Notes From The Dump

GUNS IN THE HEADLINES AGAIN…

…in one form or another, when aren’t they?

Personally, I like guns, they are fun to shoot, me like big boom booms and it feels right, I’m Tom Mix, Lash LaRue and Red Ryder again, plus all the other baggage that goes along with it, but I don’t have a gun these days – threw ‘em in a deep lake - and I don’t have a gun because I believe none of the species of creature known as a human being is mentally qualified to own one. None of us.

Under duress nothing is squirrelier than a human; when stressed out to the max I don’t want a loaded gun at hand. When angry I don’t want a gun handy. Anybody can crack. Prison is full of convicts who only committed that ONE crime with a gun in a rash act of apoplectic pique for which they spend many, many years in a maximally-hostile environment, regretting that seminal moment.

As it happens I know lots of murderers, all firmly locked up at the moment although in several cases no one would be in jail nor dead if they hadn’t had a gun so available at that defining instant. Bang you’re dead!

It’s a complex and peculiar world. I don’t know many people who don’t have a gun, most everyone does and many, several guns – pistols, rifles, shotguns, assault rifles, couple of machine guns, why, I even knew a guy with a grenade - one of those Korean War pineapples - and he never went anywhere without it…I hated to see him coming up the drive but anyhow he croaked and won’t be coming up any driveways anymore; where that pineapple went is anybody’s guess.