Concealed Carry Report

From Patrick Kilchermann, USCCA Team Member:

I’ll warn you ahead of time: This has nothing to do with carrying concealed weapons, but it has everything to do with friendship and camaraderie- which is exactly what the USCCA is all about.

It’s why I love being a member, and why this story popped in my head the other night.

I think you’re going to enjoy my story…. I’m calling it, “How I almost died when I was 13“.

We’ve all got crazy stories from our childhood. Having grown up in a tiny Irish village in mid-Michigan, I’ve probably got a few more than most people.

The town was founded in the 1840s around an old flour mill which utilized the river that cut through the middle of town for an unlimited supply of power.

The mill was abandoned some time in the early 1900s, and it burned down when I was a kid.

All that was left was a market, a hardware store, a post office… and a tavern. This tavern might as well have been called the community center- seven days out of the week it was packed with familiar faces and host to many a fist-fight.

It was painted green, complete with leprechaun and shamrocks. I’m chuckling remembering the little 1-foot tall door that was built next to the real door, supposedly for leprechauns.

With only 400 residents in this little village, as kids, we were always having to cook up our own entertainment.

Looking back, some of the things we did were pretty dangerous, but these ‘activities’ always served to bring us closer together in the end.

Let me tell you about one of these ‘activities’…

From ages 12-15, I spent most of my time with a friend named Cody. We eventually grew apart, but the years we did have as friends were some of my most adventurous and memorable.

Cody lived out in the middle of nowhere, about five or six miles north of town. He had two much older brothers, and his father (also named ‘Pat’) had served as a combat Marine for 15 months in Vietnam.

Pat was a tall, thin, stout- almost scary looking man with a huge grey beard… but he was one of the nicest guys I ever knew, and for some reason, he always liked me a lot. I recall well the way his eyes would shine when he’d arrive home from his factory job to find that I was spending the night.

He was half the reason I looked forward to going to Cody’s house, and I eventually referred to him as ‘Uncle Pat’.

Uncle Pat would rarely talk about the war, and I knew better than to ask too many questions- but he loved the Marines, and I loved sitting and listening to his stories about the friends he had made and all the crazy stuff he had to do during boot camp and in the times before the war.

He let me wear his old marine ‘cover’, and he even let me wear his old helmet once when Cody and I played paint ball- I’m not sure if even Cody ever got to wear it.

I’ll never forget the story he told me about how one of his friends had spent hours and hours rubbing boiled linseed oil into the stock of his M14 to create a mirror finish, and when his friend shipped home, he swapped him stocks before the rifle was turned back in.

I’m getting off track, but all that is all to say that after a heavy dose of Marine-Corps stories, Cody and I were itching to get out in the woods and do something crazy- something other than what we usually did, which was play Play Station games.

That was when Cody, another friend named Seth, and I came up with the top-secret “Marine Recon” plan which would end up almost costing me my life.

Obviously though, I lived to tell about it, and the experience bonded Cody, myself, and Seth together for life. No matter how far apart we grow, whenever we see each other, we always shake our heads and grin at each other in silent understanding.

This email is already getting kind of long though, so I think I will save the story for tomorrow.

Sorry to leave you in suspense, but please stay tuned, because I think you’re going to love it.

Patrick Kilchermann
USCCA Team Member
New USCCA Member Info

P.S. - Did you ever have a crazy adventure as a kid?

Going into our ‘Marine Recon Adventure’, we didn’t care about how difficult our plan was- we believed in each other, and that was enough.

We knew that no matter how much we angered our parents, or no matter how rough the path became, we would be able to handle anything that came our way.

That’s why I love the USCCA, and that’s why I’ve been a proud member since 2005.

Nobody else understands why I think it’s important to carry a gun everywhere I go like my friends at the USCCA. The mainstream media even goes as far as to paint peaceful folks like you and me into blood-thirsty maniacs.

But not the USCCA.

The USCCA believes in my core values, and they believe in them no matter what. If someone commits a mass shooting, we don’t rethink our decisions to go armed- we ask WHY there wasn’t an armed citizen there to stop the shooter.

We’re more than just a gathering of people who share a common belief- we’re a community.

We at the USCCA stick together- because each of us believes in our individual rights to life and self defense- and we believe in each other.

To the outsiders, we all stand together and say: Don’t tread on us!

Friend, I’d like to invite you to join us here at the USCCA.

The bigger our family is, the stronger it is. And I know that YOU would be a great addition to it.

I have been a member for four years, and I have never believed in anything like I believe in the USCCA.

Please use the link below to find out more about how to become a member of this family:

=> New USCCA Member Information

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