What If We Made Gun Culture Uncool Like We Did Cigarettes?

[hunter]

136. Lead ought to be banned for all hunting. On ranges too.

Lead is hell on our local California Condor population.

On a shooting range why would anyone use lead?

What distance do you shoot? Maybe you should try golf. Hitting little balls with a stick. I've one brother who is a champion at that.

Modern 2000+ psi airguns with no-lead ammo are very fine target shooting machines.

But maybe not so good to keep in a purse as a security blanket, I guess.

So what pleases you again? You like the "smell" of those nitrites and nitrates? Buy some poppers.

--Best wishes, Hunter

P.S. This is the 100% science Hunter who has played with things like very big hand guns, rail guns, high explosives, and dangerous rockets, but never any personal safety issues, even frolicking in the surf naked in great white shark territory. The secret of a good life is to be fearless, even if you have to occasionally ask some trusted friend or family to pick shrapnel out of your butt and tell lies to your mother.

P.S.S., this is a photo of my very most sweetest gentle great grandma:



Her autistic spectrum husband was always more fond of engineering math. She'd passed away before I was born, maybe because she wasn't mean enough and hadn't shot dead or emasculated any bad Mormons or other religious fanatics. (Though she did write many harsh words about religious extremists of many flavors. Especially Mormons.)

My other three great grandmas were more the-call-the-county sheriff-coroner-to-clean-up-the-mess sort. Strong silent types. I'd frequently watch one of my great grandmas in awe as she cut up freshly dead fish, birds, or small mammals for dinner. Too fast to see her hands moving. Knife magic. The same grandma who once threatened my dad with a knife. He wisely decided not to press his opinion further.

I've always felt a little sad about this great grandma, she didn't quite believe the Apollo Project, that landing men on the moon was real, even though my dad's dad was one of the many engineers. And she was still complaining about her dead dreamer worthless husband who had signed onto rural electrification for the homestead simply to feed his radio habit. She'd also scolded my mom's cousin, her firstborn grandchild of the homestead, for indoor plumbing in the second house. According to my great grandma electric pumps and indoor plumbing would be the ruin of the family, so better discard the wife who demanded such luxuries. My mom's cousin stood his ground and kept his wife. There was water from the kitchen tap in his bigger house, and later an indoor toilet, bath, and a septic tank. No more bathing in the kitchen in a tub of water heated on the wood stove, women and girls first, men and boys in the cooler leftovers.

Whenever we visited my great grandma we slept in her house, used her outhouse, and bathed in her kitchen in water heated on her wood stove. I witnessed great grandmother boobs, house in the wilderness, Scandinavian style. We'd have been much more comfortable in my mom's cousin's house, but my great grandma ruled all, so much as she could. She could shoot you or cut you if you dared press.

My wife and I are both of matriarchal Western North American families. One of my wife's grandmas was the strongest women I've ever met. (Her other grandma had passed away before we married. A Gaelic Catholic Fuck-this-Shit sort.)

My wife's Southwestern Native American ancestors survived the U.S.A. genocide by fleeing to Mexico and her grandma then birthed her own children back to the U.S.A. when it was a safer, but she refused U.S.A. citizenship until she died, which sometimes made border crossings awkward.

My wife's dad was born in a Mexican farm labor camp within two hundred yards of a small farm my parents later owned. That's among the weirdest coincidences of my life. My wife and I met as commuter school teachers in urban Los Angeles.