I don’t feel like I could be any farther left politically without falling off the political spectrum, at least, at times, but much about this story has me baffled. It’s not just that I’m now imagining Campfield and Ford, armed and dangerous, but it honestly never occurred to me that any politician, especially in a state full of farmers, could somehow not know that a gun is a farm tool. Regardless of how you feel about guns or about hunting or whatever, sitting around debating about whether a farmer should be allowed to have a gun, and whether he should have to have special training to shoot at a snake?!
I’m sorry. Like I said, I’m a died in the wool lefty and I find this painfully embarrassing.
Are we going to debate whether a farmer should be able to have a tractor? After all, they could be very dangerous if someone got drunk and drove it through campus. Or fertilizer? Need I mention the Oklahoma City bombing? What about augers? You know how many old farmers I grew up with who were missing hands or fingers because of augers? And yet, they are still on farms.
I don’t own a gun. I think I’d even be nervous about having one in my house.
But it would strike me as weird if I went to a farmer’s house and there wasn’t at least one shotgun. Like I said, it’s a farm tool.
And using a gun to shoot a snake? Not only is that not weird, I’ve seen at least two different stories in the Commercial-Appeal about flood victims carrying shotguns to shoot snakes when the gun owners have to be on their flooded property. So, it’s weird that Memphis Democrats wouldn’t get the importance of that task. Do they not read their own paper? Skip the stories about the defining current event in their city?
Again, I’m not a gun expert, but I think the whole point of shot was that you were shooting something–like a bird or a snake or a deer–that moves quickly and may not be exactly where you aim by the time the load gets to it. So a wide spray of metal makes it more likely that something will hit it.
I don’t know. I don’t feel like some great second amendment absolutist and I don’t believe anything in the Constitution is off-limits for discussion, but it’s embarrassing to me, as a Democrat, when Democrats talk like there’s no good reason for a farmer to have a gun. It’s like saying there’s no reason for a police officer or a soldier to have a gun. A shotgun is part of the standard equipment of a farmer.
Sure, I guess not every farmer has one, but it seems like that kind of basic misunderstanding of who uses a gun in their jobs and for what and how is one reason that gun nuts never trust Democrats to have a legitimate discussion about guns–prominent Dems sound like they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.