re: #189 Bert’s House of Beef and Obdicuts

I hate to keep using my neighbors to make this point, but it’s so easy.

This particular family has lived on the land they own for at least 3 generations. My property used to be part of the big farm they owned, they now own a much smaller piece of land their self proclaimed”compound” sits on. They crow quite often about the gun safety classes all of them have taken.I get the whole hunting mentality, especially as part of a family history, but that usually helps promote respect for guns on some level at least. Fine, but it doesn’t account for kids being kids and not having a clue as to what’s dangerous. For example:

1) When they were 8 and 9 I caught two of the boys(now out of high school, around my son’s age) shooting their guns at the ground at fire ant mounds. The soil here is nothing but rocks and clay, great opportunity for a bullet to ricochet.

2)Same kids, a few years later on the 4th of July got run off by my Husband for shooting fireworks DIRECTLY AT US from outside our 6 ft tall privacy fence.

3)When all the boys were around 12 yrs old, they took my son to a gun safe, opened it, tried to get him to take a shotgun and shoot out windows. My son ran home and told me. I confronted the neighbor who told me my son was lying because the kids didn’t have the safe combination. My son had never seen a gun before and actually drew me a picture of the shotgun shells and the box they came in. He wasn’t lying.

4)I recently found a hunting arrow in my vegetable garden. As I said before I have a 6 ft privacy fence around our backyard. That means someone shot over the fence on purpose.

These are people who claim they’ve had extensive safety training and practice, I shudder to think what they’d be like without it. Maybe some of that training ought to include some “guns don’t make you invincible and you can actually kill people if you’re an idiot” lessons too. The local cops won’t do much about this either, believe me, I’ve talked to them numerous times.