by Click for Original Interview with Nick Freitas.
In a recent video with Nick Freitas, I discussed my trip to Australia, and the fact that when people heard I was from Texas, one of their first questions was: “Are you going to let them take your guns?”
US Firearms Restrictions in 2024:
This was a point of interest because, in 1996, a majority of Australia’s gun rights were stripped after a mass shooting known as the Port Arthur Massacre. Port Arthur triggered massive gun control measures within Australia and resulted in the surrender of an estimated 650,000 firearms between 1996-1997.
57,000 firearms were directly handed in by Australians, while the remaining 593,000 were surrendered under a buyback program led by John Howard.
You can have a look at that full conversation with Nick Freitas using the link in the description of this video, or by using the link that will appear on the screen here…
But I actually walked away from that conversation with somewhat of a great awakening.
An awakening that was really similar to the one I had four years ago:
When I realized that the more I relied exclusively on big agriculture or a third party to grow my food, the more I was at risk of dying of starvation.
And I realized in direct parallel: the more I relied on big government or any third party to protect me from violence, the more likely I was to die from violence.
While both death and starvation are extreme ends of the spectrum, your level of risk escalates or de-escalates based on your level of reliance.
These conversations with Nick Freitas and John Lovell happened in October. And while I walked away from them feeling awakened, I also felt totally negligent, because while I was nodding my head to the vital importance of my 2nd amendment rights: #1 I did not own a firearm and #2 I had fired fewer than 20 rounds over the course of my life to that point.
And just as with farming, where I realized I had a responsibility to steward my resources so that I could feed myself, I realized here that I had a responsibility to steward my rights so that I could defend myself.
So, I walked into Bass Pro Shop (not an ad) and bought a Glock 43x. And I took that Glock 43x straight to a professionally led defensive handgun class.
Now Texas is one of the 22 states in the USA where Constitutional Carry is upheld. Let me know in the comments down below if you are living in one of these green states.
According to USConcealedCarry.com:
“Constitutional carry means that the state’s law does not prohibit citizens who can legally possess a firearm from carrying handguns, (openly and/or in a concealed manner) thus no state permit is required.”
So in short, because Texas acknowledges Constitutional Carry, I did not need any formal training or any permit to carry my new firearm. But given such a low level of exposure to firearms up to this point, I wanted the confidence of formal training, and I wanted to establish good safety protocols within myself.
Oh, and I did not train alone! I took my sister the Chicken Lady and nearly every other female in my immediate circle to train with me. Despite some initial overwhelm when I surprised her with news about the firearms training class, Chicken Lady was actually an insanely sharp shot straight out of the gate.
Scott was the range assistant and cited something that really stuck with me: he said that genocide is typically preceded by the disarming of the populace. The process starts slow, moving incrementally from regulation to restriction.
Within nine hours we moved from totally basic drills surrounding drawing from the holster, reloading magazines, and dry fire, to target practice.
The nine-hour class culminated in the two hours of range training required for obtaining your concealed carry permit: which again, you do not need this permit for concealing and carrying a firearm in Texas (or any other Constitutional Carry State), but they do give you legal protection as you cross over into states that are not operating under Constitutional Carry laws, they also allow you to carry a firearm on college campuses, among a few other things.
Phil Ryan at Northeast Texas Gun Range took my group of ladies from barely knowing how to load a magazine, to nine hours later, acing the range training for our concealed carry license with perfect or near-perfect scores on the target practice.
His snack box was next level in addition to the fresh brownies and chicken sandwiches: which in hindsight, with an all-female class, I realize that all the food was probably a deliberate strategy to avoid HANGER, but a good one at that!
I purchased a simple inside-the-waistband holster for daily use. While I am not here to give you holster setup recommendations, I am here to tell you it is a lot less complicated to conceal and carry as a lady than I was made to believe.
I have no plans of transitioning this channel into a firearms channel, the content that you will see here is going to be about how to grow your own protein. But the same reasons that thrust me into farming are the same reasons that thrust me into becoming an armed citizen.
I realized that exercising a right is the most fundamental way to defend it. And a lot like a muscle: all you have to do to lose your rights is simply not use them. I had to be real with myself and say: “Grace, if you are not strong enough to exercise these fundamental rights, you won’t be strong enough to defend them when someone comes to take them away.”
This is my first video after a seven-week break on YouTube, I have missed you guys and I would love it if you would hit the thumbs up before you leave, leave me a hello in the comment section and I will try to reply to as many as I can :).
Great video Grace! Congratulations, keep learning and keep building those “muscles”!
May you never have to use it. But I am glad you got some training and will be prepared if you must.
I believe in the second amendment right to bear arms. I too took a concealed handgun course and I just renewed my license in 2023. Every 5 years for a licensed to carry a firearm. Great job Gracie and all of you friends who went with you. Gods Blessings-
Proud of you for taking action. I too, bought my first glock this year. It is better to be prepared, than not.
Thank very much for sharing your viewpoint.
Hey I really love and appreciate what you’re doing with the small farming movement, so I want to address this with care. This statement: “And I realized in direct parallel: the more I relied on big government or any third party to protect me from violence, the more likely I was to die from violence.” is just factually inaccurate. For the record, I am a firearm owner in a blue state. But you are about TEN TIMES more likely to die from gun violence in the US than in Australia (that’s per capita). That’s a direct result of their gun control measures. The US is a huge outlier in gun ownership and a huge outlier in gun violence among developed nations. Please read this to get the cold hard facts: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
Thank you for being so gracious as you shared this! I am really going to think on it.
Andrew,
Unfortunately the PEW Research is not always impartial. The Australian gun confiscation program has not been the success that some like to claim.
I would direct you instead to review the findings published at https://crimeresearch.org/
Likewise, “gun violence” is a phrase designed to bias the reader. Guns do not commit violence, people do.
Looking at simple before-and-after averages of gun deaths in Australia with respect to their gun confiscation is misleading. Firearm homicides and suicides were falling from the mid-1980s onwards, so you could pick out any subsequent year and the average firearm homicide and suicide rates after that year would be down compared to the average before it.
The question is whether the rate of decline changed after the gun confiscation law went into effect. But the decline in firearm homicides and suicides actually slowed down after the confiscation.
Australia’s confiscation resulted in almost 1 million guns being handed in and destroyed, but after that private gun ownership once again steadily increased and now exceeds what it was before the confiscation.
In fact, since 1997 gun ownership in Australia grew over three times faster than the population (from 2.5 million (p. 5) to 5.8 million (p. 63) guns).
Gun control advocates should have predicted a sudden drop in firearm homicides and suicides after the confiscation, and then an increase as the gun ownership rate increased again. But that didn’t happen.
For other crimes, such as armed robbery, what happened is the exact opposite of what was predicted. Criminals could still obtain firearms, but law abiding citizens were initially denied their God given right to self defense. The armed robbery rate soared right after the gun confiscation, then gradually declined as gun ownership again begin to recover.
Gun control advocates like to note that there has been no mass public shooting in Australia since the confiscation. But they are simply picking out a country that happens to “prove” what they want it to prove.
Good resources and facts here. Thanks for the follow up!
“All too many of the other great tragedies of history—Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few—were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. … If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.” — Silveira v Lockyer, (9th Cir. 2003) (Kozinski, J. dissenting.)
Great quote!