[EDITOR'S NOTE: The following entry was removed because of a music file complaint, even after I removed said music file. So I've re-inserted the text but won't waste time with the pictures or the music, and I apologize to all those whose comments were sadly deleted by music bastards.]
Westerns rock.
I watched the movie Appaloosa the other day, and it's not bad. It's not sublime, but it's not bad. In fact, very few recent Westerns have blown my doors off, but I dutifully watch them all anyway, because I just love the genre. 3:10 to Yuma, The Assassination of Jesse James..., The Proposition, Open Range. Watched 'em all, and I'm pretty sure if I didn't love Westerns in general, I wouldn't have found them nearly as enjoyable.
All my friends and even some people who can't stand me know I worship Deadwood, the 3-season HBO series. By "worship," I mean it's my favorite television show ever in a looooong line of TV shows I really really love.
The '80s and '90s produced a number of Westerns that continue to earn love. Tombstone and Unforgiven are two of the best from that span, but several others are great as well, and I can't help but type the words Young Guns just so I can include it. Ang Lee's Ride Like the Devil, which is only barely a Western, is almost certainly one of the better movies you've never heard of. And Three Amigos, while not a perfect comedy, holds up surprisingly well 20-plus years later.
The West, as depicted in almost all of these films, was raw and struggled between forces of lawlessness and order.
George W. Bush loves Westerns. He especially loved High Noon, the story of a lone town marshal forced to stand off against a vicious gang. Not surprisingly, this is a genre of film held sacrosanct in the romantic hearts of gun-totin' NRA types all over our great land.
But here's a strange twist. In almost all of the movies I have listed, and in dozens of others, one key rule of law always seemed to stay constant in these otherwise lawless lands: No Guns Allowed In City Limits.
These mining towns didn't have many laws. They had to pick their battles very carefully. No stop lights. No speed limits. No laws against pissing in public. No open container laws. None of that crap. But here's one they thought was pretty important when it came to protecting the citizens of a township: No Fucking Guns!
So it's powerfully ironic that Tennessee now finds itself on the verge of allowing our citizens to do the one damn thing that even the wildest of the Wild Western towns on the edge of civilization knew not to allow. We're more backwards than Deadwood! Our legislators and the NRA thinks Wyatt Earp was a moron who stole freedom from its citizens. Yes, that's right, the NRA and Tennessee legislators are watching Tombstone and cheering for "Curly Bill" Brocious (played superbly by smarmy fucknut Powers Boothe, who's also in Deadwood), because that man and his red-sashed Cowboys must have had the right idea on how to keep order in a town.
I can think of maybe four times in the last 15 years when Tennessee as a comprehensive whole shamed me. But nothing, nothing at all, compares remotely to the embarrassment I've felt from the latest attempts to pass a law permitting citizens to carry a firearm into businesses that serve alcohol.
If "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions," then I'm not sure what the hell is paving this particular legislative road of Guns In Bars, but "asphalt" sounds like a good starter ingredient, because no matter how much I rack my brains for "good intentions" with this particular law, I can't think of any. I just know there's a lot of asses at fault.
Or, as my wife so beautifully put it the other day, "Only a bunch of legislators hiding behind metal detectors and armed security guards could pass a law with the excuse that armed citizens make society safer. I wonder when they're gonna get rid of those metal detectors and security guards and allow citizens to carry firearms into sessions of Congress?"
I read a Chattanooga Times Free Press article on this and found the reader comments very interesting. Some gun owner types are very well-written and have some compelling arguments. However, at the end of the day, I'll side with statistics, and here's mine: as someone who does not carry or even own a gun, I am roughly a bajillion times less likely to die via "GSW." Meanwhile, my uncle and other gun permit people, by cherishing that right to protect themselves and their property with deadly force if necessary, are also exponentially more likely to find themselves in the hospital or morgue because a bullet found its way into their flesh.
I might not ever be a big fan of Bristol Palin and the "abstinence only" movement, because I'm pretty convinced that, ultimately, fu -- er, makin' whoopee -- is a pretty cool thing, and it's pretty darn essential to the human race. But when it comes to guns and firearms, which by the way are neither natural nor necessary for the propogation of the human race, their idea has merit: you stick a gun in your house, and those bullets might go somewhere. You never stick a gun in your house, and bullets ain't likely to find their way in, either. Unless they're magic bullets...
But back to my point: If Wyatt Earp had a big damn problem with ordinary joes carrying their weapons into tow, and Wyatt was a bad-ass mofo, then why the hell should I have to apologize to Wayne LaPierre or whatever repressed soul is in charge of the NRA nowadays for standing in favor of the same laws as Wyatt and all those other bad-ass Wastern sheriff mofos??
You wanna spit on me, spit on them first. But they seemed to have a pretty good idea of how to keep order in a town. Maybe you might wanna go back and watch some Westerns and learn something.
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