the way of the gun

This is not a pro-gun post. Jacinda Ardern is the leader every nation needs right now.

And yet, I grew up small-town conservative, so guns were considered as right as religion.

I still go out shooting with my family when I visit the homestead.  I am a pretty decent shot with a rifle, less so with a handgun. This was taken a couple weeks ago.

Which doesn’t change the fact that one of the reasons my daughter goes to school online is because America would rather sacrifice its future than tell the NRA to go to hell.

More to the point: I am disgusted at how we as Americans have done nothing since Columbine, nothing since Sandy Hook, nothing since Parkland.

And I am hoping that at some point we will come to our senses as a country.

So take that all under consideration when I tell you that I love modern westerns.

I don’t like John Wayne westerns, because they aren’t gritty enough.

Speaking of grit, my dad and I go round and round and round about which is the better True Grit.  One guess which version I think is the best of the two.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1403865/

Of course, throw some sci-fi in there and I love it even more. Case in point…

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379786/

When I was writing my own western, Hellfire on Horseback, I had a particular female character in mind: Magdalena Gilkeson from The Missing.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338188/

To sum it all up: I see both sides of the argument about gun control, and I am still for anything and everything that New Zealand does in response to the Christchurch killings.

And, on a personal note, I have another poem I am ready to release.

The stanzas may not break like they are supposed to, so FYI: this poem is 6-beat lines in 4-line stanzas.  I call it a double dozen, because each stanza has 24 total beats.

karma

October twenty-six,
each a brother, a son.
Cochise Cowboys to quell.
Virgil, Wyatt, Morgan.

Johnny Ringo, hot head,
and that drunk dentist Doc.
trash talkin’ with whiskey,
gun hands itchin’ to cock.

boys will be boys, they say.
gangs killing quid pro quo.
all dead, gone. some murdered.
nothing worthy to show.

I wish I could tell them,
when you count coup you lose.
but they simply won’t listen,
so I sing Tombstone Blues.