Go see a good man who steps up.

Don Gwinn is a superior man. I've known him for roughly the same amount of time as LawDog has, though Don and I have never met in person.

I'm going to tell on Don, without his permission. It's an invasion of his privacy, and he's welcome to tell me to delete it. Which I may take under advisement, but probably will not do.

When a distant family member was having enormous character and personal problems involving various dependencies, she had to give up her boys. Because of the unfortunate manner in which they had been "reared" prior to that, they were challenged. If memory serves, they were 5 and 3.5 years of age at the time, but I'm probably off by a year one way or the other. One of the boys had a handicap, and both of the poor boys required a great deal of effort. Don and his wife never hesitated to take these boys in, and make them their own.

Both Don and his wife Missy are educators, and take their craft seriously. Both are working on (or have obtained) graduate degrees in education, and want to teach kids. They applied this love and skill at home. The boys quickly assimilated, and they made enormous strides, overcoming completely understandable developmental issues. As soon as they could, Don and his wife adopted the boys, making them a complete, loving family.

Don once wrote that his favorite birthday was one in which he piddled around the house with the wife and kids, watched a DVD with them, and just basked in the warm glow of his family. This man was meant to be a daddy. He and Missy recently expanded that family by one more, the old fashioned way.

Don is an amateur blacksmith, and makes his own knives. He is a shotist in a part of this nation that doesn't much support the right to keep and bear arms. He is a devotee to human rights (freedom of speech, right to assembly, gay rights, whatever-- not just 2nd Amendment stuff), and doesn't especially feel the need to apologize to those who don't understand his politics. He is fond of the written word, and has crafted more than few poems. For whatever reason, he drives an ambulance as a side gig. He's a bicyclist, having taken it upon himself to improve his health though biking regularly. If I recall correctly, he's dropped over a hundred pounds through his own self-directed regimen of excercise. Oh. And here's another thing about him-- he's funny as hell.

In short, Don Gwinn, a man I've never met in the flesh, is a Good Man. And if he doesn't mind, I'm proud to call him my friend. I look up to him in a lot of ways. Like my friend John Shirley, Don is a Hero of mine. I don't have many.

Go check him out at his new blog, "The Armed Schoolteacher."