February 16, 2018 And the gun drummers just keep on pounding

            Ah, guns. I have had my own love of guns to overcome. As Tabatha Southey put it recently in Macleans, it does seem to be an addiction, rather like smoking. And our American friends are riddled to the bones with the disease, big time. They cite the 2^nd Amendment. Now, I’m all in favour of supporting the 2^nd Amendment, in the most conservative sense – no progressive judges should be allowed to rule on this, only the strictest literalists -- they can all sport their own single-shot, flintlock ignition, black powder, smoothbore muskets till the cows come home. That’s what a well-ordered militia used to defend their supposedly God-given rights in the eighteenth century. Even the British Army, the very best in the world with a Brown Bess musket, couldn’t load and fire one in much less than 15 seconds. That’s four rounds a minute, not 400. Try taking out a school with one of those! Have at it, boys and girls!

            I once owned a Lee-Enfield Mark IV ex-Canadian Army .303, with full military wood, not one cut down for deer hunting. I bought it way back when for twenty bucks in a local country store near Sutton in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Along with that, I had a beautiful, Canadian-made Cooey single shot bolt action .22 that my Dad bought for us kids, and a $50.00 Winchester Model 37 break-action 12-guage shotgun. I got that one, along with a clay pigeon thrower, especially to go and win a frozen turkey with at the cottage annual fall shoot over by Algonquin Park, and did so, very happily beating my cousin who had invested a grand or so in a lovely Browning over-and-under trap gun. Never mind the cost of membership in the gun club! His was like the golden shotgun in the image. Oh, I had my own Browning, too! Crafted in Belgium, a 16-guage semi-auto shotgun with “Sweet Sixteen” engraved into the receiver.

            I have fired .45 semi-auto pistols, and a .36 caliber revolver that once belonged to my Dad's uncle who was an officer in the Great War, and the Canadian Army’s old FN 7.62 mm assault rifle, on the range at Camp Borden. I was on my high school rifle teams at both the schools I attended. I was never a hunter, though I did kill my share of groundhogs at the farm we owned. If the hunters eat the meat, I have no objection to them killing those animals. I am not a vegetarian. So trust me, folks, I really do understand why guns attract some of us. But they are now a sickness, unless you live in, well, anywhere outside the world of rules-based liberal democracies, broadly speaking. Australia has quit guns cold turkey. It works. But it's not the only way.

            You see, banning the weapons implies that the weapon is the whole problem. It’s only part of the problem – the culture is the rest of the problem. Think about it -- the Swiss take assault rifles home and have a murder rate about the same as that of homicides using bicycles. Nope, it ain’t just the guns, it’s the culture. And, boy, does Cousin Jonathan ever, er, have a problem. A sick, and ever-more sickening culture. Sort of like tobacco. I think, though, it's perhaps more like not being toilet trained – the NRA and their supporters just remind me of someone wandering around with a load in their pants. They smell so-o ba-a-d, but they think it’s all the other folks, the lefty, commie, pinko, Democrat, Progressives, that the stink is coming from. They are simply, appallingly wrong.

            So, I agree with Tabatha. None of the arguments for owning handguns or assault rifles in modern liberal democratic societies obviously including places like India and Japan where the rule of law is solid and governments can be changed regularly by voting, hold any water, not without taking a damn good course of instruction and undergoing a real vetting process. If you are sane and not addicted to the idea that your gun will beat your government (like Waco etc.) then you can, like me, eventually beat that drug. I turned my guns in to the cops. (I know, the trolls will have a name for folks like me – guncuck, or some such, being so inarticulate that they have make up their own words.) But, sadly, since November 2016 I am beginning to feel that pull on me again. I am beginning to want my guns back. If only to protect myself against the poopypants gun junkie wackos down there across the south forty fence line, who are headed for my, well, water, let's say. Sooner or later.

http://www.macleans.ca/opinion/another-school-shooting-in-america-and-all-the-nonsense-that-will-be-said/?utm_source=nl&utm_medium=em&utm_campaign=mme_daily

Ahahahhhhahahahah!!! LoL!! -- just a brief update about the gun wackos just a few dozen miles away across the southern fenceline -- this nest of them in Kansas is giving away an AR-15 as part of a political campaign. Another one has three-year-olds selling raffle tickets on an AR-15 as a school fundraiser. Wow. That seems perfectly normal to me, how about you?? Pheeee-yooou, does that smell ripe, or what! Go wash your pants and take a shower, cousin Jonathan. You really need one!

 https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/19/politics/gop-candidate-assault-rifle-giveaway/index.html