I''d like to talk about guns...

that is... firearms... and because of recent events, maybe a request.... or not... I haven't decided yet...

    a brief history of me and firearms....

   I grew up with them.... one of my fondest childhood memories was going to the gun range with my dad... I must have been like, 8 or 9 , the first time..... man, he had a pretty cool arsenal... an old Kentucky flintlock.... a Hawken percussion-cap rifle... a civil war era black powder revolver..... a .22 cal Irma ( a Luger replica)... a .22 revolver... a .22 lever-action rifle... a 9mm Rueger Semi... pretty much running the gamut of the last 300 years of firearms.. (man, I even out-shot the rangemaster at RTC great lakes with his own .357 at the pistol range there!..).... I still contend that I'm a pretty good shot, and even though I've not held a chambered one in over 20 years...

       What my dad had instilled in me though, is a healthy respect for not only what they are, but for what they can do.... He taught me to point one only at what you intend to destroy.... not only put a neat/clean hole in, but to utterly destroy [i.e. kill]; that is, to respect a firearm...***

      My point though is this... firearms are not as romantic as American culture would lead you to believe.... they are a means of putting a hole into something using ignited gas and a bit of metal... they can be a source of recreation...They can get you dinner... they can  help you survive, yes... they can even help win wars!..... but they are nothing more than a tool... not sexy and not  romantic by any means...

      if I could do one thing, it would be to strip away the image of say, John Wayne, fanning a six-gun salvo of shots, or Dirty Harry taking out a bad guy w/ his .44 mag, and instead replacing that image w/ a long-assed video of what those rounds actually do to human tissue....

     Maybe replacing a 4 second quasi-cool-imagined/romanticized movie shootout with the 4 hours of surgery reqiured to replace a semblance of a face that was shredded with said bullet might bring some perspective... That's the real cost, man....

I wanna talk more, but I gotta go to bed.... I hope Congresswoman Gifford recovers okay, and I hope the rest of the survivors make it as well.... the whole situation makes me wanna barf....

namaste, bitches...
-m

 






  ***  [ a side note--- This topic goes much deeper with me.... if you wanna know more, please write me, esp concerning things like self-harm and mental illness... it is much more personal than what I want to post here, but if you want to know, please write me individually... it's important, but very dark.. If you want to know and are sincere, I will share... if you'd rather not know, please don't ask....]***