ION, today's Google animation is dedicated to Steve Irwin.

We always had guns in the house - my father grew up on a farm and he and his older surviving brother would go out and shoot things for food. And we had a handgun my mother's father, um, acquired during WWI. But I dislike guns and wouldn't have one. I wish people would have to take some kind of gun safety instruction - so many seem to treat them casually, as though they were just another household appliance (there was a thing a while ago where a woman was posing with a gun tucked into her yoga pants ... neither attractive nor a good idea).

Have we already forgotten Plaxico Burress??

Oh, but wikipedia says he was wearing jeans -- in my memory, it was definitely sweatpants.

Have we already forgotten Plaxico Burress??

Clearly, I had—I had to Google. Nifty name. Questionable weapons safety habits.

I remember sweatpants, also. Maybe that was early misleading reports before we had all the facts?

Maybe that was early misleading reports before we had all the facts?

But that never happens!!

Well, it can't be that Wikipedia is wrong!

I really think part of our problem with guns in this country is that we've aged out of a population where a majority of the males either hunted or spent time in the military learning gun handling, so that firearms have become more of a fantasy weapon rather than a practical tool to be respected.

I don't want to be all anti-game, here, but in actuality the only experience most kids have with or about guns is in video games. Your character handles guns with ease and expertise and you have that familiarity, at least mentally, and I think that contributes a lot to the casual relationship kids and young men have toward guns.

H picked up nearly all of our guns at the on-post Rod & Gun clubs when he was in the army. He's shot mostly at military ranges, or civilian ranges in military towns. But truthfully, he's lost a lot of interest, and even though we live close enough to hear firing from the county sheriff-police-state patrol qualifying range, he hasn't--we haven't--been by there more than a couple of times.

Living rural, we used to go plinking fairly often, but we're no longer rural. Even if we had permission to shoot on someone's property, bullets travel, and it's not safe. I was, probably still am, a decent shot with rifle and handgun, but it's not something I go, "Oh! I should go out to the range today and shoot some." It's loud and noisy and full of strangers, a lot of them full of swagger, and, just, no.

Of course, the *best* times we ever had at a gun range was Black Powder days. Ginormous booms and swirls of smoke and the smell of burnt gunpowder. Grins and mustaches and cowboy hats and fake-swagger. But those don't seem to happen locally. Part of that fun was the ritual of loading--powder, patch, percussion, etc. before going BOOM!

I don't know, it just all seems grim and portentous and not any fun at all, overlaid with paranoia about storage security. I don't think it would bother either of us to give up the guns we still own.

Except the black powder pistols. We'll be keeping those because pretty, and lots of fun memories.

My brother is a libertarian gun nut. We do not see eye to eye on gun laws, to put it mildly.