Years ago I was hiking near Mount Baker East of Bellingham with my daughter and my late wife. When we got home that night we saw on the news that a woman and her daughter had been shot to death in cold blood on a trial just a couple miles from where we had been that day. They had not been robbed or raped or anything, just killed for no reason. If I hike or camp on the mainland now, I wear a pistol. Open carry is legal here in WA State, no permit needed for that. Only concealed carry has to be permitted here. (But there are a number of local city ordinances against open carry that one has to obey if inside those city limits). I am not a gun enthusiastic at all; they just always seemed to me a necessary evil, I guess from growing up on the Gulf Coast where cities like Houston and New Orleans were fairly dangerous places after dark or near the docks (I was a tug captain for about 10 years). Guns were just a fact of life; even one's grandmother had one. We often had them at school; my high school had both a rifle and a pistol team and one year the pistol team went to state and placed third. We always had guns with us on scout trips too, mostly for the snakes. We would leave on a scout camping trip on Friday afternoon from the school parking lot and had our guns in our lockers. One time I remember the high school principal was watching us leave on a hike and he laughed and said we looked like Pancho Villa's army on the march. Different World now, for sure.
