Guns in My Past

I had my fling with guns.

I was young then.  Lived in a tiny Oregon town.  Everyone had guns.

Now the gun craze has gone whacky though.  People hoard them and have dozens sometimes.  Hunters go out drunk or high and shoot from their pickups after spotlighting.   Gone are the days of the skillful patient hunter and tracking skills.  For the most part.

I cringe when hunting season hits.  Its dangerous for everyone.

If someone eats dead animals I guess I'd rather they  hunted it than have it come from these awful factory farms.  I just figure its more humane. I don't know.  There are so many diseases out there in wild animals.

Like chronic wasting hitting deer herds.  When I was looking for a kitten thrown from a car near Waterloo last year, I found a deer carcass in the ditch, minus its head.  I thought about that later on.  I'd just read a story about chronic wasting in deer herds and that Oregon was testing road kill for the awful disease, caused by prions in the brain, and figured maybe the deer's head was missing because researchers took it to test.  They don't want that hitting Oregon.  It has been linked to deadly CJD in humans who eat infected deer meat.

So anyhow, I never hunted. People have delivered me roadkill, to cook up for my cats.  There is no sense to waste.

My father once hunted ducks.  But my mother hated picking lead pellets out of ducks and we kids just wouldn't eat it.  We were out at Malheur Wildlife Refuge where he was hunting in fact when the Columbus Day storm hit and we drove home in it, mother terrified the entire time, because the wind was so strong.  I remember that drive home even though I was very young.  Our house sustained damage, windows broken, that kind of thing, but it remained standing.

Anyhow, before I went to Alaska the first time, to work, I had bought a .44 magnum pistol.  Those are big huge pistols, the Dirty Harry pistol of choice.  My younger brother pushed me to do it and taught me shooting.   I had to load my own cartridges because bullets were too expensive.  It drove my mother nuts for me to load those casings and she'd make me do it outside.

The rebound when it fired was extreme and sometimes would cut me between my thumb and first finger.  My brother made me shoot it til I didn't anticipate that recoil and tilt up the barrel end.  He made me learn to shoot it accurately one-handed too.  Not easy with a .44.

I flew to Alaska and declared the pistol in my luggage as was required.  However I didn't know any bullets I carried had to be factory made and store bought and in an unopened container.  They asked me about bullets and I told them they were reloaded and in a plastic bag.  So I had to remove them. I gave them to mother who was with me at the airport.  She couldn't go through the security point at the gate then, to see me off, but suddenly here she comes, running to say goodbye.  I asked what she did with the bag of bullets and she said she dumped them in a metal ashtray outside the gate.

At that time, if a security person found them, they would have just rolled their eyes and taken them off.  But if it had happened nowadays, oh my, the airport would have been shut down and my dear mother would have been hauled off and treated like a terrorist.  Probably I would have been too!

I sold that gun up in Alaska for more than I bought it for in Oregon.  I discovered it was an encumbrance and when I carried it, it was all I thought about.  It was heavy too and it wasn't me.

I'd had a very close encounter with a bear, middle of the night, ended up half up a scraggly tree, with no memory of climbing it.  Terror!  I had the gun with me but never even considered using it, figuring it would make a bad situation much worse.

It was after that I sold it.

I had a false sense of security with it, you see, and was not alert like I should have been and was doing stupid things in big bear country.

I had not shot a gun of any sort in decades when some friends invited me out to their back field, a couple years ago, to shoot skeet with them.  I'd already had one beer but I went along, since they were anyhow.  I hit every target and they stared at me, like I was some freak show.  I couldn't believe it either.  My explanation:  I work with cats and it keeps a person sharp, quick and on target.  This is true.

In reality, it was just my brother's words, from long ago, coming back to me.   It's like pointing at something, he said. And relaxing while you do it.

I don't like guns.  They're loud and deadly and I don't need one. I can't own one anyhow now because I was in the mental system.  Most people don't need one either because they lay around the house and people don't clean them or practice much and that makes them even more dangerous.  And if someone drinks too much or becomes depressed or paranoid, or just gets in an angry mood, they can do something with that gun, in the spur of the moment, they otherwise couldn't do, would be forced to think about, like hurt themselves or someone else.

I am afraid of bears, after the two experiences I had with them in Alaska.  I'm a little paranoid also of cougars, especially after two people have been killed in the last year in the northwest by them.  One was on a mountain bike with his friend and was drug off and the other was a woman hiking near Mt. Hood.   Just yesterday, a Ring doorbell camera caught a cougar roaming a Sandy residential neighborhood in the night.  A friend in Oakridge had one scale her cat fence, kill and eat four of her cats, then came back a few nights later.  She had most of her cats in the garage by then, but one little young one she said was staring, like a deer caught in headlights, as the cougar banged against the garage, angry the cats were inside, trying to break in.  She only had a .22 and was living in a yurt.  She slipped out, through her gate and ran to the neighbors.  He came over and shot it at close range in the tall grass.  It was an old cougar.  His dog had been torn up badly a week before.  A week later, his game camera caught another cougar going through.  Wildlife officials, where he took it, as is required, said that old cougar he shot had likely been in the area for ten years but now couldn't eat his normal food and was going for pets.  Her neighbor doesn't believe in waste either, and they ate the cougar.  I suppose the scariest thing to me about a cougar you usually never see them first.  They strike from behind.  If you have a chance to run, you're dead.

Well now I'm scaring myself because I'm out a lot at night.   I've had a few encounters.  I've survived them without a scratch and just a pounding heart.

An Oregon state senator made news world wide when he threatened to kill any state police who tried to bring him back to Salem to do his job.  The Republican minority fled the state to prevent bills from being passed, specifically a carbon cap and trade bill, but they're still absent, even though there are not enough democrat votes to pass it, threatening all sorts of vital bills and costing the state money.  It was like witnessing a child's tantrum to see him make that statement.   There are many in the state like him, who threaten to kill anyone with different views, particularly Democrats.  In other words---neighbors!   Sometimes I think they'd love going out with their guns to kill people, given some excuse, like a cause they judged as righteous.

I don't see people that way.  I see my neighbors who  believe differently, politically or religiously, as neighbors.  That's it.  We're all different.  I see those who threaten people who are different in some way as seriously mentally ill.  I also don't understand why people arm themselves to the teeth in case of natural disaster, to protect what they have they tell me.  And yet wouldn't you help your neighbors, share, if there was a natural disaster.  It wouldn't even cross my mind to shoot them instead.

I may not own a gun or want one.  Doesn't mean I can't shoot one though, if need ever came up.