The Wahkiakum County Eagle - Established as The Skamokawa Eagle in 1891

To The Eagle:

This nation, our culture and our communities are polluted by the stench of gun oil and cordite and the ominous crack of gunfire such as I’ve heard echoing from a ranch several acres away from us. That awful, staccato pop-pop-pop-popping of small arms fire, followed by the mechanical chattering rip of a much heavier weapon, announces dangerous and probably illegal doings beyond the distant misted hayfields.

Such is my idyllic rural neighborhood which I share with strangers in rusty trucks parked in the middle of the road as they shoot blithely into the ditches not thirty feet from my front steps. I chase them off with vile imprecations, reminding them that regardless of the bounty on varmint tails, only a moron would discharge a firearm so close to my residence and my loved ones. I descend into an inner cringe as Fall arrives and cover my ears when awakened in the dark mornings by the hellish symphony of shotguns ripping apart the graceful geese I’ve loved from afar in the golden sunset skies of their great migration.

A gun of any sort is a finely tuned, mechanically balanced marvel. A well oiled machine whose dedicated purpose is the high velocity extinction of another living being. With such a fine hammer in hand, everything and everyone out there begins to look like a nail. The only thing in this world more dangerous than a gun, is a gun in the hands of a man. That idiotic mantra “guns don’t kill people, people do” is the zenith of absurdist illogic which disingenuously ignores the obvious corollary that with a radical reduction in the number of available firearms there will be a significant reduction in gun related murder, suicide and accident.

Stripped of a century’s worth of accretions attached by the lawyers, legislators, judges and gun lobbyists bought and paid for by the trillion dollar firearms industry, the Second Amendment in its purest form states only that men must be allowed to bear arms in order to answer any call of duty from their state militias.

Those militias have been replaced by national guard units of our gigantic permanent armed forces that didn’t exist when the Founders wrote that every man must keep a musket handy to defend the republic. The military should be the only organization sanctioned to possess those engines of mass destruction known today as “assault” weapons. It is my opinion that a national standard for firearms ownership should restrict possession to one single shot bolt action long gun and one double barreled shotgun for hunting and recreation, and a revolver for personal protection. Renewable license and insurance required.

Yes, and this will happen when pigs fly, and you can be sure someone will shoot that pig out of the sky just for the pleasure of hearing its dying squeal.

JB Bouchard

Puget Island