On the way up to the mountains to ski some of the seven plus feet of snow which fell during the past week, I passed a car with a bumper sticker that read: “The Animals Support Gun Control.” That brings up an issue you almost never hear about, ironically enough, after someone brings a hunting rifle to school and tries to peck off every kid or teacher they can get a bead on.
Oh, you hear about gun control, that’s a given, but almost never in the context of how they’re used against non-human animals—for sport or savagery—in contest kills, often geared especially for young people, as if to tempt the next mass-murderer out of hiding and onto the playground for some real fun and games.
You can’t expect grade-schoolers to understand the subtle difference between a sacred human life and those of other animals they’ve been trained to kill—before they could even develop a conscience—by their proud parents, who use their kids’ eagerness to please and to play follow the leader against them, in hopes of recruiting a life-time hunting partner.
The disturbing trend among states to lower the legal hunting age, practically to infancy, suggests the word “Columbine” evokes only the image of a pretty flower to them. Meanwhile, hunters in states like Idaho are actively luring young children to try their luck in coyote or wolf killing derbies to further degrade the value of life that movies and video games have already taught them to disregard a thousand times over. The town of Holley, New York, just held another appalling example of state-sanctioned sadism in the form of an animal-kill contest they dubbed the “squirrel slam.” “Sporting” events like the so-called “squirrel slam” are an embarrassment that only adds to the global perception that this is an inherently violent country.
Not to be outdone, the Oklahoma “game” department just announced that the senior class of Sasakwa High is sponsoring a crow-killing contest, set for the end of this month—complete with prize money for whoever murders the most crows. It’s a spectacle sure to inspire the next killer-in-waiting to turn their semi-automatic on their fellow classmates.
These kinds of hunting events beg the obvious question: how can kids be expected to know the difference between officially sanctioned animal cruelty and acts of cruelty they come up with on their own?
So if you feel your Second Amendment rights are withering away at the mere mention of gun control, relax that death-grip on your rifle for a moment and consider what the animals would have to say about the issue, if only we allowed them a voice.
Exposing the Big Game 