Tool of the Week: 02.12.2006

This week I had intended to continue the miniaturization theme, as it's a subject I spend entirely too much time thinking about. I will most likely pick it up next Monday or Tuesday, so y'all can see my super-sweet Skoal can condom case. Smells like Wintergreen, leaves her with a pleasant head buzz.

I'm briefly detouring from the Way of the Teensy, however, because this week's tool is (a) something of monumental significance, and (b) inspired by current events, which naturally have a half-life, so I as Blogger Extraordinaire must move swiftly.

Now, the source of this week's tool post is intensely political, but I wish to stress at the outset that political sniping isn't my purpose here. As I've said before, I'm not at all afraid to discuss my political or religious beliefs (tantalizing preview: I've got a possible series of theological/philosophical posts in the planning stages), but I try to avoid political posts just because there are roughly eight billion bloggers who already do that. Not to mention that two weeks on the internet have a way of souring you on politics for a good long while. So try to bear in mind here: I'd say the same things I'm about to say even if we were talking about a Democrat.

This week's tool is absolutely essential to daily living. How fortunate, then, that they come in pairs.

Ladies and gentlemen, our Tools of the Week are THE EYES IN YOUR HEAD, what God gave you for lookin'.

[EDIT: That link is correct, but hotlinking to posts on that site really sucks. Scroll to the post titled "Not a Laughing Matter."]

Yes, I'm going to beat up on an old man a little bit. Granted, it was a friend of his that he shot, and given that he actually possesses a heart and is not in fact the complex system of levers and pulleys draped in human skin I personally believe him to be, he probably feels pretty bad about all this. Still, this sort of behavior must be called out for what it is, and given that 99.95% of the national press has never fired a weapon that was not part of research for a story, I feel some things must be pointed out for the record. Bear in mind, I'm not exactly Dan'l Boone, but I do know a few things about guns and hunting. So let's look at what Lord Vader did wrong and see what nuggets we can glean:

The long, skinny end is the dangerous end.

We'll start with the basics. Two ends to your average shotgun. One is flat and wooden or plastic and kind of looks like a paddle. This end does not go bang. The other end, the long steel cylindrical one (cylindrical being a word that means "vaguely bong shaped"), that's the one you've got to be careful of.

Folks, this is rule numbers one through forty-five in gun safety, something every marksman and hunter knows: ALWAYS POINT THE GUN IN A SAFE DIRECTION. You can't get through fifteen minutes of a hunter safety certification course without having this tattooed on the insides of your eyelids. See that guy over there? Don't point it at him. Think the barrel might be obstructed? Don't peer down it with your one good eye. It go boom.

Don't even think about putting your finger on the trigger until you're sure.

Sure of what you're shooting at, that is. Of supreme importance with any firearm, but doubly so with a shotgun, which fires a spread of little pellets rather than an individual bullet, the same little pellets currently being picked out of the Veep's buddy's face.

When you're trained to shoot, you hear the word "background" used a lot. As in, "Watch your background" or "Be careful of your background" or "Don't shoot, your best friend and hunting partner is in the background, hey no, seriously, IT'S DOUG, YOU IDIOT, DON'T SHOOT."

Your safety should not be off, your finger should not be on the trigger until you're sure.

You are responsible for what you shoot.

Let's stop the tap dancing. You have armed yourself with a lethal weapon, one capable of killing with less effort than it takes to fart. And any hunter, any marksman will tell you the same thing I'm telling you now: the responsibility and risk associated with that fall entirely on your shoulders. You are responsible for what you shoot. You brag when you bag a quail, you take the heat when you pop a cap in your buddy's ass. Or, as it were, face.

Not convincing enough? Okay, let's look at the official story. Whittington "came up from behind the vice president and the other hunter and didn't signal them or indicate to them or announce himself." Yes, that's correct. You only approach a fellow hunter from the rear, if he's got his gun in a position ready to fire. You sure as shit don't approach him from the front. And when you're hunting, particularly if you're hunting something skittish like deer or quail, speaking loudly is generally frowned upon. So the frankly insulting implication that Whittington somehow had it coming, that it was his fault, is a steaming pantload. You are responsible for what you shoot. Use the eyes in your head, what God gave you for lookin'.

Big boy time. Time to own up to what you did.

Here, here are some rules about gun safety and facts about quail hunting you may find enlightening.

Hunting is for the healthy.

Four-letter outbursts in Congress notwithstanding, the Veep's not currently all that young and spry. He's got a bad pump. He has an immediate need for that 24-hour, on-call ambulance that follows him around. He's wrinkly and looks like his house might smell like tapioca and loneliness. Point being, he just might be beyond his hunting years.

This is not to pick on the elderly, but out of genuine concern for safety. Some mention has been made of the fact that Cheney was shooting a 28-gauge shotgun, not normally the choice of hunters. Twenty-eights are usually used by women and kids and novices learning to shoot — I personally spent many years as a kid shooting skeet with one, because a 20-gauge was just too heavy and had too much kick for me. As mentioned in the first site I linked, some bird hunters prefer a lighter-weight gun, but I wonder if age and health issues aren't behind his particular choice of firearm.

Why does it matter? Well, why wasn't he shooting upward? Why was his gun pointed essentially parallel to the ground when he fired? You're supposed to bag birds in the air, not on the ground. Which makes me wonder if maybe his arms weren't doing so well, hoisting that steel around for however long they were out there, so he was shooting when the quail were dangerously close to the ground, and perhaps even followed a bird with his shotgun muzzle into an unsafe zone. However, this makes less sense, when you realize that they were having a canned hunt, one of the most loathsome and chickenshit kinds of hunting trips imaginable. Which leads us to our next point:

That's not hunting.

Look, dude. You're going to kill an animal, take its life away from it. Personal beliefs aside, you have to admit that this is not the same thing as picking an apple. It carries moral weight. So let's at least adhere to the bare minimum of decency here and actually go find the things we want to kill, not just release them from cages, huh? Canned hunters are craven and lazy cheaters who I can only assume didn't give two seconds' thought to the lives they took.

I remember when my dad bought me my first BB gun. When he handed it to me, he said something I haven't forgotten: "Son, if I catch you killing a squirrel or bird or the neighbor's cat with that thing, you'd better be damn ready to skin, cook, and eat that thing, because that's exactly what you're going to do." It stuck with me, my dad's own Atticus Finch moment, only with mild swearing. As an unrepentant omnivore, I can't possibly find fault with those who eat their kills — hell, going to McDonald's is tantamount to paying someone to whack a cow Mafia-style for you, which some argue you shouldn't be allowed to do if you've never killed your own food and seen the rawer side of meat-eating. Trophy hunting's not something I'm particularly fond of, though, but I have my own hypocrises on that score, and anyway even your average trophy hunter's going to actually give his prey a sporting chance, catch it in the wild on its own turf. You're taking its life. You owe it that much.

Don't like the moral argument? Okay, try this: Canned hunting is for sissy cowards. It's not big-boy hunting. It's for rich, flabby city boys who dress up like they just stepped off the cover of Field and Stream, the kind the locals chuckle at and send out to hunt snipe. Don't be a tool. I've got boots more rugged than you, and I'm a city boy myself.

You know what? I'd like to change this week's tool, as re-reading this post reveals that it's not the eyes that are important to this story as much as are good sense and responsibility, two things that at least one member of that hunting party was sorely lacking. How predictable that that someone was a politician.

Responsibility and sense mean that you take the precautions not to seriously injure or kill someone, or that you own up to your mistake if you fail to do so. They mean that you do no harm and have the guts to admit when you fall short, like, say, starting a war under false pretenses or cheating on your wife in the Oval Office or using a woman in a persistent vegetative state as a political football or just generally valuing your job over the good of the Republic.

This pool of mediocrity (on both sides of the aisle) is our leadership, boys and girls, the people we chose to steer the boat, and I'm tempted to say that they are the single greatest argument for the alleged Republican platform of smaller government I've ever encountered.

Tempted, I say, but I am reminded that the blame lies with us, ultimately. We voted for them. We allow this de facto oligarchy to persist. We ask them to come back around again. We swallow their fear games. We allow the Ann Coulters and Michael Moores of the world to have careers.

They have not failed us. We have failed ourselves. We have chosen the soundbite over the Lincoln-Douglas debates, politics over policy, spin over accountability, every-man-for-himself over we're-all-in-this-together. The responsibility for that choice has always been ours, and we have not chosen well. It's high time we owned up to it.

Right now in America there are likely millions of people actually blaming the guy who got shot, defending the guy who had the responsibility not to shoot anyone. Chew on that for a minute.

Aw, hell. And I said I wasn't going to get political.