Guns don't kill people, middle-class gamers do.
Yesterday was mostly spent pottering about Chepstow with some unusual suspects and it all turned out utterly splendid. I wonder if the one-way-system pub crawl is a thing, and if not it should be.
Anyway.
Part of the gig was minding an assemblage of artfully constructed steampunkery in the castle. For reasons which I suspect the estimable autopope of this parish could fulminate over for quite some time, several of the items were handguns of varying baroqueness.
While I was standing there, everyone who picked up one or other of the pistols peered down the barrel and worked the trigger.
I have a phrase for that sort of behaviour and it is fucking idiocy.
I think it is a problem created by a particular sort of smug, (English) (middle-class) type who consider all firearms icky and therefore won't have anything to do with any aspect of them. Indeed, after the n-th time I found myself cringing and looking for something to hide behind, I was moved to explain to some small Tarquin (or Bastian or whatever pre-teens are called these days) that perhaps it would be a good idea to keep the thing pointed at the floor and finger away from the trigger until he was sure the weapon had been made safe.
This resulted in the usual set of filthy looks. The useless tossers.
I am not, in the main, the sort of person who agrees with many of the aims of the NRA (US version), but their advice to parents is spot on.
In a similar area we find the gormless sods in the office who do the same peering-and-triggering with the nerf pistols lying about. I don't actually care that the fucking things are toys don't do that it's fucking stupid and by the way don't point the fucking thing at me because you will have a sense of humour failure when I wallop you with something.
Jesus.
It's just me, isn't it? I was the one who was taught gun-safety by my parents and so I have to put up with a legion of horrible horrible bastards who'll bang on for hours about the relative merits of MP5 over G36 over Glock something-or-other and actually they haven't a fucking clue what they're talking about because they're the same bloody people peering down the business-end of something they don't know the state of and working the trigger hopefully to find out.
The very next person who tries something like that near me is going to get a right fucking talking-to.
(The cringe-and-duck thing? I can't not do it. It's ingrained behaviour and really, I'm not about to stop doing it.)
Anyway.
Part of the gig was minding an assemblage of artfully constructed steampunkery in the castle. For reasons which I suspect the estimable autopope of this parish could fulminate over for quite some time, several of the items were handguns of varying baroqueness.
While I was standing there, everyone who picked up one or other of the pistols peered down the barrel and worked the trigger.
I have a phrase for that sort of behaviour and it is fucking idiocy.
I think it is a problem created by a particular sort of smug, (English) (middle-class) type who consider all firearms icky and therefore won't have anything to do with any aspect of them. Indeed, after the n-th time I found myself cringing and looking for something to hide behind, I was moved to explain to some small Tarquin (or Bastian or whatever pre-teens are called these days) that perhaps it would be a good idea to keep the thing pointed at the floor and finger away from the trigger until he was sure the weapon had been made safe.
This resulted in the usual set of filthy looks. The useless tossers.
I am not, in the main, the sort of person who agrees with many of the aims of the NRA (US version), but their advice to parents is spot on.
In a similar area we find the gormless sods in the office who do the same peering-and-triggering with the nerf pistols lying about. I don't actually care that the fucking things are toys don't do that it's fucking stupid and by the way don't point the fucking thing at me because you will have a sense of humour failure when I wallop you with something.
Jesus.
It's just me, isn't it? I was the one who was taught gun-safety by my parents and so I have to put up with a legion of horrible horrible bastards who'll bang on for hours about the relative merits of MP5 over G36 over Glock something-or-other and actually they haven't a fucking clue what they're talking about because they're the same bloody people peering down the business-end of something they don't know the state of and working the trigger hopefully to find out.
The very next person who tries something like that near me is going to get a right fucking talking-to.
(The cringe-and-duck thing? I can't not do it. It's ingrained behaviour and really, I'm not about to stop doing it.)