I have nothing against owning useless things. That’s why I have cats. Others own guns. The similarities…
gun control
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We learned to shoot in high school.
It was the 1980s, and as an alternative to gym class, any student could, with minimal instruction, be blasting away with a .22 bolt-action rifle in the basement.
Once the rules were read, and some initial range-safety demonstrations given, we were off and shooting within a week. And, for the next few weeks after that. We shot so many rounds, in fact, that teenagers grew bored of it — bored of shooting (real) guns, having grown up shooting imaginary Russians with sticks.
Many of us became excellent shots by the time it was over — some even shooting bull’s-eyes from the hip when the instructor wasn’t looking.
It still seems ludicrous. I’ve often wondered about it as I recount this high school memory to a generation more familiar with metal detectors than the sounds of a platoon of fellow students blasting away.
For a brief moment following the shooting in Arizona, it really seemed like a consensus was forming within the liberal (and parts of the mainstream) media and blogosphere; that the violent rightwing rhetoric which has become standard feature of our political discourse had finally gone too far, and that we as a nation were finally due for some rhetorical climate change.