Public Disservice Announcement

 Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys - Willie Nelson

Mama didn't raise a victim - National Rifle Association

Given a choice, and I am as a citizen of these United States, I'll stick with Willie. His is more career advice, couched a bit in the ironic since he speaks from experience: "Don't let 'em pick guitars and drive them old trucks, make 'em be doctors and lawyers and such."

But by no means should you allow them to be members of the NRA. That second bit comes from a Tweet sent out by the ghouls at Gun-Totin' Central just a few hours after an idiot with a gun killed six and then shot himself in Colorado Springs. It features a smiling mother and daughter holding their matching assault weapons. The suggestion seems to be that if mom and her little girl had been at the party in the mobile home park with their rifles slung over shoulders, the only bloodshed would have been the idiot who made the mistake of confronting them. 

These kind of ridiculous fantasies are propagated by those who never consider crossfire or errant shots. Or the simple fact that a twelve fifteen in the morning during a family birthday party no one should have to be thinking about getting off a clean shot and available cover. It's only the idiots who prioritize shooting and killing. This slogan didn't just leap off the thumbs of some NRA staffer over the weekend, by the way. It has floated about Al Gore's Internet and elsewhere for a few years, sometimes as a simple feminist reminder, but mostly as a call to arms by those who are interested in picking a fresh market for the sale of guns and ammo. 

I don't suppose that the NRA's advice extends to the thought processes of women and men of any age and how they should be able to discern reality from fantasy. Grinning models holding weapons that they most likely were handed just prior to the photo shoots are no more capable of squeezing off a few rounds in the midst of a domestic dispute are the fiction. The reality is an epidemic of gun violence that is not quelled by shooting back. The regularly scheduled killing will not stop until someone gets it into their head that killing is the problem. It's not who or how we kill. It's killing at all. 

You're better off being a cowboy. Take it from Willie. He wouldn't steer you wrong. The National Rifle Association? You bet they would. In the most fiendish and manipulative way possible.