The Legacy of Steel

(by permission of Mr. Malloy)

My legal name is Malloy, of the clan O'Molloy, county Offaly, Ireland. My ancestors, descended from Neil of the Nine Hostages, lived by the sword and the dirk. Our stretch of Ireland for over forty generations was called Fircall and we were its rulers. An eleventh century text reads: "The princes of Fircall, of the ancient sword, are O'Molloy".

The steel was our ally and companion in a wild and dangerous land. Steel in hardened Irish hands protected us while we tilled the soil and raised our cattle. When we warred with other clans we killed and sometimes died, again by the steel. When the English came we fought with the steel until they overwhelmed us. Afterward we had to hide our swords and concealed the carry of our dirks and knives. Carrying and training with weapons, the pipes, native songs and even Gaelic itself was outlawed.

When guns and powder came to our land, in secret, we mastered and added them to our belts. We fought for 300 years against an occupation army on our island. They called us traitors in our own land for not swearing allegiance to an English king or worshipping in an English church. Officially we were an unarmed population standing in defiance of the most powerful armed Empire on earth. In truth, with guns and powder, bombs and knives we fought and struggled until we freed most of Ireland.

We were also locked in combat with another enemy we could not defeat. Instead it killed us by the thousands, the millions. Famine killed and scattered my clansmen to the distant corners of the earth. It was brought on by generations of absentee English landlords raping the land, English taxes, and exportation of shiploads of food to England while the Irish people starved. On the tiny plots of our land that the English landlords rented us we grew potatoes. It was the only crop that could support a family on such a small area. When the potato crop failed we starved. No steel could save us, not sword or gun or plow.

During the time of the British occupation some of my clan came to America. We brought with us the steel. My great-great-great-great grandfather settled in the mountains of central Virginia. Law there was mostly what you made of it. Those who were strong and knew the steel lived and prospered; those who were weak or unarmed died. Our family grew strong farming, hunting, trapping and fishing. We used the steel during the Revolution to free this land from the hated British. With powder, ball and blade my forebears secured the freedom for me I would not have had in Ireland. Again in 1812 we beat back those who would usurp that liberty.

My great-great-great grandfather came to the piedmont of North Carolina in a flat bottom boat on the Dan River. He and his family took a grand adventure and gave up everything to live by their wits in a new land. They used the steel to defend against bandits and Indians. At that time the foothills of our state was a wilderness. From this wilderness he carved an 800 acre farm with sweat, sinew, courage and steel. He carried a brace of pistols and a knife as part of every day of life.

My great-great grandfather went to war to defend the freedom he had come to cherish in our hilly wooded land. Yes, he owned a slave or two, but what he fought for was the freedom to live free and conduct his own affairs as he saw fit. In this war we learned that not all thieves of freedom come from other countries. Any federal government, British or American, that intrudes on the lives of its citizens uninvited cries out for resistance. The thought was, we had traded one tyranny for another. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died for what they believed was this just cause. He had lived his life free with the steel as a tool of war and peace. He was one of the best shots in the county. His exploits with a knife also survive in family documents. When he returned from the Civil War he carried his brace of ivory-handled six-guns and a large knife until the day he died. Best accounts state he was never afraid to use them. At his death they hung on a belt on his bedpost.

My great-grandfather moved to town to take advantage of the new industrial boom. To the city of the new age of steel he had brought the steel of our ancestors with him. We still have the revolver he used to defend himself and his family in this new urban wilderness. His son, my grandfather, was the first generation of my family that never went armed. An overprotective strict mother raised him. His education was the tea party and the textbook, not the woodlands and the steel. Maybe he was a product of the times. Laws had been passed that forbade the carry of weapons in cities. For the first time in history Americans were learning to look to the government for their needs. When he was in his thirties he was murdered in an alley by two thugs over $20.00.

My father is also a stranger to the steel. He was raised in that same city, by his mother, with no father. To him the steel was something to be taken up in war and then turned into a plow during the peace. To my knowledge, the first weapon he ever owned was obtained as collateral for a loan to an employee. Uninterested, he later gave it to my sister. However, luck of the Irish has been with him and he still lives.

As for me, far removed from the green Irish hills, I have again taken up the steel. The gun and blade are constants of my life. Through them I reach back across the generations to a distant skin-clad chieftain on a shaggy Irish pony gripping the hilt of his sword, to a Revolutionary soldier loading his musket as the redcoats cross the field toward him, to the settler on the Eastern frontier feeding and protecting his family, to the Civil War soldier sitting in the mud at Sharpsburg with the pungent smell of burned powder in his nose, to my grandfather laying in a stinking alley with his blood on the bricks.

You ask me why I carry the steel?

I ask you why were laws passed and kept on the books for almost one hundred years that choked my right to carry it? This right my clan has cherished for over a thousand years. A right secured for my family and me by the blood of patriots. Why does this same intrusive federal government we bled to rid ourselves of now seek to disarm me? Why is there American soil I can not tread upon armed? Why do honest Americans fear the steel?

Why do I carry the steel? Indeed, sir, why do you not carry it!?

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Used by permission of the author.

All words not Mr. Malloy's are copyright © 2001 Morrigan Consulting