Chickenminnie’s Weblog

Growing up on a farm in upstate New York I had a ring side seat for gun ownership and as a result am well versed in how to clean, load and use a gun safely.  An appropriately sized firearm was an essential tool in the farm life survival collection; there was no reverence or hero worship for the household gun, but rather a deep and abiding respect for its ability to end a life and the two household guns lived in the tack room with the ammunition in a location known only to my parents. On the farm it would be considered a cruelty to be unable to quickly and humanely end a severely injured or suffering animal’s life or to kill a rabid animal.  The incredible amount of irony in that combination of killing and compassion occupies a big part in the Venn diagram of gun ownership as it should.

My grandfather was an avid sportsman who had a massive collection of custom and specialty guns for all manner of sporting much of which was to gather food and as kids we ate all sorts of fowl and game gathered by grandpa. Someone once asked him why he had no automatic or semi-automatic weapons and he quipped, “I want to hunt, not make hamburger”. He went on to explain that he felt that automatic and semi-automatic weapons belonged squarely in the wheelhouse of military and police personnel…the professionals. “They are ugly and designed to kill people, not dinner” said he. Perhaps the fact that he was a prominent area surgeon colored his opinion; I know that some of his younger colleagues who were MASH doctors returning from Korea influenced him a great deal after describing the carnage these weapons can cause. So no, I don’t think they should be available to average citizens because the use case is nothing other than nefarious.

In case you are wondering, I get the American gun culture thing but somewhere along the line it moved away from the pride of quiet responsibility for such a potentially fearsome thing to a grotesque (cult)ure of power acquisition, paranoia and personal insecurity.  Clearly  as a society we can no longer handle the parameters for gun ownership set forth by our forefathers and by responsible society.  As a country girl I had more than my share of boyfriends with gun racks in the back windows of their pickup trucks but even at seventeen I knew a guy with an AK47 was nothing short of creepy.