[ebacon]

Gun owners would do well to understand how many decades right and left media have been using us as pawns. The narrowness of the debate is a material source of noise, aka profit, for media companies.

The issue became real for me when I had to disagree with a best friend on Facebook. He reposted some propaganda that shed good light on the memory of playing cowboys and indians. In his defense I imagine that he remembered the play like I did. I imagined playing cowboys and indians from a maintenance or Boy Scout perspective where preserving the tool, in this case the gun, is important to winning. The gun must be at the ready. It must be prepared.

My friend posted that after I had debated with you guys for a few years and began to understand how fast the news works, particularly through political cartoons. Knowing that I had changed my position on any enduring value of the childhood game of cowboys and indians I tried to summarize my position against my best friend in one sentence. In a cartoon of words. It went something like this:

What if Crocodile Dundee was about an Aussie shooting Aboriginals? Would that be a story that you would want to carry on?

Writing that question of disagreement against an armed best friend was among the most difficult writing experiments that I have ever performed.