‘Bleeding-Hearted, Left-Leaning Liberal’ Woman Bought Gun — and She Says ‘Everything Changed’

A self-proclaimed “bleeding-hearted, left-leaning liberal” recently revealed in an xoJane blog post how she became a proud gun owner, calling her stereotype-defying stance an “unpopular opinion.”

The writer, who goes by Jenna Glasser, said that “everything changed” when she bought a gun. Her liberal friends “shamed” her for owning a gun and were left “gape-mouthed and stunned” at her decision.

Credit: Getty Images

They would ask her thinks like, “What are you thinking?” and “How could you?!”

“How could I? Here’s how: I lived alone in a sweet 1905 cottage in a historic section of east Dallas, with original heart pine on the floors and exposed shipboard walls,” Glasser wrote. “The first vacation I took after I bought it, someone entered uninvited and stole my new drill, my cheap DVD player, and my expensive tequila. The next three unwanted advances cost me three different laptops and over 100 CDs. And those were just the physical costs.”

But she said the emotional toll that the break-ins had on her was worse. Glasser said she “wouldn’t sleep for days” and would “move into the guest room, and curl into a tight ball of nerves.”

She first tried to avoid getting a firearm, adding an iron gate, getting a dog and buying a better alarm system. But her firearm eventually became her “sleep-aid.” Read more:

The gun became my sleep-aid. Each night, I would take it from its locked case, load it with six beautiful brassy bullets, and rest it on my nightstand, where I could reach it without opening my eyes. Occasionally, before doing so, I would point its laser sight to the door across from my bed, the one that led to the back patio, the one they liked to come in, and go through the motion of squeezing the trigger again, and again, to prepare myself to do it half-asleep.

I tried to help the blue dots understand my gun the same way I tried to help red friends I cared about understand the importance of recycling: by putting the cost in a familiar context. People who have never seen a giant redwood that is as wide as an F350 is long and towers higher than the side of the Cotton Bowl understandably don’t know what it costs the environment when you use paper plates for every meal because you just don’t feel like washing real ones. If you haven’t stood at the edge of the Pacific in a storm and heard how powerful its waves are, it’s harder to consider where in that ocean the plastic bottles of water you keep drinking out of and tossing in the trash are floating.

So I tell my blue dot girls, “Ladies, every day, before I leave for work, I have to hide my laptop in a new place – one that isn’t obvious to a burglar. The underwear drawer and between the mattresses, FYI, are considered obvious. And when you alternate between the sheets, at the bottom of the dirty clothes bin, or in the bathroom cupboard enough times, you start to go home at the end of your long work day and forget where your laptop is.

But there’s always one line, she revealed, that usually “shuts them up” in a hurry:

“So when you live alone, in a house that has been broken into five times, and people keep saying to you, ‘Just move,’ or, ‘It’s only a matter of time before they come while you’re home,’ then you can decide that getting a gun isn’t right for you. But for now, this is what’s right for me.”

Glasser said she has since moved and can now keep her revolver in a locked case, where it waits for her to “take it out on the range for a little bit of fun.”

Read Glasser's full article here.

(H/T: Townhall)

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