One more bit about Politicians and Guns

After Cheney, while trying to shoot penned quail, shot a guy, I couldn't help but remember the 2004 Presidential campaign, when John Kerry went duck hunting in front of the cameras.

As this article shows, Kerry's trip was met with derision, not just from the right, but from the mass media. It was just an example of the latte-sipping, opera-watching, soon-t0-be Brokeback Mountain ticket-buyer posing as a man.

Because, ya'all, hunting is a man's game. Maybe the last man's game we got left! A man, a gun, dangerous game (or, quails raised to be retarded, as Cheney was hunting) -- it's one of the last man vs. nature survival games a real man can play, unless he can afford some adventure travel (which, as a general rule, usually involves observing rather than killing the wild life, so is for fairies).

And... after all the shit poor Kerry got for going duck hunting (okay, I gave him shit, too, but that's because I get MY duck in NYC's chinatown... so roasty!) it turned out that Cheney's the guy that can't handle a firearm the way a man does.

My grandfather (on my step-dad's side) was a cop who went through an entire career only pointing a gun at a man once. My step-dad owned guns and taught me to shoot them. We never shot a living thing (though, if I'm every attacked by an empty soda can sitting on a desert bluff, I can so waste that thing, from a surprising distance)!

What's funny to me is that though my step dad and I still always make time for a visit to a target shooting range whenever I get home to visit, is that he really taught me two things about guns: 1) They're cool, get a big one, they make a louder noise and bigger hole in the target. 2) They're freaking weapons. A man, a real man, doesn't carry around a weapon he can't control.

Especially when we lived in a little town called Bernalillo in the years before the booming economies of neighboring cities and the growth of Native American Casinos made the place more populace, the guns our family owned even had a very minor home defense purpose. If something happened there, the cops really might have been too far away to help, after all.

But, when it came to guns and other people, I remember being taught a good lesson: "Don't point a gun at a person unless you're prepared to fire it. And... seriously... there's probably no reason for you to ever point a gun at another person."

My step-dad and I used to go out for afternoons of target shooting where we'd, as they say in the gun world, "use" a number of "rounds" that would make you think we were out "fighting a motherfucking war."

But we never freaked out and say... shot another mother fucking human being!