Yesterday the state of Indiana, and the United States of America, and the gun owners\u2019 civil rights movement all lost one of their most accomplished sons.\u00a0 James Reinholt died in the quintessential heartland American town of Winamac, IN, where he was born in 1941.<\/p>\n
In his younger days, Jim spent time as a policeman in the American Southwest, where he became a friend and prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of such great gun experts and legendary lawmen as Bill Jordan and Charlie \u201cSkeeter\u201d Skelton, and earned their respect to the point where he progressed beyond being their student and became their peer and friend.\u00a0 Like them, he didn\u2019t fear to go into the most dangerous situations, and the gunfights Jim won left him with a renewed value for human life. He taught people how to survive, in classes from Mexico to the American Midwest.<\/p>\n
When Jim decided to devote his life to teaching \u2013 which he did, for four decades as a true mentor in venues from elementary school to Purdue \u2013 he never lost sight of the lessons that kept him alive in his earlier profession. Reinholt\u2019s Range in Winamac was a true Backwoods Home gathering spot for everyone from factory workers to judges and millionaires, some coming to shoot an evening round of trap or skeet, and some coming for more serious pursuits. Before he became ill, Jim hosted an annual police combat match in which each scenario replicated some gunfight that had occurred in the past year between Indiana cops and dirtbags who tried to murder them. For many years, he hosted the Indiana State Championships of NRA Action Pistol shooting.<\/p>\n
He taught cops and armed citizens alike to understand what they were fighting to return to when the chips were down: their family, their values, the people they loved. Jim\u2019s long marriage to the brilliant Carol Reinholt was evidence of that. Together, they raised a bright and beautiful daughter and two fine sons, one of whom they tragically lost.<\/p>\n
One of the most articulate men I ever knew \u2013 like Col. Jeff Cooper, Jim Reinholt always spoke in the same perfect diction in which he wrote \u2013 the erudite Reinholt was a compelling advocate for the civil rights we all fight for when he stood at the podium. His influence was recognized in 2004 when he was named a Sagamore of the Wabash, an Indiana accolade that any Hoosier understands and reveres.\u00a0 Jim Reinholt was living proof that being an intellectual and having common sense need not be mutually exclusive.<\/p>\n
Condolences to his family. We have too few people like Jim Reinholt, and it\u2019s not a clich\u00e9 to say that his loss diminishes us all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday the state of Indiana, and the United States of America, and the gun owners\u2019 civil rights movement all lost one of their most accomplished sons.\u00a0 James Reinholt died in the quintessential heartland American town of Winamac, IN, where he was born in 1941. In his younger days, Jim spent time as a policeman in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[89],"class_list":{"0":"post-1033","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-jim-reinholt"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1033\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}