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If ur a gun guy, but not a gun goon guy, this post just might appeal to you.
Blogger TBogg fucking details the problem with the modern gun culture:
When I was eight, I attended gun safety courses put on by the NRA at the local community center where thick-necked men with serious faces and butch haircuts promised us hell and worse if we mishandled a rifle or a shotgun. There was no Eddie Eagle cartoon character who spent his time talking about the 2nd amendment because the important thing was to learn not to shoot yourself or someone else. It was serious people teaching the next generation how to safely hunt and not just how to shoot.
I waited another year before I was actually allowed to carry a shotgun, serving instead an apprenticeship in the field, walking and watching and learning and carrying the kill in the back of my new hunting vest.
When the time came, I was given a .410 single-barreled shotgun by my uncle and spent days at a shooting range learning how to lead and squeeze.
The first time I was allowed to hunt, we were walking a dirt-clod field in Imperial Valley during dove season. In dawn’s very early light, I spotted the distinctive beat-beat-glide of a single dove almost directly above us, but way out of range. After pleading with my father to let me take a shot because I had waited so long, he finally relented. I tracked the bird to the best of my then non-existent experience and pulled the trigger. Far above us we saw the dove lurch, followed by a small puff of what were no doubt feathers, and then it plummeted to the ground, the victim of an overachieving bb or two that managed to find its mark.
I was a natural born killer.
Go on . . . . . . . . . .
Depending upon the season, we hunted pheasants, dove, quail, and duck. When it wasn’t hunting season, we fished. On summer nights we walked the edges of the vernal pools that used to dot the parts of San Diego that are now suburbs, gigging frogs for their legs. They really do taste like chicken, as did the rabbits we hunted as they hopped up to those same pools to drink at dusk.
We did this, not for the sport — although there was an element of that –, but because it was a way to supplement what we ate.
And we did this for years, raising and breeding hunting dogs, spending hours in the garage at night reloading our own shotgun shells, hand painting decoys.
We felt safe in the field because the NRA had taught us how to be safe; to know where everyone else was when you pulled the trigger, to keep your weapon pointed at the ground, to open the breech and extract the shells if you weren’t hunting, to keep you finger off of the trigger unless you had reason to pull it.
As I grew older I began to notice a different breed of hunter; men who showed up with multiple shotguns as if they were golf clubs needed for specific shots. While most of us wore jeans, t-shirts and hunting vests, these newcomers dressed like they were going on safari, wearing bush hats, shooting jackets (in the 100 degree heat), and cargo pants with more pockets than there existed implements to fill them. You would see them walking the fields; shotgun draped over one arm, can of beer in the other hand. We learned to stay away from them.
For these men hunting was a manhood thing, a way to get in touch with their alpha male, a way to prove they weren’t soft city dwellers and what better way to do that than to get together with some buddies and shoot some guns at whatever moved.
It was no coincidence that, at this same time (this being early seventies), the NRA changed their focus from hunting programs to promoting gun ownership and defending the 2nd Amendment from imaginary enemies.
Each trip afield meant running into more men concerned with the idea of shooting but unburdened with any concept of the etiquette of hunting. For an adult, all you needed was the cash to purchased a gun and a hunting license and you were good to go forth and kill.
The last time my father, my brother, and I hunted together was pheasant hunting in Imperial Valley. We walked the short-grown alfalfa fields hoping to kick up a pheasant, or watched to see our German Shorthaired Pointer, Candy, go on point. When she did we would instruct her to chase the bird until it flew, at which time it was considered “fair game” to shoot it. Rule of thumb: you do not shoot a bird not in flight. Not cool.
Having worked the field, we returned to our truck to get water. By our truck were several other cars and trucks with hunters standing around talking and smoking and looking for shade in the ninety-degree heat. While we sat on the truck’s tailgate, Candy — ever the worker — kept sniffing around and doing what came naturally to her. Somewhere, possibly by one on the canals that separate many of the fields, she kicked up a pheasant and gave chase, the pheasant running several feet in front of her, refusing to fly. A large man, decked out in a bush hat, cargo pants, and vest with no shirt — his white skin blotchy and red in the heat — immediately swung his shotgun up despite standing amongst of hunters in all directions and fired off two quick shots at the running bird. Poor shot that he was, he missed the bird but sent up two large explosions of dirt no more than two feet in front of Candy’s nose as she skidded to a stop.
It was deathly quiet afterwards as everyone looked at him, stunned by what he had done.
My father quickly walked over to him, cursing all the way, grabbed the shotgun out of his hands by grabbing it by the barrel — no doubt burning his hands — and broke it open ejecting the spent shells. He then threw it end over end into the field. As my father berated him, using words I wasn’t well acquainted with at the time with but have learned to love since then, the hunter (known in family lore now as “The Great White Hunter”). His friends looked away and shuffled their feet, no one daring to come to his defense. I have no doubt, even to his day, had the man shot and killed Candy my father would have shot him if he’d had a loaded shotgun in his hand.
Having verbally unloaded on the man who didn’t dare to look upset that his gun was laying in the field somewhere, my dad said, “Get in the car boys. We’re going home.”
I don’t remember if he said another word during the two-hour drive back to San Diego.
When we got home, we released Candy to the yard while my dad went into the garage and cleaned the pheasants we had shot. Afterward he cleaned the shotguns before sticking them in his bedroom closet without a word.
He never took us hunting again and we never asked to go.http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/05/25/i-was-the-nra/#.U4H09zXz1lw.twitter
Jeebus -- he most certainly fucking nailed it.
The Gadfly grew up in a midwestern state ---- hunting, fishing, outdoors activities, and with people who appreciated it. This new culture of the Dirty Harry gun nut has nothing to do with those mostly decent and fair people.
The new breed of NRA sycophants are narcissists more than anything ... they love to show off their armaments in public just because they can and because they know it intimidates people. They are cowards, because who wants to get in to a heated debate with a fucking hot-headed, arrogant loon waving an AR-15 around? The Gadfly has no respect for them.
They're the same assholes who show up in public venues like family restaurants waving their proxy dicks around as The Gadfly has already talked about. They're assholes. They're ignorant. They've been educated by Fox "News" ....
And it's time that decent society slaps their fucking hand and tells them to knock it the fucking off as far as the stupidity goes ....
The Gadfly hopes - beyond hope - that society wakes up to these clowns .. but as the late, great George Carlin said:
----TFG
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