Sunday, August 16, 2009

post 631. guns.

maaan, i love guns. that is, i love guns when bruce willis or chow yun-fat is blasting away at the bad guys, or the faceman pops out of the a-team van and sprays the bad guys (conveniently missing all of them but still able to produce them from overturned and blown-up jeeps and buildings with browbeaten looks of surrender).

guns in real life make me very nervous. i remember, when living with my uncle in new orleans, finding out my cousin had a shotgun, and it just made me a little squirrely.

last summer i went skeet shooting with my friends for a bachelor party. no problem: here's a shotgun, we're in an extremely enclosed area, the short mailman-looking guy seems like he knows what he's doing, and safety is the main concern. i was the second best shot of the day, and it was nice.

this summer the cast of shear madness met ed haddad, a lawyer who likes performing on stage, flying his plane, guns. after one of our shows ed bought us drinks, made fun of obama and his supporters, displayed a cacophany of bar tricks and jokes, and then invited us to come to the shooting range. he showed us pictures of him and friends strapped with everything from assault rifles to cowboy-endorsed six-shooters.

i figured, "why not? " let's see how the other half lives. maybe i'll understand the gun thing a little more while i'm out there, and learn to appreciate it. for an hour, patrick, ashleigh and i picked out guns from ed's cabinet, mainly to take pictures of us trying to look cool with all that steel. ak-47s? .22s? pistols? bayonets? when we chose our guns to shoot (a .22 pistol, a .22 rifle, an ak and a glock), we put everything else away, and i had seen so much that i accidentally reached for a nearby umbrella, my brain seeing it's riflesque shape.

the .22 was polite, felt comfortable, and was quite fun. but that ak47? the choice of terrorists the world over? i carry no shame when i say that the ak47 is an awful piece of machinery, and after firing the first round, i wanted to melt it down and turn it into a toaster. who the hell needs this much power? the .22 felt like you could hit something; the ak47 felt as if you were to simply throw a bunch of bullets out there and hope you hit something. whatever the appeal is of such an indiscriminate muscle gun, i didn't see it; ohhhh, television. i can't imagine how the great dirk benedict could preserve such a worries-to-the-wind smirk while chomping on a cigar and knocking off drug lords as he fired this thing. ick. ban them all. there's no place for something like this, or the canons that the other gentlemen at the rifle range were shooting.

and not to get too stereotypical, but yes: i did hear someone at the end of the rifle range, making a much bigger rattle with his ar10, say, "you haven't heard a government talk like this since hitler and the nazis."

oh, christ. we're all fucked, i'm thinking.

but here's the weird thing. the glock? the ants ran for the hills and the target breathed a sigh of relief; i couldn't hit the broad side of the proverbial barn with this little smooth customer, but i thought it quite preferable. perhaps, instead of being an anti-gun, burn-all-the-nra-cards new york intellectual dummy, i'm secretly a gun snob: could it be that i simply thought that the brutish, ugly utilitarian construction of the ak47 (it's popular because it works under almost any circumstance; hence it's prevalence in the middle east, since it still kills things while mired in all that sand) was far inferior to the balanced, well-fed diet of the glock's figure. there was even a little tinge of thought: maybe...i could just keep one under my bed...

nope. still don't trust them. you know what? let people keep their pistols. and rifles? sure. but automatic weapons? that's just ludicrous that anyone outside of the law enforcement (another bag of trouble, i know, but for the sake of this argument i'll pretend "law enforcement" means reasonable, respectful, and intelligent agents), it's far too late for the current united states to do anything about guns. the argument that we'd all be safer if we all carried guns? the argument that guns don't kill people, people kill people? the argument that the constitution allows us to have guns? all hogwash.

i'd hate to be in the middle of a robbery in a convenience store where every granny, little kid, and stupid teenager was trying to help the situation, perforating everything in sight with their firearms. people kill people with guns because guns are there. and the constitution? jesus, they wrote that when it took ten minutes to load a fucking musket.

the glock made my left ear ring more than any metallica concert i ever attended. ed took us back to his place and fed us hot dogs. we were friends who went out shooting; and i guess, at the end of the day, that's cool, if you just ignore all politics. but that's tough.