Snow Melt

Sharpshooter gun control

The April 16, 2013 prompt for "Blogging Circle of Friends Prompt Forum"  is
If you ran away and joined the circus, what would your role be? Would you run a concession? Would you train elephants?
Be a clown? Ringmaster? What and why?

I'd be a sharpshooter using a version of the Sharps Rifle,1 which was in service between of 1850 to 1881. The reason I would want to use a Sharps Rifle concerns the American myth of the origin of the word sharpshooter. According to on version of this myth the word sharpshooter comes from Sharps' shooters referring to buffalo hunters using the Sharps Rifle, while another version of the myth concerns the Sharps rifle and the Civil War.2 The term sharpshooter actually come from the German word Scharfschütz referring to an expert marksman.3

The April 16, 2013 prompt for "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  is
What are your thoughts about gun control?
if you don't want to talk about gun control, then I have an alternate prompt:
What's the worst present you've ever received, and what did you end up doing with it?

I'm not completely convinced that gun control is possible; however, I do think that a background check should be required on every gun sale. The reason I believe that gun control may be impossible is the human factor. When one is dealing with a human being you are encountering several unknown variable such a emotion, state of mind, etc. Just because a person passes a background check doesn't mean that individual isn't going to snap in a moment of anger. In addition, there is always the possibility of that the person buying the gun is buying it for someone else, so the only background check that is done is on the person buying the gun.

Life is dangerous
it isn't so much survival of the fittest
as survival of the luckiest.

Life is dangerous
and survival is a community
endeavor.

Thought of the Day: “The gun of a writer is the pen and his or her bullet is the word” ― Anca Marinescu

Footnotes
1  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharps_rifle
2  http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-sha5.htm
3  http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sharpshooter?s=t