Varmints... and varmints

Full disclosure: Us coyotes are no fans of getting our fuzzy butts shot off. Especially by half-tons full of baseball-capped pseud cowboys, careening full tilt across the foothills, blasting merrily and often, with a astonishing range of rifles apparently all called "varmint guns". I gather that rural stop signs are often also varmints... I digress.

Another disclosure: Granny coyote used to excel at a very tricky high-speed dance that would lure drivers of such half-tons over big rocks that bent wheels, busted springs and punched holes in oil pans, while younger coyotes - hell, even passing jackrabbits - laughed our fuzzy butts off at safe distance. Granny was quite a joker.

Just so you know where I'm comin' from on this one. I have watcha might call an opinion about that long-gun registry the current government is so hellbent on, ummm, gunning down.

Really, the news a couple of days back that the US National Rifle Association was lending somewhat less-than-moral support to Canadian gun lobbyists was hardly a surprise, despite quick government and lobbyist denials. Their patented paranoid-nutbar brochure spiels about ill-defined freedom and the registry existing "so the police can come and take away all your guns in advance of a Nazi takeover" were cropping up here with tiresome regularity.

See, here's what I don't get. People drive cars, and need both operator and vehicle licenses to do so. Good idea, given that vehicles are, in the wrong hands and/or in the wrong situation, two-ton-plus weapons. As much as I enjoy hanging my tongue out the shotgun-side window into the breeze when Aggie drives me somewhere, I know they pack enough potential kinetic energy to kill.

Yet start talking about licenses for machines expressly designed to make enough kinetic energy to kill, and suddenly a bunch of people, many of whom ought to know better, start yelling "FREEDOMFREEDOMFREEDOM" at the tops of their leathery lungs. Yes, yes, yes, I know some weapons are useful tools for farmers and duck hunters too. A firearms registry does not make them any less useful to those who use 'em that way. Even supposing that gun ownership does equal freedom, freedom still equals responsibility. And registering weapons that blast big, irreparable holes in living organisms as a design feature is a reasonable, responsible thing to do in a civil democratic society, no matter what the hell the NRA, or anyone else, may yell at the top of their intriguingly well-rehearsed, very well-financed, voices.

That's the evil genius of the NRA - managing to conflate owning a gun with a big, hazy, near-undefinable motherhood word, using a withering barrage of fallacious arguments. The evil genius of the Conservative party is in playing politics with those acquired arguments, then preemptively accusing anyone who calls 'em out on it of 'playing politics'. And people call me a varmint!

As one of my coyote brethren from the Alberta days says, "Fallacious arguments during crooked 7-card stud seem to be all there are anymore..."