Grandpa never celebrates birthdays, including his own.
My "granpa" is long dead these days. He had a farmstead which he had to defend on a number of occasions.
Once My Granddad killed a Texas county Sheriff, who was at the time wearing a KKK outfit and trying to burn my grandfather's barn with a band of other KKK thugs.
My granddad was attacked because he had allowed a black family of seventeen to live in his barn, along with his livestock, as that family worked toward a piece of the land they all worked together. My grandfather was in question for even working with blacks.
The family had been kicked off the land they had been working. My Granddad took them in as best as he could.
When the KKK approached his house on horses, he recognized several of the riders, due to his work as a blacksmith. He recognized the horses they were riding and he recognized the voices he heard.
He called them by name (he knew who most of them were by his work on their horses) and asked them to leave his barn standing. It did not work. The mob of KKK assholes went in to burn down his barn (because blacks lived there) My Granddad shot twice with his double barrel shotgun. Killing the Sheriff and wounding his neighbor.
My father was only six when this happened and remembered this incident to his deathbed. It was 1932 when this happened. The KKK ran all over the western Texas region in those times, trying to remove the last of the black families from the area.
Once the local Deputy knew what had happened on that night, my granddad was never charged with any crime. His action was, rightfully, accepted as protecting his property under the law.
That was only the start of him having to defend his taking in a "black" family as it turned out, however. The KKK was not yet done.
I am pretty sure I have related this story to a few of you, but once is once. IT is a story worth repeating, for its own sake!!
Never let us forget what it means to have the freedom to bear arms!
