Guns and old jokes
In this post on gun control by Belle Waring, there’s this phrase (scroll down):
No one is a 2nd amendment absolutist, because everyone agrees that there are some types of arms which private citizens may never have, such as tactical nuclear weapons. The debate is clearly over what restrictions we will have over the armaments of private citizens, not whether there should be any.
When I read this, all of a sudden that old joke popped into my head:
A man asks a woman, “Would you sleep with me for a million bucks?”
The woman looks him over and says, “Yes.”
The man asks her, “Would you sleep with me for ten bucks?”
The woman draws herself up and retorts, “No! What kind of woman do you think I am?”
The man responds, “We’ve established what kind of woman you are — now we’re just negotiating the price.”
I didn’t say it was a good joke.
The post also reminded me that I miss shooting. I took riflery in college (back the days when phys. ed. classes were required — riflery was one I could do without having to change clothes), and shot rifles and handguns in class. I also have used shotguns (clay pigeons) in an old quarry in Ohio. Once I had the opportunity to shoot a black-powder long rifle — which was a blast because I actually hit the clay pigeon I was aiming for.
It is fun to fire guns. I don’t care for handguns because to do a good job at it requires a steadier hand than I have. But it’s fun in the way that explosions on TV are fun (the fake ones, that is), or watching a building being imploded, or racing around on a go-kart track, or putting metal in the microwave. It’s using a mechanical object as an expression of power, and feeling just for a little bit that you might have some control over it (whether you really do or not).
This has nothing to do with hunting, by the way. I don’t hunt, and like most people of my generation, would find it difficult to prepare any meat that didn’t come shrink-wrapped to styrofoam (eating it if someone else has prepared it is totally different).
