Etcetera...

If you're immersed in a community (especially a really pleasant community), it's easy to forget that not everyone is either part of the community or knows about and understands that community. That's true of the gun owners community generally, but even more true of the community of Gun Bloggers.

GC: "Yes, please schedule a wake-up call at omigawd thirty."

Silver Legacy Hotel Staffer: "Certainly, GC. I've got to ask - what's a gun blogger and what's this rendezvous thing? None of the rest of the staff know and I'm curious."

GC: " Thanks! Gun bloggers are folks that write about firearms, the gun owning community, and a lot of other things - some of them even related to firearms. The Rendezvous is a get-together for a bunch of them, including some of the most-read in the country. Go to BooksBikeandboomsticks.com to see what a gun blog looks like, or maybe Ma-rooned.com to get a feel - they'll both have links to other blogs of various viewpoints."

Silver Legacy Hotel  Staffer: "Thanks"

This kind of interaction is what I talk about when I go into one of my periodic rants on how each of us, as a gun owner, is an ambassador for the entire gun owning community. We can be a cruddy one, we can abandon our responsibilities - or when the opportunity lands in our lap, we can seize the chance to create a positive image of gun owners in folks minds - one or two, or even three, people at a time.

Each time we decide to pause, take a breath, and teach that "the default setting for gun owner is not scary person" we undermine hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of effort that the anti-gun movement has spent spreading the myth that "gun owners are racist fat old white guys who are barely articulate, knuckle-dragging, uncivilized, mouth-breathing bubbas that shouldn't be trusted with rubber spoons - let alone firearms." Undermining bigotry isn't just fun, it's good for both our community and the nation. (Bigotry is bad, m'kay?)