Thursday, December 20, 2012

Speaking Of Gun Control...

...The news over the last few days got me thinking of a story told by my parents. This, apparently, happened before my parents met, but my mom was pissed off about it anyway.

According to the lore, on board the ship, after WWII was over, my dad was returning to Canada with a couple of things he apparently wasn't supposed to have. I have no idea why he wasn't supposed to have them, but it makes for a good story.

What he had with him was a pair of binoculars and a German pistol, which he used to tell us kids he stole off a German general. Because he wasn't supposed to have either, he tossed the binoculars into the Atlantic but he kept the pistol. (My sister has it now.) Of course he didn't bring any ammo with him, so the thing was useless.

Anywho....as the story goes, my mom was mad at him for tossing the binoculars and keeping the gun. I kinda have to agree with her. The binoculars would have been far more useful. My dad had a couple of shotguns which he used for duck hunting and for killing the farm animals before they were butchered. But a German general's pistol, without the ammo, wouldn't have been very useful.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Dave in Pa. said...

I would have kept both the binocs and the pistol. I've known many vets, from WW2 through the latest Gulf War. It's a time-honored but very unofficial custom that servicemen bring back war souvenirs. As far as leftard anti-gun freaks, since it's a given that they weren't at any front, fighting for their country, their condescending anti-gun, anti-vet views are less than valued, IMO.

One of my senior-citizen neighbors is a widowed WW2 US Army veteran who saw a lot of terrible combat in the Pacific. He's got all kinds of guns in his place next door and while that would no doubt bother somebody from the anti-gun crowd tremendously, that doesn't bother me a bit. The anti-gun fanatics frighten me a lot more than does my neighbor.

BTW, one of his guns is his old Army Colt .45 pistol, which he "liberated" from the Army when he got discharged. That's stretching things a bit...I'd rather that he'd bought the pistol and just kept Japanese pistols that he got. Anyhow, he mentioned once that he'd "killed a Jap with that pistol", who by a split-second in the shoot-out almost killed my friend-neighbor, instead of the other way around.

Given the brutal no-holds-barred, pretty much take-no-prisoners kind of war that was the Pacific theater, thanks to the Japanese setting the tone with their brutality, the Allied troops responded to them in kind. My friend-neighbor's attitude is quite understandable. The few Iraq and Af-stan combat vets I've spoken with have a very low opinion of our Islamofascist enemies, somewhere around the same level as pond scum.

December 21, 2012 11:49 pm  

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