“Arlington National Cemetery Rows” Joeyp3413, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, joins the keeper in considering how Memorial Day is built around those who die when they are handed official guns and ordered to go to a shoot-out with total strangers. The keeper lucked out when it was his turn with the absurdity of an official guns-are-good occasion, but he remembers the two young pals from Michigan who did not, when they were killed on the Korean hilltop by “total strangers” who returned fire.
So, guns are good when we say they are good, such as in producing the dead heroes of Memorial Day; and in today’s world, we say guns-are-good because we never know when Paul Revere may come riding in again shouting about British invaders, or maybe Norwegian attackers.
Places like Texas lead the “guns are good” way by encouraging everyone to take their guns to church or the grocery store. Meanwhile, in California, nine people die when a shooter decides guns would be good in the workplace.
The keeper suggests that perhaps Memorial Day needs a guns-are-good update, one that reflects on more than the long-gone victims of past guns-are-good wars, but also on the 100 or so people who die from gunshot EVERY DAY, some of them second graders and all of them worthy of being memorialized.
