Drizzt
Member
Gun owners headed the way of smokers
JOE SOUCHERAY
Pioneer Press Columnist
Turns out this is more fun than you can shake a stick at, all this bang-bang hysteria. The other day, as I deleted about 300 e-mails, I'll bet half of them were from people, some of them right here in this newsroom, who believe that guns will up and develop their own two legs and a mind of their own to boot.
Look out! There's a gun coming down the street!
I can save everybody in Minnesota the trouble of any additional worry about guns. I'm not saying that this is the last word on the subject — not when it's turned out to be this much fun — but it will be the last word for a while.
OK. This is Minnesota, right? The State Where Absolutely Nothing is Allowed? Everybody just take a deep breath and you can see where all this is headed. It is headed in exactly the same direction as the anti-cigarette hysteria.
In fact, with the anti-smoking hysteria as a precedent, the anti-gun hysteria already skipped a few of the phases. For example, we have already skipped ahead to the "no guns allowed on these premises'' stage. It took years for the anti-smoking crowd to get that far. Why, I remember when I was allowed to hack away at the typewriter in the newsroom with a Marlboro hanging from my lip. When they outlawed that, they still set aside a room in the building, and right in the middle of a sentence, if you got a real bad jones, you could head up to what was euphemistically called a lounge and smoke your brains out. It was still in the building.
In the meantime, they started devoting about half the school day to brainwashing the kids against tobacco and they wiped the ads off TV and they passed restrictive measures to make it so that cigarette machines had to be elevated 22 feet off the floor and then could be accessed only with a secret password. They even demonized poor old Joe Camel and said it was his fault that kids smoked and that turned the kids around, all right, because pretty soon the kids were taking to the streets and blaming evil manufacturers for causing them to smoke.
Well, the upshot of all that was that smokers were forced outside the building, as in shunned, turned against, rejected. You see them to this day, smokers, huddled in the doorways of businesses in 22-below weather, still trying to convince themselves that it is a habit, not an addiction.
It probably took years to get to the outdoor stage because every once and a while you will get a 103-year-old guy who says the key to long life is a little whiskey and his Lucky Strikes, but with guns there is no doubt that one bullet will do the job. You really don't need any scientific studies.
Thus, with guns, we're already at the shunned, turned against and rejected part. The new "shall issue'' law went into effect Wednesday. When I arrived at the Pioneer Press on Friday morning the signs were already at the doors — No guns. Damn, I had to go back to the parking ramp, open my trunk, and empty my pockets of all my bullets and guns and scopes and my canteen, too.
Next winter, when you see people huddled in the doorways of buildings, they could be smokers or they could be gun owners. Or, they could be smokers who are gun owners. We won't be able to tell.
Think of all the places you can't smoke and you pretty much see the future of carrying a gun in Minnesota. Not much of a future. In all the places you can't smoke you won't be able to carry a gun. Oh, there will be lawsuit or two, as well, but even Mike Ciresi will have a tough time proving that gun manufacturers carefully hid their data that shows that guns kill people. Like I said, you don't really need a scientific study for that.
Smoke 'em if you got 'em, and I guess carry 'em if you got 'em, but not here, there or thither.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Soucheray can be reached at [email protected].
http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/5981869.htm
JOE SOUCHERAY
Pioneer Press Columnist
Turns out this is more fun than you can shake a stick at, all this bang-bang hysteria. The other day, as I deleted about 300 e-mails, I'll bet half of them were from people, some of them right here in this newsroom, who believe that guns will up and develop their own two legs and a mind of their own to boot.
Look out! There's a gun coming down the street!
I can save everybody in Minnesota the trouble of any additional worry about guns. I'm not saying that this is the last word on the subject — not when it's turned out to be this much fun — but it will be the last word for a while.
OK. This is Minnesota, right? The State Where Absolutely Nothing is Allowed? Everybody just take a deep breath and you can see where all this is headed. It is headed in exactly the same direction as the anti-cigarette hysteria.
In fact, with the anti-smoking hysteria as a precedent, the anti-gun hysteria already skipped a few of the phases. For example, we have already skipped ahead to the "no guns allowed on these premises'' stage. It took years for the anti-smoking crowd to get that far. Why, I remember when I was allowed to hack away at the typewriter in the newsroom with a Marlboro hanging from my lip. When they outlawed that, they still set aside a room in the building, and right in the middle of a sentence, if you got a real bad jones, you could head up to what was euphemistically called a lounge and smoke your brains out. It was still in the building.
In the meantime, they started devoting about half the school day to brainwashing the kids against tobacco and they wiped the ads off TV and they passed restrictive measures to make it so that cigarette machines had to be elevated 22 feet off the floor and then could be accessed only with a secret password. They even demonized poor old Joe Camel and said it was his fault that kids smoked and that turned the kids around, all right, because pretty soon the kids were taking to the streets and blaming evil manufacturers for causing them to smoke.
Well, the upshot of all that was that smokers were forced outside the building, as in shunned, turned against, rejected. You see them to this day, smokers, huddled in the doorways of businesses in 22-below weather, still trying to convince themselves that it is a habit, not an addiction.
It probably took years to get to the outdoor stage because every once and a while you will get a 103-year-old guy who says the key to long life is a little whiskey and his Lucky Strikes, but with guns there is no doubt that one bullet will do the job. You really don't need any scientific studies.
Thus, with guns, we're already at the shunned, turned against and rejected part. The new "shall issue'' law went into effect Wednesday. When I arrived at the Pioneer Press on Friday morning the signs were already at the doors — No guns. Damn, I had to go back to the parking ramp, open my trunk, and empty my pockets of all my bullets and guns and scopes and my canteen, too.
Next winter, when you see people huddled in the doorways of buildings, they could be smokers or they could be gun owners. Or, they could be smokers who are gun owners. We won't be able to tell.
Think of all the places you can't smoke and you pretty much see the future of carrying a gun in Minnesota. Not much of a future. In all the places you can't smoke you won't be able to carry a gun. Oh, there will be lawsuit or two, as well, but even Mike Ciresi will have a tough time proving that gun manufacturers carefully hid their data that shows that guns kill people. Like I said, you don't really need a scientific study for that.
Smoke 'em if you got 'em, and I guess carry 'em if you got 'em, but not here, there or thither.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Soucheray can be reached at [email protected].
http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/5981869.htm
