“I think I’m going to be sick.”

[Plucketeer]

35. I'm a "boomer"

I'll bet I'm not alone in recalling Sunday afternoons in front of the TV - watching Westerns and War Movies with my dad. It was all about WHO triumphed over WHO with a gun. The baddies, the agressors, the enemy - all were vanquished with the help of a firearm. Even the agressors initially got their way at the point of a gun. What could a kid (or even a grown-up) deduce from these fanciful bits of drama? Were not the Axis Powers a real threat? Gangsters, cattle rustlers, murderers - all put in their place in the end, with guns. Message delivered.
Sure, I wanted and HAD - cap guns, squirt guns, BB guns and even access to a .22 rifle in my childhood years. After I enlisted in the US Air Force, they taught me how to use an M1 and subsequently, an M-16. I qualified "Expert Marksman" by the way. I guess if I were ever forced to defend myself as an aircraft electrician, I would've held my own.

I CAN relate what it's like to be roused from your sleep to face a huge flashlight beam along with the gleam of a large, chrome-plated revolver flashing as you're interrogated. This was in a galfriend's bedroom while I was stationed overseas. I've often reflected as to how I might've fared if I'd groped for a gun of my own, had I had one at the time. I figure there's a good chance I would not be "witnessing" here and now.
Some years later - planning and preparing to move to the wilderness in pursuit of a simplification of life - I even bought a survival rifle to use in pursuit of game. I never shot that gun any more than to prove it's function. I actually feared it's potential if wrested away from me, so I sold it to an uncle who's always maintained an arsenal.

But here's the point of what I'm saying here...... We Americans have been raised on a pablum of might makes right. And guns make "might" a possibility for almost every one of us. Beyond guns themselves, there's the gladiator culture of "kicking ass" in any venue one can think of. Competition is not the breeding ground of civility - not like the thin veil we tout as "sportsmanship". We don't outscore our opponents - we slaughter them. We don't simply win - we kill them. What's that say about the sub-current mindset? And yet we continue to crank out the candy of ass-kick to this day - video games and "entertainment" glorify and promote the proliferation of tools that spit death.
I find it incredible that some can defend guns as a means of sport. I always say - when given a chance - that guns were not invented to answer a plague of bullseye targets. They were conceived as a way to cast a pellet of metal accurately so as to cause bodily (possibly fatal) harm to another living thing. The flimsy "sport" angle is just a way to stay proficient should the previous scenario seem necessary.
The ridiculous assertion that ALL of a society's populace should be packin' as a means of prevention is SO silly that I refuse to even talk about it with anything but derision. To think that this could be a panacea for our plauge is just nuts. We must certainly be the laughingstock of nations that have much more severe controls over firearms than we do. We're a nation of warriors - and we've purposely made it that way. Wake Up America? We spend SIXTY PERCENT of our national budget on defense (death tool) hardware! SIXTY PERCENT and yet not even the TINIEST mention of that bloat while discussing Medicare and Social Security.