mikethegunguy

EVOLVE

Evolve was founded by Jon and Rebecca Bond over their kitchen table. That’s how most of the great innovators started something important and new - sipping a cup of coffee and an idea pops out! And the idea in this case had to do with doing something about the terrible violence that infects America - violence that is transmitted from person to person with guns.

I have been involved with guns all my life. The earliest home movie of me was taken with a Kodak 8mm movie camera standing in front of my grandfather’s fruit store wearing my beloved Roy Rogers hat and twirling my even more beloved Roy Rogers plastic toy pistol. I was five years old and it was 1949.

I bought my first real gun in 1956 when I was 12 years old. I was in Florida with my great-uncle Nathan and we were walking through a big tag sale somewhere out in the swamps off of Highway 441 near Fort Lauderdale. And there was this old guy standing behind a table and he was selling a big, Smith & Wesson revolver for fifty bucks and I had fifty bucks in my pocket so I bought it. And I’ve been buying, trading and selling guns ever since. Sometimes as a hobby, sometimes as a business, but always around guns.

I like guns. They’re simple, they work, they’re beautiful and they last. I have a Colt pistol manufactured in 1973 that looked like it was made yesterday. I don’t own anything else that’s forty years old. Do you? Oh yea, we have a lamp from my mother-in-law’s apartment that’s more than forty years old. It looks it.

So I love guns. And I know everything about them. And I know everything that’s been written about them, researched about them, legislated about them and argued about them. I also know how to shoot them. I can double-tap a 9-inch target in less than 2 seconds. If you don’t know what that means take my word for it - I know how to shoot guns.

That’s why I really love Jon and Rebecca Bond and I was honored to be asked to help them with Evolve. Because what they are trying - going - to do is something that’s never been done before. They are going to make us re-think the way we think about guns and bring guns back to what they really are: mechanical devices that can be used safely and properly by people who love them the way I love them. They are doing something very important. They are doing something very real.