(Note to editor: I made the first line so that you can post this ANY TIME)

With these latest reprehensible killings, it finally is evident that the mere proliferation of guns is not adequate to provide safety from being shot. Ever since the Days o’ the Wild West, our understanding as Americans has been that: allowing that the people are provided with enough guns including spy-pen-guns and AR-67’s, and those things with the giant bullets that can kill a moose at a thousand yards, allowing sufficient rapidly-reloadable ammunition in case of attack by an entire Bedouin tribe or every cop in town, allowing that weapons can be carried openly over one’s shoulder at the diner or through the GINORMART or secreted blithely in a brassiere holster in public schools and movie theaters, allowing for these quantifiably significant risks to public safety, MAGIC GOLDEN SHOOTERS will emerge that will shoot only the bad people -instead of all of the perfectly good people that currently get shot all the time- by whippin’ out their Magnum .47 MeatMaker and unloading a clip of hot lead into the INEVITABLE bad shooters, who cannot be controlled with any kind of gun control legislation.
That is our understanding, right? I think that’s what we’ve been going with.

But gosh! It’s not working. I have examined the numbers carefully and regret to inform you that  although the people killed with guns should be: terrorists, home invaders, rapists, those bankers with the waxed moustaches and black tophats that tie blondes to traintracks, supercriminal scientists, guys that try to shoot you first, pederasts, people that try to take your stuff, street gangs that threaten with switchblades and cigarettes, etc. -instead of those “perps,” mostly, as Americans we just shoot ourselves or our family or some teachers & kids or the receptionist at our office. That’s too bad!

I put it to you that as Americans, we aren’t training shooters- we’re training gun holders. The establishment of OPEN SHOOTING ZONES, which I recommend as standard for all American Downtown/ Main Street Areas, would allow us to address this absurd oversight in gun safety policy. As I hear it, there used to be a time a man could yank out his six-iron and fire a .53 bore pure copper slug across the tip of his cheroot to ignite it. A lady might choose to get the disrespectful waiters’ attention by spinning his toupee upon his pate with a carefully-aimed pellet from her derringer. In old movies we can view the lost art of shooting so skillfully that very little injury occurs: bad guns are shot from the hands of malfeasors, hats are perforated as a gentle warning against poor behavior, bottles of alcoholic libations in the horny hands of surly hobos are shattered by the bullets of those who would recommend temperance. As I hear it, in the old days, kids as young as four years old used to have tiny, cute guns that they’d use to shoot frogs and cats. That’s great practice!  As I hear it, when a gang used to ride into town and hang old Mr Lipthwaite from the trainhook and shoot up the saloon and rob the farmers of their corn payments, a single man in the middle of the street who’s been PUSHED TOO FAR could unzip his zipgun and fan the hammer to blow away like twenty really despicable individuals that society wants dead from behind rain barrels and up on balconies with fragile railings. As I hear it, two people with a minor disagreement used to be able to agree to attempt to shoot each other to death by way of settling the argument, and sometimes they’d draw and the bullets would collide exactly between the two of them and neither would be hurt and they’d be friends again. That rarely happens anymore.

Sadly, our modern”gun holding” public is not prepared to serve up the righteous rain of heroic leaded Armageddon that our movies and media try so valiantly to model for us. They’ve been ruined for the fun of real-life Rootin’ Tootin’ Shootin’, trained as they are to fire weapons only occasionally at sad sterile shooting ranges, under some supervision, and that don’t give you the true urban experience. If you know what I mean.

OPEN SHOOTING ZONES: Because we need to be able to express our guns freely as Americans! To fire them off to make a point, or for the intrinsic humor value inherent in a chunk of metal travelling at 2,500 feet per second. We need to practice shootin’ tin cans off the top of the fence behind P.S. 37 and never mind what Widder Jankens says. We need be prepared to sometimes take a small calibre bullet in the buttocks as a good-natured joke. We need to practice quickly pulling our guns and waving them around and shooting and using them to threaten everyone, the cheesemonger, the maid, ESPECIALLY the police, the boys at the bar, the gals at bridge club, your boss, the kids at breakfast, shoot out the tires of that bad driver, shoot the prissy concierge in his shiny shoe, shoot! Shoot! WAHOO! Shoot! Kapow! PopPOW! WHEEHAW KaBOOM Peeoww! OBVIOUSLY WE JUST NEED MORE PRACTICE AND WE’LL GET THIS RIGHT

Interested sociopathic monied parties in the Gun Industry are welcome to contact the author to pay me billions of blooddollars to frame out some scalable model legislation to promote OPEN SHOOTING ZONES in downtown America: Because people can’t be safe unless we shoot more people.

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~ Love, Nitro