My California CCW Journey Part 1: Coming to the Party
Join me as I navigate this process
As a boy growing up in the 80s and 90s in the southern California city of Riverside, there was no “gun culture” for me to encounter. Guns were something cool but distant. Like most kids of my generation, I played “guns” while running around the yard, and from there teenage me wandered into tabletop wargaming and some hobby-level military history (which eventually led me to a couple of for-real history degrees). But guns were something cool to ogle in history books and catalogs and magazines, not something I got much hands-on exposure to in my youth.
It wasn’t until I spent time out of state that I encountered a gun culture where having an appreciation for guns could translate to ownership and use. In Oklahoma, where I lived for 12 years, guns are totally normal. If your life has been spent largely in urban California, this is something that might be very foreign to you. It was to me. But right around the time I turned 30, I spent $250 on my first firearm: a Remington 870 12-gauge pump shotgun bought off the brother-in-law of a friend. Yeah, it was like that. I love that shotgun, and it was my introduction to shooting. As well as the general costs of shooting.
Cost is often overlooked by those who haven’t gotten into shooting yet. Guns are a little pricey, and shooting as a pursuit is also a little pricey. However, if you’ve ever seriously played a collectible card game you’re familiar with the idea of investing over a thousand dollars in a hobby. Any hobby will do that, as they are by nature expensive wastes of time. But I got in for $250, and 400 dollars is a pretty average price for a handgun (which is about what you’d spend on an Xbox). So it’s not like guns are crazy expensive, but getting into shooting will require you to make a new line in your budget, and that’s something you need to be honest with yourself about. I was honest with myself about it, and did some bargain hunting for gear: ear muffs, a little shell pouch, a couple of ammo storage cans, and a case for the thing so it didn’t get dusty in the closet.
And I started watching a lot of YouTube videos, and realized something about men (including me). At some point in almost any man’s life, he gets fascinated by a topic that involves an interplay of mechanics: if A occurs then B must follow and that leads to C, but if D interrupts A then E happens instead, and so on. Some men come to love little fix-it projects. Some get really into their lawns or flower beds. Many take a deep dive into sports, often a single sport, obsessing over fine points of technique and rules trivia. Some are seduced by cars or motorcycles and their engines. Some start to cook a handful of specific “specialties” they serve with pride. And among other such examples, some get into guns. Learning the ins and outs of his pet mechanism is important to a man, and understanding this phenomenon goes a long way toward making the gun-dude world not-weird.
You should also let that encourage you to be patient with gun dudes. In my online research I discovered (as will you) a LOT of men (mostly men) with a LOT to say about guns. And it became clear quickly that very few really knew what they were talking about. It appears easy for gun knowledge, like any knowledge of this sort, to hit a plateau. There are a lot of people roaming around on that plateau and making educated guesses about what’s beyond, all while trying to sound like they know everything. Couple that with the siren song of “I can have my own YouTube channel!” and Sturgeon’s Law definitely applies. Caveat emptor. Don’t listen to just me, either. Do your own research and listen carefully and critically.
Anyway, my research led, in 2017, to the purchase of my first handgun, a Ruger Security-9 at the 4th of July holiday sale price of $250. Scouring the sporting goods store ads for deals like that also led me into the Oklahoma pawn shop scene, which is a treasure trove of bargain-priced firearms. So when the time came for me to return to the land of my people, lovely Riverside, I moved back with … uh … some guns.
I say “some guns” now because keeping it vague is socially safer. California’s institutions are almost universally anti-gun, and not just not-pro-gun, but virulently judgemental about it; California’s tastemakers are actively anti-gun the same way they want everybody to be actively anti-racist. You can’t just not own a gun, you must denounce guns daily as anathema. There’s a general institutional vibe that just wanting a gun should be grounds to deny you one; what kind of degenerate would want a gun? In Oklahoma, showing people your guns is a totally normal getting-to-know-you activity. In California, that offer has even odds of getting you ostracized from polite conversations.
However, California is also coming to grips with a pretty serious rise in crime (driven in part by some of those anti-racist chickens coming home to roost, but I digress), and the vibe has shifted in Riverside County in particular. In fact, across the southern counties Sheriffs have recognized that they haven’t got the manpower to “protect and serve” everybody, and they’ve embraced the nightmare of the actively anti-gun crowd: concealed carry.
In this, California is admittedly coming late to the party and is still well behind the leading edge. Fully half of these United States have loosened gun carry restrictions to the point that they don’t even issue permits anymore. “Permitless” (or “Constitutional”) carry is the law in 25 states: if you’re an adult who owns a handgun, you can pack it around with you, no permit needed. But California’s not there yet, so a permitting process is required.
As with any government permitting process, it’s been made deliberately opaque. That can charitably be excused as a way to weed out the people who are “just looking” so the permitting clerks don’t waste their time, but come on. The California bureaucracy just hates guns and would deny them all if it were possible. But that pesky second amendment stands in the way. Thanks founders!
Anyway, as one who believes strongly in the concept of personal responsibility and the exercise of personal liberty (and since Riverside County is one of the most CCW-friendly Sheriff jurisdictions in the state), I decided this year it was time to start the process and get a Concealed Carry Weapon (CCW) permit. Happily there is a local organization, the Inland Empire Gun Owners, who run a monthly webinar intended to demystify the process. That will be my first stop, this week.
Stay tuned for the next part of this series (my takeaways from the webinar), and subscribe below. It’s free!