I volunteer down at the Pistol Range to help out from time to time.  It helps out the club and I get to meet a wide range of interesting people (sometimes a little too interesting, but you get that!).  Yesterday I helped out with the GOLD Shooting activity – Growing Older and Living Dangerously, that is.  What could possibly go wrong… teaching a group of senior citizens to shoot pistols?  No wuckin’ furries!  🙂

Here’s a few little things I learned teaching OAP’s to shoot:

• Turns out that it’s difficult to communicate safety procedures to someone who has their hearing aids turned off under their ear muffs. 🙁
• Handing a loaded pistol to a thickly bespectacled man who says he can’t ‘quite make out’ the large red target barely ten metres in front of him, is a somewhat nerve wracking experience.  Eek.
• ‘No, I’ve never shot before,’ is invariably code for: ‘I have 20 years military experience but I just want you to feel like an idiot, giving me basic firearms safety instructions’.
• The mature ladies who turn up looking fabulous, are here to meet men and couldn’t care less about shooting (a perfectly valid pursuit in my humble opinion!).   🙂
• The gentleman with the hand tremors from recent open heart surgery will take more time, and put more effort into taking his shots and will shoot much better, than the non-trembly guy who follows him.
• The sweet looking granny in the mauve cardigan, is the person most likely to tell you that she wants a huge revolver to keep under her pillow.
• Shooting clay targets with shotguns is apparently ‘the best thing since indoor plumbing’… sliced bread coming a distant third.
• Pulling the trigger and making an exclamation of surprise will always be swiftly followed by a ‘Oh, sorry dear!’
• And everyone wants to take their targets home to show their grandkids!

Out of the innumerable people I have lead in groups, and taken through various shooting activities in the few short years I’ve been volunteering at the range, I have to say that the GOLD participants, for all their hearing challenges and vision shortcomings, are the most respectful, attentive and diligent of the lot.  They were thoughtful and considerate, well spoken and polite, tried their best and were proud of their accomplishments.  To be honest, I’d rather shoot with these guys who can’t hear me and can’t see shit, than a bunch of 20 somethings who simply won’t listen and won’t try!

With the recent blocking of gun reform legislation in the US Senate, the debate brings tempers to a boil on both sides of the aisle and shows once again just how strong the NRA stranglehold is on the American political system. Apparently it’s ‘political suicide’ to go against the NRA in certain states and yet I keep coming around the the same old question:

If the NRA has approximately 4.5 million card carrying members.  That’s 4.5 million out of some 311 million Americans – 90% of whom allegedly support compulsory background checks and restrictions on semi-automatic weapons or some form of tighter gun regulation of some description… So why doesn’t a huge chunk of that 90% just go and join the damn NRA and take it over from within?

Yes. Join them.  If say 20+ million Americans, with slightly less ‘out of my cold dead hands’ views towards gun ownership, went ahead and joined the NRA – at a measly $35 per annum – they could take over the place in about three years by voting in a preferred board of directors and totally change the dialogue and the NRA’s organisational agenda.  They’d out number the monster raving looney right element by as much as five to one… So why don’t they do it?  Why try and fight against the NRA when you could just join it, and bring the common sense and moderation that 90% of Americans supposedly want?

You see, according to the all knowing Wikipedia, the NRA is governed by a seventy-six member board of directors. There are seventy-five elected Directors that each serve a three year term – this means that overwhelmingly stacking the membership deck could result in a commonsense gun legislation friendly, seventy-five member board.

These seventy-six directors then choose the President, one or more Vice Presidents, and the Executive Vice President (who is the leading spokesperson for the NRA), along with a Secretary, and Treasurer from among the elected Directors – any and/or all of these directors could be pro-gun but also moderate pro-reform and pro-legislation… and even (gasp! god help us), Democrats! if more regular Joes decided to join the NRA.  So why fight ’em?

In the meantime all we see over there is lots of money being thrown around, lots of misinformation about President Obama’s agenda, lots of ranting about loss of civil liberties and 2nd Amendment rights, lots of politicians being threatened or bought off and lots and lots of mass shootings, gun related homicides, gun related suicides and accidental gun deaths.

Australia went through the painful gun buy back thing and as much as we bitch about the various weapons licensing boards and authorities who do the background checks and execute the legislation that we have to abide by – it’s not what they’re doing that gives us the shits… it’s the lack of speed with which they do it!  There is a big lesson for the US to learn from Australia as far as gun control is concerned and it really is something that should be taken seriously… not just turned into fodder for comedians.

The Daily Show: John Oliver Investigates Gun Control in Australia – Part 1

The Daily Show: John Oliver Investigates Gun Control in Australia – Part 2

The Daily Show: John Oliver’s Australia & Gun Control’s Aftermath – Part 3

Update:  I just found this article which discusses the backlash in the polls that Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte from New Hampshire is experiencing since NOT backing the gun reform bill.  Senator Ayotte has seen her approval ratings drop by 15% to 44% since voting against the bill aimed at reducing gun violence making it really obvious that her constituents are seriously displeased at her bowing to pressure from the NRA and other gun lobbyists.  Maybe there’s some hope at the end of tunnel?  Maybe they don’t have to join the NRA en masse after all?  Maybe Americans just need to become less apathetic about their political processes and actually turn up and you know…  vote the ‘cold dead handers’ out of office!

Little Red Riding Hood was originally a French, and later European, fairy story about a little girl and a Big Bad Wolf.  The version most of us know it as was written and published by Charles Perrault in 1697… In this original version, both Little Red Riding Hood and her Grandmother die horribly at the hands of the Big Bad Wolf, however The Grimm Brothers (oddly enough) revised the ending and added the Woodsman who saves both Grandma and Little Red Riding Hood.

Skip forward a few centuries and you get… a 1989, Houghton-Mifflin published version (an edition which won the Caldecott Honor Book Award by the way) which became a source of ridiculous controversy.  The drama began in Empire, California in 1990 when local school boards raised objections over the depiction of a bottle of wine in the book’s illustrations. Little Red Riding Hood was taking some wine to Grandma’s house along with other goodies in the illustrations, though not in the text.  Across the country in the same year, In Clay County, parents of fifth & sixth graders challenged the fairy tale because of the presence of the alcoholic beverage (personally, I think they should have been querying why their 12 year olds were still reading picture books…  but that is another story).  Anyway, Grandma was perceived as a detrimental role model for young children as she would invariably turn all children exposed to such licentiousness, into rampant alcoholics and two county school boards in California and the school board in Florida duly BANNED Little Red Riding Hood to protect the innocent children from the evils of Grandma and her Alcoholics R Cool advertising campaign.

Not long after in 1991, further controversy arose surrounding the same, now nefarious Little Red Riding Hood text, when a teacher from Bradford County (again in Florida… bugger me, but I always thought Florida was full of retirees?) lodged complaints with the local school board stating that the Big Bad Wolf was far too violent for small children and that this would encourage violent behaviour among preteens.  Naturally, children should be taught that wolves are fluffy and friendly… just like the neighbour’s dog and should be approached without caution.  Oh, and feel free to teach the kids that they might want to give them a cuddle or offer them a treat if they see one.  Have you ever head anything so ridiculous in your entire life?  More banning of Little Red Riding Hood in the name of ‘protecting the children’.

There have been other controversies surrounding the infamous fairy tale (yes, oxymoronic I know) not the least of which revolve around Grandma’s alcoholic tendencies, the Big Bad Wolf’s propensity towards violence, but also (and now you really gotta want it here) because it promotes unconventional family units, it pushes a transgender ideology, and it clearly exhibits communist sympathies by the excessive wearing of red.  No shit.  Americans are either bored stupid and have nothing better to worry about or they’re seriously deluded about their abilities to make logical, rational and coherent arguments.  Either way you look at it, the end result is that Little Red Riding Hood is banned across several counties and many school boards in the US to protect small children from the alcoholism, violence, communism, familial dysfunction and transgender tendencies apparent in a FAIRY TALE!

Hence, the startling effectiveness of the advertisement at the top of this post.  Little Red Riding Hood – banned!  Semi-auto AR-15 rifle with high capacity magazines – no problem!