Fighting what feels like a nasty case of bronchitis, I\u2019m unusually pessimistic, reflecting on a really rotten July.
\nA reported 13 police officers killed around the country in the line of duty last month.
\nA dozen innocent citizens murdered and many more shot by the mad dog in Aurora, Colorado, bringing down political pundit hellfire on, of all people, the decent armed citizens of our nation, who were forbidden by theater management to carry guns in the place where it happened.
\nThe world of the gun has taken some hard hits. My old friend Jerry Ahern, a gun writer who specialized in concealed carry and managed to resurrect his favorite pistol brand, Detonics, died last month of cancer at 66. Jerry was famous for his \u201cSurvivalist\u201d series of novels. David Arnold, one of the founders of the United States Practical Shooting Association, was killed in a car crash. Vaya con Dios, mi hermanos.
\nAmerica\u2019s daughter Kim Rhode won yet another Gold Medal for her country, one more in a long series. You go, girl! (What could possibly be depressing about that? Only that the mainstream sports media has largely if not completely ignored her triumph, because she achieved it in skeet shooting.)
\nTime to move on. The tanking of the UN small arms ban was a bright spot last month, and hopefully, there are more such on the horizon.
\nPersonally, I\u2019m gonna cheer myself up by joining the Duffy family and the Backwoods Home Magazine team for an Appleseed shoot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fighting what feels like a nasty case of bronchitis, I\u2019m unusually pessimistic, reflecting on a really rotten July. A reported 13 police officers killed around the country in the line of duty last month. A dozen innocent citizens murdered and many more shot by the mad dog in Aurora, Colorado, bringing down political pundit hellfire […]<\/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":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1850","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1850","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=1850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1850\/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=1850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}