Well guys as regular followers will know (yes all 3 of you!, sorry 4 with my mum!) I’m about as European as you can get being both Spanish and English - which makes international football interesting/conflictive to say the least. So nipping downtown to buy yourself a new semi automatic being on par with just adding some Nikes to your collection is really hard to get my brain around.
Consequently after surviving one of the cabin crew’s least popular mega 15 hour flights to Houston, ( and even though we get a 48 hour stopover the first day counts for nothing as you’re so jet- lagged ), I thought I’d have a closer look and for the purposes of the piece, keep it as objective as possible.
I’d heard all our coverage of the shocking school shootings and the devastating impact it had but wanted to talk to some locals and get their take on it and more importantly, of course have myself some fun with the root of the controversy, specifically shooting a couple of rounds with a small XD5 to start with:
to then move on to the bigger bad boy, G36:
Firstly as us gamers will attest, there’s nothing as sweet as hitting the target but when you move from the virtual to the real, your primal instinct is not so easily satisfied. In fairness, I did ok with the pistol but the recoil on the automatic made it nigh on impossible to hit the target.
My European brain found the casual banter in the gun shop packed to the rafters with merchandise mind boggling - one guy was waiting for the sales to get his uncle a new pistol, (mine’d be lucky with a pair of house slippers ), the girl that moaned about having to carry her boyfriend’s mobile and gun in her handbag or the dude that rolled up in his 4 x 4 and removed some bagged weapon the size of an antiaircraft missile, as casual as you like, and sauntered into the shop... And was also surprised how cheap it was to pick up a gun, half the price than a normal modern phone!
Anyways after all that jaw dropping my dry mouth deffo needed a beer(s) and a chance to get some local input. Scarily 40 Americans (17 of them youths) die every day from shootings so what did the locals think? Everybody was unanimously pro so I’d obviously cornered the one third of gun owning Americans. Their consensus was that if your responsible enough to vote and decide your country’s future then you’re responsible enough to have the right to defend yourself. That we Europeans were denied this right during our oppressive feudal middle ages, whereas in the US the rugged individual had to build the nation from scratch rejecting the centralised institutions that we take for granted. I was going to say health care but that would be another story!
So what do you guys think?
Thanks for the read guys and take care!
