Hey yall the current insanity has finally pushed me into a place where I want to purchase a rife for self defense. Do any of you have access to a good guide on purchasing as well as any advice on finding a good firearms safety course/instruction?
EDIT: Wow! Thanks for the responses yall! A handgun wouldnt be ideal for a lot of reasons, and I wouldnt plan on carrying it around on my person anyway; I have pepper spray for that. I also dont plan on using it like in a home intruder situation, I mostly just want to be prepared if things really start to go sideways. I dont want to be the queer who is lead away to the camps without a fight, plus I have greatly enjoyed target shoting the few times I have done it. Mostly I am just looking for advice on what type of rife I should get and what is an affordable way to get it, I dont want to be taken advantage of.
It certainly has been tempting to blame it all on outside forces (wreckers/infiltration), but I believe that would excuse behavior by regular members. It can't all be infiltrators abusing each other, calling each other Nazis, absolutely destroying each other in sectarian conflict. I saw this on the national message boards, and in the local chapter communication apps.
Nobody was willing to treat anyone else respectfully. Any argument/misunderstanding/disagreement immediately escalated to "you are wrong, and you are also an awful person who should have no place in this organization"
Certainly there was and is harassment going on, and I believe that even though a small fraction of interactions in the organization were those that warranted expulsion, it has caused people to go into a mindset that everyone else in the organization is not arguing in good faith and that any disagreement means that person is racist, sexist, and should be exposed as such, and then have a Welfare Committee procedure initiated so that they can be publicly humiliated and then cast out.
That's how an organization dies, and is currently dying.