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?

Oh my god-time for the subjunctive has come!

What follows has some hard-core grammar in it. You may not want to show it to children under 13.

When you speak English, you get stuck with facts. We Englishers speak in (what grammarians call) the indicative mode almost all the time (in fact, I am right now). Indicative is for talking about “objective facts.” We don’t do much of anything else in English. We fact, fact, fact, constantly suffering from indicative fact disease even when, in truth, we lie our butts off.

Listen to FoxTV. You get continuous indicative objective facts piled way too high.  And how much truth is in this pile? Not much.  But it is all indicative as hell!

English grammar shows that objective facts need not be be true. Anything can be true if you say it in indicative-heavy English: your kid can be student of the month, we can be number one, you can get rich with that limp idea of yours. It’s not your fault you think you are going to make it when you have the brains of a road-kill possum , the emotional control of a meth-addict Chihuahua and the cluelessness of FoxTV watcher. English grammar did it to you.

We need to put subjunctive into English.

Then we can tell true facts from the faith-based ones.

In Spanish they mark verbs in doubtful sentences by putting them in the subjunctive. Technically it is not hard to do. Flip-floping the verb tells you the listener that something is not right with what you hear. If a verb normally ends with an A then they flip it to an E, and if it normally ends with an E then they flop it into an A. Hear it flipped or hear it flopped- beware: doubt, emotion and lies follow.

You can’t flip flop English because we have too many ways to end our verbs. Spanish only has three.

So we need some other language tricks. I think we need to look a bit farther to find our truth markers when we talk. Some languages use prefixes. I say lets just put a big warning sign in the front of every sentence that is shaky. What can we put there?

Since everyone born since 1990 already says OMG to start every other sentence, maybe we can co-opt the useless God phrase and make it mean something. My rule: If you OMG, then you lie or doubt, if you don’t , you are a straight arrow (as we used to say when people were honest all the time )

I think that is the answer. OMG I have figured it all out and OMG no more unmarked lies, especially from OMG teen girls.