Friday Five: Cheney's Got a Gun

[trista]

1. Do you have good hand-eye coordination?

Not so much, no.

2. Have you ever held a gun?

Yes. My father took me shooting once. I hated it.

3. What do you think of toy guns?I loved mine. I had quite a few of them. I think my favorite was my superspiffy Space Ray Gun, which had a red light that flashed in time with the high-pitched, extremely

Comments

[trista]

No, mine was white plastic with a black knob that you turned to choose your superspiffy space sound. It was toy-gun shaped, and it had a plastic blob at the end that looked an awful lot like an elongated light bulb, and I think there was a silvery sticker on it where the handle and the point-at-people part came together. It so totally rocked.

You had an olive drab space gun? Was it fantabulous?

[trista]

Mine was pretty silly, but I was all Intrepid Spaceman Spiff with it. Except more Spacechick Spiffette, really.

[gentlemaitresse]

I don't like toy guns. I teach my children to use real guns, but I won't let them play with toy guns.

When I was little, my brother and I were jumping on our parents' bed. No, we weren't supposed to be doing that. We weren't even supposed to be in their room, most likely. But we lived in a large house and Mom was way at the other end of the house in the kitchen.

As we jumped, the mattress moved little by little to the side of the bed. And there we saw the pistol. My brother picked it up and started to point it at me, and I ran screaming down the hall.

My brother liked to terrorize me anyway. I'm sure he thought it was hilarious to make me run screaming like that.

It turned out that the gun was loaded. Thank goodness I ran screaming to my mom!

My brother should have known better. Lots of kids should know better. But if all children were so smart we wouldn't have so many children accidentally shooting other children while playing with guns.

[trista]

My dad had guns in the house, and we would never, ever have touched them. Part of that was Dad's attitude about them. He made sure we knew that they were most certainly not toys and that they were off-limits to us, and he made sure we knew why. Part of it was that our toy guns didn't look like Dad's real guns. My space gun, for example, was the most obviously not-real toy gun evar. I had a cap gun, too, that was clearly a toy. Another part of it, I think, is that our parents made sure the guns were out of our reach, always. We would no more have picked up one of Dad's guns than we would have thrown the television out the window. It just wouldn't have occurred to us

[trista]

I've just re-read this and realized that it might come off sounding critical of anything other than my experience, and that's not at all what I intended.

[gentlemaitresse]

Well, *I* didn't think it sounded critical at all. I thought it sounded thoughtful, like you have many of the same questions I have regarding why some children do those things when we, personally, can't imagine it at all.

[geekjul]

My favorite gun is my glue gun. I also like my staple gun, but if I have to pick a favorite, I'm going with hot glue.

[trista]

Oh, the glue gun! I love glue guns. Oh, the crafty goodness!

[ilythia]

Thank goodness we finally got another snot content alert! It's been a while since the last one.

I'm sorry to hear that said content is quite high, though.