Last week, I was chatting contentedly with my friends on Facebook (who would ever have thought I'd say that?) about gun politics, when I was interrupted by (ostensibly) a young woman (everybody's young compared to me these days) who denied that anyone in politics was out to take my guns away and asserted, in essence, that I am some kind of paranoid crank.

I resent that. I do not deny it, but I resent it. But I have my reasons.

I responded that I have been fighting this fight for some 48 years and knew better than she did what was going on. It may be longer than that; I forget how gradual the build-up was to the 1968 Gun Control Act, which inspired my first high-quality gun purchase (a Walther PP .22, which I still have) and a lifetime of firearms rights activism. The first thing I did was write essays—some of which appeared later in my first nonfiction book, Lever Action (You may have seen "Suppose You Were Fond Of Books", one of my first.) In the days before the Internet, I Xeroxed them onto brightly-colored paper and handed them out at gun shows.