Big Iron On His Hip

 Back in November I wrote a short piece discussing the latest firearm atrocity. I had exactly the same effect on firearms in this country as every other opinion piece, editorial, blog post, and survivor plea after another nutjob takes his bullet launcher and sends another bunch of poor sods to join the Choir Eternal.

Nothing.

But today I was thinking how utterly weird the current insane gunlicking going on at the American Right is, and, in particular, how sudden it has arrived.

This isn't some sort of trace-it-back-to-the-Revolution thing. It's basically been invented out of whole cloth over about the past forty years. Contemporary with the rise of the modern GQP (hmmm...what an odd co-inky-dink, Bug Bunny would say).

The whole hyperammosexualization of firearms is only about twenty or thirty years old and how freakishly weird is the notion of living in a modern industrial democracy and wanting, NEEDing, to be strapped at all times.

I was a medic in an infantry battalion in the early 1980s. 

 

 It was legal for a GI to own a personal weapon (mind you, not many did - certainly nobody in my platoon, and infantrymen, even infantry medics, ain't exactly your soy-boy peacenik hippies...).

 

Keep in mind that this was an airborne infantry battalion. Infantry. The kind of people who, y'know, made their living with firearms.

 

And the ironclad Armywide rule was that IF you had a personal weapon, whatever the make and model, that weapon lived in your company arms room at all times 1) unless and until you signed it out to go to the range and 2) was immediately returned to the arms cage when you returned to the company area.

 

The notion that you the individual Joe would keep your bang stick leaning up against your bunk? Or your hogleg in your desk drawer? Your First Sergeant would square your young ass away most quick smart.

 

So here's a bunch of people who are thoroughly trained and experienced using firearms - whose trade is using firearms - whose first, last, unbreakable rule is that unless you're going to shoot at targets you don't get to keep and bear the sonofabitch. 

 

Period. 

 

It stays locked up with the rest of the weaponry.

But here's some idiot Joe and Molly keeping their nine-mil in the bedside drawer where their whacked-out sprog can use it to work out his testosterone issues.

 

Nope. 

 

This whole business is completely whacko.

 

And as always on this subject, I refer you to Jim Wright for a bit of bang-bang-sanity.