born in america, as close to the south as you can get before entering dixie, gives you a deep understanding of “just the way things are.” people hunt, people fish around here. but they don’t do it for their groceries, they do it for furniture, for wall hangings, decor. they do it to put on the walls to show their prowess at taking the life of something. rooted, i assume, in they way we had to do it as we cleared the land, survived and built these societies, cities and burgs. men my age were spoon-fed cowboy movies, western-tomes where heroes wore white hats, shot to kill savages, food and those in black hats. guns and killing were a way of life. for food, for protection and for power. guns were part of the fabric of life in these movies, just as they were in households. we had a couple shotguns, even a couple pistols, my dad and my granddad were both veterans. my dad, a occasional rabbit hunter and all of us fishermen, for a few years i would say that i was a real angler, boats, expensive gear, the whole she-bang. there were no politics to these things. my family, if anything were hyper-liberals. that’s all i really knew. but i got older, i discovered things that opened my mind; art, visual and aural. punk rock and the ethos behind it led me to question some of these deep rooted notions of white and black hats, of killing things just for the “sport” of it and ultimately i questioned killing things to stock the shelves of the food markets.

i am now going on 33 years without meat. i don’t preach to others about much of this stuff. alas everything is now political, to each his own, but when the debate about freedoms involves old and tired arguments like, “that’s why cows were put on this earth” or “guns don’t kill, people do” i grow a bit antsy and begin to stand up a little straighter. when people tell me they love beef, the love pork, they love chicken, i can understand that, they don’t need a justification beyond that with me, same with those fried fish–same with their guns. hell, loving something is something.

but the gun lobby isn’t really honest, they don’t say they love their guns, they give you a bunch of horse shit about safety and protection and THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS! it isn’t about any of that, let’s talk the truth about guns. no one is coming to get yours, no one is saying you can’t have one, but your dishonesty about why you have them is what is bothersome. you love them, the same way you love brisket and bar-b-q and that 7 lb. bass on the wall. you don’t need any of that, you just love it. and that’s really america. we make things we love, a “right” and we use a bunch of fear and hyperbole to justify getting more of what we love. so when you say that having the same weapons that the military or the police have is your “right” we know it really isn’t and you really don’t believe it is. you want them for the status, that weird male itch of collecting something and the gun manufacturers figured that out and they marketed that notion to you and they used fear with a dash of “own the same killing machines and the good guys” and you fell, it wasn’t your fault. you love guns.