart and soul to belong to northern Michigan. When I die, I want my ashes scattered over Crystal Lake and my wake to be held at the Hungry Tummy restaurant in beautiful Beulah.
I don’t freak the hell out at the site of ignorant Portland teens who wear Ernesto Guevara t-shirts. Nor do I feel compelled to cover my daughters’ eyes when we see an Antifaschistische Aktion flyer nailed to a telephone pole… Despite the fact that Guevara’s and Antifaschistische Aktion’s politics are responsible for far more death and destruction than all the deer rifles and handguns in rural Michigan have ever caused.
I mean, I suppose I could scream at my barista about how Antifaschistische Aktion’s first major public event was to stage a riot to disrupt an anniversary celebration in Berlin commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. (Yes, that’s right, it is the official policy of “Antifa” that East Germany / Deutsche Demokratische Republik should be brought back.) I could scream and whine about how “triggered” I am by the sight of homocidal homophobe Ernesto Guevara on her t-shirt… But I don’t. I suck it up and drink my coffee.
Is your middle name “Moon” as well?
The trick there is that I just won’t move to some place like that. I don’t want to live like that, under those draconian rules that put criminals ahead of good people. They like living that way, they should stay there and enjoy it. They shouldn’t move here and try to make it like the place they left.
In my younger days I lived all over the country, including in New England, and traveled all over the world, and in my old age I’ve had Head Hunters offer me jobs in CA, MA, and NY. You couldn’t pay me enough to live in any of those states. But then, not liking the culture of states like NY I’d never consent to move there in the first place.
So who is more culturally sophisticated, someone who has lived their entire life in the bubble of NYC, and considers themselves cosmopolitan and superior and is shocked that everyone doesn’t live like they do and whines about it publicly, or someone who has lived and traveled all over, seen places like NYC, and rejected them?
True story. A friend of mine was the son of a State Department career diplomat (never an ambassador, just a life-long upper middle management type), grew up in Paris, went to boarding school in Antwerp, worked his way through Georgetown as an interpreter / tour guide at the National Gallery in D.C… Speaks five languages. Got a job as a translator at the United Nations when he moved to NYC (his fiancée was a Brooklyn girl).
His first weekend there, some schmuck at a party asked where they had just moved from and he said D.C… The Manhattanite sniffed and dismissed it as “provincial.”
Doesn’t surprise me one bit.
There were 289 murders in New York City in 2018, a record for the lowest number in almost seven decades.
There were 1,322 murders in the entire state of Texas in 2018, making it one of the more violent years in the last few decades.
New York City has a population north of 8.6 million, Texas has a population of 28.7 million.
That makes the homicide rate for New York City 3.5 per 100,000 inhabitants versus the entire state of Texas 4.6 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Those homicide rates are, essentially, close to equal… But we’re looking at an entire state versus a single city. We’re also looking at just homicide. Compare all other violent crimes, property crimes, and so forth… Texas wins the safer place to live title easily. Compare any random small town or mid-sized city, alone instead of the whole state, to NYC and Texas will win by a landslide.
Houston alone had over 300 hoimicides last year.
And if I had to guess… the shared border with Mexico may be a factor for the atypical high homicide rate in Texas.
And according to the Houston Chronicle, it’s pretty much all concentrated in one neighborhood in the city: “The 77036 zip code is the most homicide-prone area in Harris County dating back to 2012, medical examiner data shows. However, neighborhood leaders say those violent crimes are mostly concentrated in the apartments bordering the 7,000-home Sharpstown community in the area.”
Generally speaking, this seems to be a trend nationwide. Every city has its “bad neighborhood,” most of the “bad” in that neighborhood happens after sundown, and everyone in the city knows which neighborhood is the one you don’t want to be in after dark… and progressives hurl all sorts of –ist and –ism words at anyone who actually acknowledges this basic fact of city life out loud.
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Houston-homicide-rates-Harris-County-murders-13513660.php
I luv to ask these whiny a$$holes 2 questions- do you know some one who died in a car crash?
Do you know some one who died in a fire?? Most always they do. I reply -why do you have a car? Why do you live in a house that could burn? In the REAL world guns are just a tool. We get lotsa Massholes move here and they cant believe the gunfire all around them. My friend is an NRA instructor and during one of his classes the cops showed up cause the next door neighbors claimed the bullets were hitting their house, turned out to be acorns hitting the roof of the house. We had a good laugh on that. I get tired of these whiny idiots who lived in their city bubble and “never saw a gun” yet live in high crime cities. I educate the snow flakes around here regularly with my full auto Freedom tools
[…] On Saturday I wrote a post about a woman who moved from New York City to Texas to clutch her pearls at Texas gun culture. […]
Hoplophobia is a disease.
Yes, there are dumb people out there. Get used to it. Can’t change it.
And they are also allowed to vote. Scary.
The only hope smart people have is that dumb people will remove themselves from the Earth by becoming homicide victims (since they are too dumb or pussies to defend their own life). All I have to say to these morons is “good bye”.