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Gun Owners: Mount Vernon’s Vincent Emilio

Bough as a home self-defense measure, the gun Emilio and his wife own also serves as a symbol of their Second Amendment rights, one that they (and the NRA) fight to preserve.

Vincent Emilio lives in Mount Vernon, where he runs DB Hydraulic Equipment MVNY, a hydraulic distribution business. He was granted a pistol license in October 2011, for which he applied six months prior because he and his wife were getting older and they “just thought it might be wise to have a weapon available to protect ourselves,” he says.

You just bought your first gun a little over two years ago. What do you think of the fact that it might be harder to get certain types of guns from now on? I think we have an absolute right to the Second Amendment, and it should be, as the Constitution says, totally unfettered. I don’t think the government has the rights that they claim to. It’s like water on a stone. They’ll just keep pecking away until, eventually, we’ll have very few rights.

Do you think the government doesn’t want people to have some guns? The right to bear arms was originally put into the Constitution in order to keep government in its place. And you can see by the growth of government that it’s becoming more and more present in our everyday lives. I think the government’s position is just to protect us from foreign powers, and local government’s is to protect us on a local basis, and that’s about it. Everything else, people should be free to do what the free market allows them to do within obviously legal bounds.

Do you believe in any gun restriction laws? Every time one of these incidents happen, everybody gets riled up and passes legislation in four days without even thinking about what they are doing. There is no deliberative process. They just go running off half-cocked and do whatever they think is best. This whole thing makes no sense to me.

But what do we do to prevent more tragedies in the future? Short of having everybody take a psychiatric test once a month, this will never stop. And I don’t think it is any different now than it was years ago. It always happened—it happened in the 1900s, it happened in the 1800s, and it will happen in the year 20,000. It’s just so magnified these days that people go nuts.

Are you going to take any action? I vote with my checkbook. I sent money to the NRA, which I never did before, because I think that is the one voice that is for the Second Amendment.