I will start out by saying that I am not anti-gun . If I had been in the possession of one a couple of years ago I would have blown that bear off my porch. I had been woke up by the dogs about 1:20 in the wee hours, they wanted out. So I groggily got up and opened the door to let them out. Then they froze- all three of them. I pushed old Buster with my knee and told him to go but he wouldn’t. I prompted him again and he stubbornly refused to budge.

Waking up some I realised there was kind of a ragged looking old shag carpet standing beside the bench just outside my door. The one that I kept my cat food on. Then the carpet growled a warning. Realizing that it was actually a bear I did the only thing I could, I closed the door.

Then I ran around turning lights on an looking in each room before I entered to close the windows and the kitchen door. I do a lot of cooking and it occurred to me that the food smells might also have been an attractant. The bear did not take off, it finished the cat food off and knocked over a pot of rusty nails I was soaking in cooking oil. That was handy as the fish cop didn’t seem to take the assertion that the beast had actually been ON my porch too seriously. He kind of jumped when he saw the track.

That bear should have been shot, it had no respect anymore and there are people with kids who walk to the bus around here. I had one in the bush behind the house for years. I would see its sign in among the raspberry bushes along the field. So I took the truck and the dogs that hundred yards to pick berries. I grew up in this country, bears and deers are not too much of a concern. Unless they get too brave. That is to me what guns are for, they are a tool to put food on the table, dispatch aged or ill critters, and to control aggressive wildlife.

But, it would seem that much of the world has lost this understanding. I was watching Wendy Mesley interview the head of the CSSA (That is the Canadian Sport Shooters Association. Sort of our ten percent version of the NRA.) When she asked him if he wasn’t worried that the guns would be used to kill people he replied that was what they were for. I really did not like that man. He sounded like he was going to break out crying and insisted that the answer (Like some tool in the states.) that what we needed was more guns. We needed good guys with guns to shoot the bad guys.

May the fates protect us all from a bunch of self styled ‘good guys’ strutting around all cocky and armed on the lookout for ‘bad guys’. But think of all the money we could save on law enforcement and incarceration.

The trouble with guns is not just a cultural thing where humanity is experiencing some cataclyismic convulsive evolution away for our hunter/gatherer beginning to a modern technocracy where people have more money and more time and while we still have that atavistic to urge hunt something down and kill it.

The trouble with guns is that they don’t wear out. In this mass produced age more guns are being manufactured than ever before and the people who need them the way that we in the north country need them are gradually dwindling in numbers.

That leaves a lot of firearms manufactures on the ropes. I remember Anderson Cooper telling Obama that a lot of people thought he was going to take their guns. Obama got kind of tetchy and informed Cooper that he only had a year left. The NRA themselves might have started that rumor. It resulted in a lot of people buying more guns. Apparently when Trump got elected fire arms sales dropped by 90% as did the manufactures profits. Which set up a whole new dymanic.

I am not even for a second suggesting that the NRA actually approves of children and innocents getting sliced to ribbons by assault rifles. If any of them actually had the presence of mind to realize what could happen and went through with it they deserve to be charge with murder. I don’t think these guys can think past the end of their nose. Never had to, never wanted to, never will. If they had any idea of consequences Trump wouldn’t have fired Comey or tried to fire Mueller.

I am saying that these people are suggesting a solution that fits their paradigm. More guns for everyone. When Trump first swaggered into the Whitehouse they rolled back a law that Obama had enacted that made it against the law for people with severe mental health issues to have a gun. Which brings us to the man who went into that school and killed those kids.

He was mentally ill and he acquired those guns legally. Now the right wing is blaming the FBI. The FBI may be breathing down Trump’s neck, but they were not responsible for the tools that be repealing that law.

I have a couple of suggestions. First of all no one needs an assault rifle, and if someone catches you actually out hunting with one you will likely get laughed out of the bush. If you can’t hit your target with the first five shots you should maybe go to the supermarket for supper and make the bush a little safer for the rest of us. Secondly, I understand the arms manufactures need for profits, and I really understand the need of the factory workers for their pay cheques. So to that end I recommend plastic guns that blow up or melt everytime you use them so you have to go buy another gun.

This convulsive need to pull the trigger was enshrined in the American constitution as they so like to say. And I would like to point out that when they penned the second amendment a gun was a different kind of a dog. The word musket comes to mind. Not these hideous contraptions whose barrels the arch conservatives are so intent on stroking with such love.

Last summer a man at a shooting range killed his son when he was reaching down his son’s neck to retrieve a hot shell casing without taking the gun out of his hand. He accidently shot the boy in the jugular. He stated that he had always wanted his boy to be comfortable around guns. My Daddy never did. He taught us respect for them. Playing with guns was a whoopable offense.

Guns are tools, they are not toys, or stock options, or a chance for a ‘good guy’ to dispatch a bad guy. We need to remember this and to understand we can’t drive a car until we are a certian age, we can’t beat or starve an animal, and we can’t just walk into a store and take what ever we want. There is no reason on earth why guns should not be subject to these rules as well.

Eva Sartorius

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