The only firearms in my home when I was growing up were my dad's .22LR rifle from his childhood, and his 1943 Ithaca 1911A1 which had been his sidearm in WW2. Both were stored in locker in the attic of our garage. When my dad died in 1990, I inherited the .45, and my youngest brother got the .22. Since my total firearms experience to that point was having once fired a friend's .22, I asked a couple of friends of mine who were in the California National Guard to take me to a range and teach me how to safely handle, shoot, and clean the .45. As soon as I shot the pistol, I was hooked. After that, I began the slow accumulation of a collection.
However, my sense of really needing self-defense began with the 1992 Los Angeles riots in the wake of the Rodney King verdict. Prior to that, the only time I considered a gun for self-protection outside of the home was whenever I had to make a late night visit to an ATM, or something like that, and then I would (illegally) put a pistol under the front seat of my vehicle. At the time of the rioting, I worked for a newspaper publisher in downtown L.A., on First Street, just on the west side of the First Street Bridge, which connected the Aliso Village housing projects to Downtown. On the morning after "opening night" of the rioting, I witnessed a large mob of thousands of mostly hispanics sweeping past my office building, headed for city hall a few blocks away (where they ultimately broke into offices there and trashed the place). I thought, "this is not good!" The rioting intensified that day throughout the day. The next day, as I went out to get some lunch at a restaurant around the corner from my office, I came around the corner and nearly bumped into a military patrol of roughly squad size in full battle rattle. I thought, "this is REALLY not good! What in blazes am I doing at work in this kind of environment?" I left work thinking "I REALLY wish I had a gun with me." The Los Angeles basin was covered with a pall of smoke for days as rioters burned and looted buildings all over the county. It even happened near where I lived at the time in Altadena (Rodney King's home town). For quite a while after that, I frequently carried a gun in my car, and occasionally in a fanny-pack, although I did so illegally.
During the next 14 years, I had other occasions to wish that I had a gun in my possession - including once about a year before I moved here, when I was threatened with a gun by a tattoo covered vato during a road-rage incident.
After I moved to Texas in mid 2006, my gun collection grew more rapidly, and I began to carry a pistol in my vehicle fairly often. It was a huge relief to know that I was doing so lawfully. I admit that I had some early misunderstandings about what Texas CHL law permitted, but the idea of being able to carry a firearm legally virtually any time I wanted to without getting hassled for it had great appeal to me. I applied online in November of 2007, and sent in my completed paperwork in December. In a discussion on a hunting forum, Flintknapper convinced me to check this forum out in January of 2009 while I was still waiting for my plastic. I got the card in late February of 2008.
Originally, I hadn't necessarily intended to carry every single day. I just thought it would be nice to be able to carry whenever I wanted to. Well, it turns out that I wanted to carry all the time, and I've never left the house without a gun on my person since then. There was a time when I was in very good physical condition, young, spry, and on top of my game. That is no longer the case, and I now feel like my gun is the great equalizer in any possible circumstance in which my personal safety is threatened.
The icing on the cake is that my wife's plastic arrived in the mail the other day, and so between whatever gun I'm carrying and my wife's Glock 19, we make a pretty well-armed couple. I'm not sure how to explain why, but it has made us closer as a couple.
