A real kinky fetiŞh.
I’m a pretty good shot even though I have never developed a fetish for guns. I suppose the ability to hit a target may come in handy one day if things end up going really sideways; better alive and ambivalent about killing than dead with no opinion left.
There was a day, several years ago, when a hot-headed guy (spun and high beyond belief) came menacing towards me. My reptile brain was, in that moment, running the show as it is designed to do. I had a 9mm tucked into my boot. Had I not taken the clip out an hour earlier, I might not be writing these words to you online today — Medium.com is largely unavailable behind bars.
I grew up around hunters and target shooters and cops and all of that, so I know all the standard, weak arguments. Experience and observation, however, have taught me an important lesson: a gun that is not in a tree-stand, on a target range, or in a gun-safe is a tragedy in the making.
Big picture, I’d like to see a drastic reduction in the number of unregulated idiots with guns:
— particularly the ones carrying badges.
His first day out on the job, a cop did this:
Why should this or any rookie cop walk out on the streets with a loaded pistol? The wisdom of knowing when to fire that gun, with adrenaline coursing through a person’s veins, only comes with time.
I have written before — my dad was a cop before he retired and never shot a man. He de-escalated, tried to understand folks, and treated people fairly. Those are the kinds of folks we need serving and protecting folks. Not bullies.
The Brits who more-or-less invented modern policing have the gun thing figured out. While there are always imperfections, the mistakes in the UK rarely end in fatalities:
As you said, James — when a person is killed, there are no do-overs:
That goes for state-sanctioned killing as well:
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Here’s everybody’s favorite Aunt with the good prescriptions, Steven Tyler and his band Aerosmith performing our anthem:
