Carrying

Fashion guns are in. Stuck tight under the belt. Looking mean.  Big barrel hanging down, oiled and ready.

Then, there is the opposite style, too: puffy dog fashion.  Dog tucked in purse, muzzle poking out, panting, waiting to be rubbed.

I say regulate them, keep  serial numbers on them, and make sure owners take good care of them.  Regulate puffy dog use!

We can do that. We already do. Dog tags, chips under the skin, SPCA, dog catcher, and the pound. Puffy dogs are under control.

Some people want to regulate guns too. But that’s harder. No SPBG--Society for the Prevention of Badness with Guns. No gun catcher. You can strap one on and strut right down the center of the street. You can strap on a dozen.  Try that with puffy dogs. You will be hounded out of town.

Gun-toters say they are bearing arms . That’s in the Bill of Rights. Bear your arms everywhere. Stick them out where everyone can see them. Load up and carry. Bear, bear, bear! That’s what gun-toters say.

The problem is that people don’t just bear and tote. They shoot too.  And lots of times they shoot people. It’s bad when toters shoot squirrels and pigeons, but shooting people is really bad. And shooting lots of people is even worse. It happens every day. We need to figure out something.

Some say we need registration. Then we can weed out the shooters from the carrying kind. But I have news. You got one, you shoot one. You just need a trigger.

Lots of things trigger shooting. For instance; Driving down Route 1, someone cuts you off, you finger wave, they fist shake, you butt wag, they dogwoof. Bang!  Out came the guns and you didn’t even notice. Then there are holes in the car and maybe holes in you, too.  

I have another approach.  I say let’s sell guns everywhere. Gun-shack, Wal-gun, Gun-bucks Pistols and Lattes. Just make guns expensive. Say $100K and up.

This helps in lots of ways.

First, the rich guys can have their guns. They don’t need to fund gun lobbies anymore. Rich people rob you with their contracts, not guns. At least, most of the time.

Second, let’s say you make a decent wage and you want a gun.  Save up! Ask the wife to skimp on groceries for the kid. See how that works.  Then, after thinking about it and looking at it and eating PBJ’s at work for a couple years , you get one. Are you going to wear it out where you might have to check it at an airport? And may never get it back.  No you probably keep it at the bank in a safe deposit box. And shoot it? You don’t want anything that expensive to get dirty, do you? You invest in a gun like your old 401K and plan on selling when you get old and half dead and want to buy a beach condo to retire in. Yep, a bank safe deposit box makes sense.

Speaking of banks, they will have gunloans, I’m sure.  Who needs government registration when the banks do the checking for us. Do you think a bank wants to finance a gun for a 7-11 stickup guy or, worse, a bank robber. No they will check you out better than any bureaucrat and the government can sit on its bottom and watch. Those gun-toting libertarians will be drooling when they hear this.

Now for the poor. Do you think they can afford a $100K gun. No they need to go back to knives and brass knuckles, like the good old days. Knives are pretty effective but they only work at close range. So anyone can run away. That’s hard with a .45 but easy with a butcher knife running after you.

So problem solved.

You are thinking, hold it buster.  How are you going to make guns expensive. They crank them out like candybars in gun factories; so they cost about the same. What can you do?

Well, here is the answer. We are mandating gas for cars with 10% corn oil, We say that ground beef can only have 50% fat, so why can’t we say guns have to be 15 percent solid, yellow, shiny, thousand-bucks-an-ounce gold. That will make them expensive.

OK they might get a droopy barrel if you shoot too much, but who’s going to risk it with their new investment.

Next problem?

The Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw

Sometimes you see something you missed in your life of reading.
GBS was one of those. He was only an icon to me with a pointy beard, no longer popular, especially with the hip and then hippie set. I only knew of him thru references on Sesame Street –Miss Piggy-malion--and reading the credits to My Fair Lady.
So last week I ran into him lying on a shelf in the local library, an edition about 60 years old. Why not?
GBS was witty and could write dialogue for Bringing up Baby or any of the fast talking, screwball comedies. Oh, I forgot, they copied him, not the other way around.
How class-bound England was/is. Sometimes I forget about social class when I hang out in Silicon Valley (where they hide their fancy-pants au-pairs and yardmen). Those Victorians cemented class but left cracks for upward money. And you forget how eccentric and extreme edge political those landed lords (and their lesser cousins) could be without disrupting upper class manners.
GBS writes polemics about mistreatment of the working class in the middle of snappy dialog. But readers skipped those pages to get to the characters spitting it out at each other as they danced around rituals of love and old fashioned hate, too.
You see how socialism was perceived b4 the communists took over Russia and hatched Stalin. GBS watched England losing its markets for manufactured goods because the rest of the world made things cheaper and predicted an England going broke. (sounds familiar?) , where they could only export workers. He didn’t forsee our overstuffed world and ad-driven continuous style-change buying that remade the world in its own image.
He sought a moral force that was rational. Religion was hocus-pocus; the church was just finishing up dealing with Galileo and the Pope declared himself infallible. GBS looked for non-revolutionary change to a more equitable world thru education. And he started the London School of Economics to explain it all.
But in this book, GBS creates the rational man as hero, the anti-romantic, that would have been a detective if he were born in the 40’s, I bet. And the tough thinking woman could be played by Kate Hepburn or maybe Becky Sharpe if she gets incarnated in the computer game world. These two finally marry after his first wife sentimentally dies off and they accidentally get engaged in about a paragraph and realize love would only mess things up.
Hope I didn’t mess up the ending for you.

Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind by Gary Marcus

Now, if you don’t want to blame your momma anymore, this is the book for you. All those problems -- making those questionable food and partner choices, believing in the devil and not in NASA’s moon trip, making dumb math mistakes, forgetting just about anything sometime—These problems are not your mama’s fault; they are not your fault. Those proto-monkeys and lizards did it. They spawned and recreated, bequeathing you a bottom brain that smolders and cooks up schemes for living in the jungle, not the city. Your brain stays always alert for that big, furry, pointy-toothed thing you have nightmares about, while always ready to grub for smelly roots, tasty rabbit parts and potential breeding partners. We have a lizard brain that is worse than our parents’. Gary Marcus explains our thinking tools as a big kludge—just a pile up of lizard, mammal, and, finally, faulty reasoning circuits that do not play well together.

The worst is--we default to the lizard brain when life gets tough.

Most people know how evolution failed us by standing up four-legged hoofers to a life of backaches and, eventually, metal knees. But the million year old brain is just as bad—we react; we don’t plan. We were evolved to eat, not to do math. According to Mr. Marcus, it’s a wonder we can even post well-reasoned stuff like this. He wrote a slim little offering, but it is a nice intro for the layperson. Note: I prefer Amos Twersky talking about wacky thinking or Eleanor Rosch explaining how we make categories in our heads.