Just imagine the following scenario. I’m shooting the breeze with a friend. The conversation is as free and easy as shooting fish in a barrel. I make a comment about violence in the news and we launch into a rapid fire debate with guns blazing. Locked and loaded, I set my sights on winning the argument. In my mind, my position is bulletproof but my friend feels as if I’ve misfired on my point, shot myself in the foot. He labels me a loose cannon and tells me that I’m shooting blind. He thinks he’s a hot shot but he’s shooting blanks.
I consider myself a real pistol of a straight shooter who is simply coming under heavy fire for what I said. My friend continues to shoot me down. I implore him to face the facts and not shoot the messenger. That’s when he takes out his big guns and really takes aim. In reply, I decide to shoot from the hip by reminding him that no one is holding a gun to his head. At this point, he’s not willing to shell out anymore opinions on the matter and asks me to just shoot him now.
Sigh.
no images were found
We love guns in our hands, gun rights in our Constitution and lots of guns in our movies. We love our gun sales, gun stores and gun shows. We love our hunting rifles, assault rifles, automatics, semi-automatics, double-pump action and Saturday night specials. For those of us who have never purchased, held or fired a gun, we actually love guns too. We love them in the hands of the soldiers who defend our values at home and abroad. We love them in the hands of the police officers who patrol our cities and protect our homes. We even love them in the hands of our fellow concealed carry citizens who have played a large role in putting down many of the mass shooters we fear.But you know what we really love most? We love, love, love our gun talk.
We love it in our conversations over caramel macchiatos. We love it on our glock talk forums and our Hickock 45 YouTube videos. We love it in our do-nothing congressional political debates. We love it in our music with our Janies, our pumped-up kicks and our buck buck bucks. We love it in our celebrity airhead tabloids. We love it in our news stories complete with drug deals gone wrong, home invasions and drive-bys. If we didn’t have gun talk in our linguistic arsenal, I’m not sure what we would do. How could we express our intent, our stance or our thoughts without it? We just wouldn’t be on target. Shoot. We would downright miss the mark.
I’m just as saddened as any other American when I hear about senseless violence robbing us of innocent lives. I can’t say, however, that I’m shocked. If we stop and take a minute to self-reflect then we would see how we all contribute to our gun-toting, shoot’em up environment.
We speak our reality.
