So here's an interesting (to me) thing.

Twice in 24 hours I've found myself in an itchy scratchy place over guns.

Just a few minutes ago I had one of those "name and serial number or you're a liar" things with a gun troll that you just walk away from like this...

And last night, in a completely different, friendly, private discussion where I mentioned the coyotes in the woods and my dad's old gun on the floor and the person asked for a pic. In a perfectly normal way.

And I actually had a moment where I didn't know what to say.

Which is super unusual for me, as you might guess from the 100,000+ tweets this account has made.

Eventually I just mumbled something about not wanting to send a gun picture over the internets and we moved on.

I thought about that a lot on my drive around the Cabot Trail today.

And then the troll thing happened.

So, I have some thoughts on guns.

I fully understand if there's a window you need to wash or a movie you need to watch instead.

I learned to hunt when I was very young. My father was an avid sportsman and hunted all things in all seasons. We regularly ate rabbit, deer, pheasant, duck, goose and sometimes moose.

I can field dress most animals.

We also occasionally did a bit of skeet shooting but that was mostly to train dogs, keep guns in good order and practice marksmanship or get used to a new gun.

My dad knew a lot about guns and kept his in perfect condition.

And he never talked about them. Ever. He didn't engage in discussions with other hunters about this or that weapon, he never discussed his weapons. If the discussion turned to guns, he got up and left.

He taught us how they worked. He taught us how to use them.

He told us that unless you were going to eat it or it was *actually* endangering your life or your livestock, shooting an animal was close to a mortal sin. An abomination. Yes, that seriously.

When my brother was a young teenager he got involved with some kids who also hunted.

And he got interested in guns themselves. My father was not amused.

Then my brother got a subscription to some magazine or another and the first issue arrived at the house.

Fuckity fuck it was a scene.

My father made all three of us sit at the table and he gave us the one and only lecture he *ever* delivered.

Guns were tools, he told us. Serious things not to be used cavalierly or casually, never, ever against a human - under any circumstance whatsoever.

They were to be carefully selected, chosen for "lowest force that will work", kept clean and oiled, locked up and never "shown off". They were not toys.

He said it was dangerous to glorify them and he saw all gun afficionados as not truly understanding what a gun *was*.

I don't really feel that way, I don't care if you're interested in guns. I'm interested in cars and that's just as stupid.

But here's the thing. I don't know a fucking thing about guns except these things:

I can keep all my guns in working order and clean. I know what ammunition they take and which different types of ammunition I require for what I'm shooting, how to load them, how to aim them and how to shoot them. I'm a pretty good shot.

I know what brand names they are and basic things like gauge or calibre, model in some cases, but not much else. I have my dad's goose gun (that was taller than him, he was short) and I use it and I don't even know what make or model it is because I've not had to buy ammo yet.

I don't have my father's religious dislike of gun talk but I too get up and leave if people talk about guns. I don't discuss them or take pictures of them or talk about using them.

And I never do bona fides anyway, but I *never* do them with guns.

When I worked in the field (search and rescue specialist, I didn't work in it as a full time job, I was called in as part of a deep woods dog team for specific types of searches) I carried a weapon and had to be certified, but everyone I worked with was the same way.

No one talked about their guns. They just didn't.

Most of the hunters and country people I know are the same. They're not rabid like my dad, but pretty much the same reluctance.

To a person, they think our gun laws are shit. As in way too lax.

And they don't care about concepts like "personal freedoms" and slippery slopes. They just don't think yahoos in cities need "machine guns" and rifles that could take down a bear. They're tired of idiots coming to their woods and shooting everything in sight and leaving a mess.