SCOTT’S FIRST TIME AAPI GUN OWNERSHIP STORY

About Scott’s First Firearm

So a little about me and how I got into firearm ownership, education and advocacy. Well its a funny story and you can read all about it on award winning Washington Free Beacon Journalist Stephen Gutowskis site The Reload.com but suffice it to say I didn’t grow up in a gun owning household and went 38 years before I purchased my first firearm. My family’s safety or lack thereof due to a rise in Asian hate crimes brought me down this path: that’s my beautiful daughter above and I would do anything to ensure she doesn’t have to grow up in a world where she needs to be afraid of random attacks just because of 50% of her DNA.

Speaking of childhood, Dad had an old Mossberg shotgun locked up and we were told not to touch it, I shot bee bees a few times, did paint ball a few times growing up and of course; as a child of the 90’s, my brother and I had a ton of super unsafe Intertech squirt guns and such that basically had no orange tip etc. Glad I made it out alive!

#StopAsianhate

So, as you readers can tell, I was always interested but COVID and hate crimes against asian Americans is what really made me take the leap from mildly curious to a firearm owner and it all started with one horrible moment for my young family against my very asian wife and mixed race child.

I’m the father in a mixed asian family: my wife and I met when I was trying to find myself teaching abroad in China during my GAP year in college. As you can imagine walking down the street in Beijing with my wife would occasionally lead to scowls from old Chinese dudes (I could never tell if the frequent loogie hocking was directed at us or just a byproduct of unfiltered Great Wall branded cigarettes?) and such but in America it was always a fairly benign experience aside from a few insensitive /racist “mail order bride” jokes here and there but things took a turn for the worse about a year ago. And its not just me actual hate crimes against asian Americans at are on the rise.

One horrible incident stands out for me. My wife kid and I were walking down the street when a group of dudes in a truck slowed down, pulled up beside us, spit out the window and yelled “go the fuck back to China! Kung Flu!” Gunned it and sped off.

My wife and daughter were shaken and in tears and that got me thinking “what if I wasn’t there? How can I protect my family if one of these assholes followed my wife home?” That’s happening at an alarming rate in the Bay Area; just follow Dion Lim at NBC in the Bay on Twitter. Theres just a horrific spike in Asian hate crimes.



COVID 19

This incident led me to doing research on reddit and YouTube and then I decided to go through the process of getting my first firearm and a super highly safety rated Vaultek safe. When I got to the store ( and subsequently to the range) I was struck by the fact that the majority of folks in line were Asian. Estimates say that a huge percentage of new gun owners in 2020 are in fact asian jumping 46% from 2019 stats.

But I digress, before heading to the store I looked up everything I needed to apply to own a gun in CA: Passport, Utility bills, valid drivers license or hunting/fishing license and passing a Fire Arms Safety Certification test + Fee and headed to the now bankrupt Sportsman’s Warehouse in Milpitas. Now this was as I mentioned like a week before Started in Ca lockdowns so what should have been a 10 day wait after passing a background check after shelter in place orders were put into effect itturned into 50 days.


Ironically, no other retail businesses to my knowledge were as heavily impacted in California as stores that happened to sell firearms in addition to other products from Nikes to Camping Gear: I could go to Target, Bestbuy, Sephora all offered curbside pickup but Sportsmans Warehouse and Cabella’s were not allowed to re-open despite selling essential gear other than firearms

California also has a limit on the number of hand guns an individual can purchase within a 30 day period so I couldn’t get a refund, or even go to another store after cancelling my initial purchase until that 30 day wait came up and then I had to start all the paperwork over again and pay the background check and licensing fees all over again.

Legal Limbo

If you factor in California’s ironically unsafe “safe hand gun roster” whereby one can only buy Gen 3 Glocks made in the 1990’s and indeed cannot buy the SAFER lighter Gen 5’s I think I got hit by every law on the books in CA. That’s not even counting weird things like fin grips on popular sporting rifles like the AR15 or fixed magazines which make the rifle less safe and less accurate for a user in a home defense situation. We also have an arbitrary 10 round limit on magazines when the manufacturer out standard it 15 rounds: I’m open to debating whether or not additional licensing and training should be required for 100 round drum mags that are after market and not made by OEMs.

That’s what planted the seed for me to get politically active. You really don’t appreciate how nonsensical and arbitrary some of CAs laws are until you experience them firsthand.

Don’t get me wrong I personally feel that training and safety classes should be cheap, plentiful and mandatory especially for weapons like the AR15 which is partially why we started AAPI GO: its a hard process to navigate especially with potential language and cultural barriers. We want to ensure safe and responsible gun ownership is the norm in the AAPI community.

AAPI GO

So fast forward to about a month ago, asian hate crimes are going up and I’d been a pretty regular poster on Reddit and elsewhere finding my voice and realizing there’s a lot I don’t agree with in typical firearms advocacy and press coverage. That’s where I met my cofounder Patrick and we shared the same values: and thought why not try our hand at a startup and do some good for our AAPI brothers and sisters in the process. We just launched our site yesterday and its been a crazy ride so far. Although Patrick and I have parted way’s I’m still more committed than ever to being a home for safe responsible gun ownership in the AAPI Community with new partners. Drop me a line to get involved.




Scott’s First Firearm: Beretta 92FS.