Know me long enough and you will know that I am not a gun fanatic. However, neither am I a gun hater. I am a realist. So, you might wonder why I would choose to put this song on my list of Song of the Day posts. Well, firstly, I don’t exactly have a list. Sure, there are a half dozen songs I’m thinking about at any given time but no list of songs I’m laying out like a path to enlightenment or something. No, this is the most seat-of-the-pants thing that I have done since I pulled up stakes and moved out of my apartment back in 2007.
I was sitting in a conversation yesterday where other people in the room started to talk about weapons. Some real and some were in video games. This song popped into my head so that I decided that I would use it.
Some personal history on this song first. I discovered this song on a CD I bought from a pawn shop in the mid-1990s. I spent several minutes going through the collection that the proprietor had and I also picked out an Information Society album, a Bobby Brown album, and about 7 others. I think it was 10 CDs for $5 or something. “Something to Shoot” was on a disc called “Steal this Disc 3”. The disc title did its job really well, I was intrigued so tossed that onto the pile too. I am glad that I did even if I can not say that it is the favorite CD out of that grab-bag. Still, it had some good songs on it that I would have not heard otherwise.
That was the point of the CD.
This song stood out to me not only because of the subject matter but because of how good the anger was and just how good it was overall. The subject matter, guns, itself didn’t interesting me but we will get to that later. However, I never could decide if the singer, Chris Wall, was serious, doing a straight parody, or taking a satirical, side-eyed look at the culture. If I had known the artist, I would have known the answer immediately. It’s the latter.
I have talked about guns a little so far, but like the drugs I talked about in a previous SotD post, guns were just part of the decor. Let me say that if you found out that an adult wasn’t carrying a gun on their person or in their vehicle, you just about assumed that they were either a hippie or they were from out of town. My family was unusual in the fact that we did not have a whole lot of guns around. However, my grandmother had her shotgun. It sat propped in a corner of her bedroom like it was a broom.
Most of my friends and extended family had guns and that is where I received my gun training. Yes, I’ve held, loaded, cleaned and fired a few different firearms from a black powder pistol (which misfired) to a hunting rifle. To most of us guns were tools. Tools for hunting, tools for clearing pests, tools for practicing accuracy, tools for training, tools for protecting your family and property. No more and no less.
My extended family was a collection of backwoods loggers, farmers, soldiers and law enforcement officers. Firearms were too ubiquitous to be status symbols or identity totems.
I say what I did about totems because there’s another class of people who their whole identity seems to revolve around guns. Some of them like to say, “Guns , God and Country,” but I’m not certain about those last two. I have known far too many gun collectors, to pot it nicely, that really didn’t seem to give a damn about any god or the United States as it stood back then. We see the same sort of people now but now they’re even louder, more in-your-face and even more ludicrous.
I see these people like the fake cowboys, those people who have clean trucks, shiny boots and hats which have never fallen in the dust before. Your putting on a show that only other people like you care about.
You’re not impressing anyone.
Of course, no one like that is going to be reading this blog, so I really shouldn’t go down that road. These people just annoy me, I mean, the sheer stupidity or at least the sheer ignorance. Like, you really expect your arsenal of weapons is really necessary to protect yourself and your family? You can only safely fire one weapon at a time and anything you might have isn’t going to compare with what can be brought to bare if you’re stupid enough to be considered a threat.
It’s like I’ve said before, “Your guns aren’t going to save you from a bomb dropped on your house.”
Yes, people have a right to own gun in this country and I don’t question that.
What I do question is why some people believe that they have a need to own enough guns to arm a small para-military organization.
I’ve seen enough of these people either dead by their own hands, holding a gun of course, or dead because they got into a fight with someone who was faster, meaner or more stupid.
Live by the gun, die by the gun.
Anyway, turns out that Chris Wall grew up surrounded by guns too, and he acknowledges the culture and at the same time can poke fun at it. So, my hat is off to him for stepping up.
