While traveling around the world as an American there are some questions that I always get asked, but the most common one is about guns.

I get questions like:

“What’s up with all the guns?”

“Why do Americans keep killing each other?”

“Do you have any guns?”

These are great questions for me to answer considering that I’ve grown up with guns and have a dad whose love of guns is only trumped (no pun intended) by his love of sitting in the cold for hours to kill deer with guns. Yep, besides going to Bob Evans, going deer hunting is also where he’s in his element.

Anyway, while I was in China everyone was amazed and very curious about our country’s love with guns and from their perspective, I get it. People in China aren’t allowed to own guns and most likely have never even seen on in real life (much less shoot one). All while I live in a country where some type of gun shooting is happening nearly every other week.

To them it doesn’t make any sense and to me, knowing where a loaded gun was in the house while I grew up was totally normal — it’s just that I knew never to touch it and if, for some reason I did need to use it, I knew how. Dad made sure we were all on the same page when it came to the guns in the house and we never had any problems. Guns also have a long history here in the U.S., so it’s not easy to just to dismiss them altogether. I guess you could say it’s complicated.

Speaking of guns, my friends also really like them, too, but this is pretty normal for people here in good ol’ Indiana. So, for the past two years on Thanksgiving morning me and my buddy Marc have gone shooting with The Rev Peyton and his Big Damn fam out in a cornfield to celebrate the beginning of the holidays. It’s a fun way to kick-off Turkey Day and this year was super fun (see photo at the top). So, I guess you could say that shooting guns doesn’t always need to be crazy, it can be just a way to bring people together who like to load up shotguns and shoot them at targets on Thanksgiving mornings.

The pro/against guns argument will continue here in the States, but I guess as long as we can still keep this tradition I’ll still be pretty happy.

Also, the Rev knows his way around guns and guitars — you might have seen him playing a shotgun guitar in this video last year. Yep, that’s my homie.