Hooray for Muskets

by Rachel Starnes

I am a staunch supporter of the second amendment right to carry a firearm-- as long as it's a musket. The amendment was written for a far gentler time, with good honest, totally inaccurate behemoth-like weapons that took a fucking eternity to load and reload and had an excellent chance of misfiring anyway. The merit in carrying a musket is twofold; not only does it require a greater degree of cunning and foresight, but it also requires a sense of philosophical surrender to the capricious whims of physics on the part of its owner. Musket owners are a higher breed, set apart from the pistol-packing proletariat because they eschew the motivators of passion and convenience.

These weapons were perfect counterpoints to the human psyche because they rewarded concentration, planning, and methodical thinking and punished passion, madness, and impulsiveness. Sure, carry a musket. If somebody pisses you off enough to send you measuring and carefully packing gunpowder and a musket ball and keeping track of a ramrod, then they probably deserve to be shot at. A lot of planning is involved to pop a cap in someone’s ass with a musket. Doing so successfully is a far greater testament to how badly this person needed said cap popped in said ass, and what a cunning, foresighted, and therefore morally irreproachable person you must be.

Besides, the musket is half on the intended victim’s side because so much of its effectiveness is based on random chance. What an equitable weapon! You have at least a 50/50 chance of it completely missing or misfiring and exploding in the face of its owner. With so much left to chance, fate, and physics, this gun could be a better mediator than our current legal system. Who’s right--you or your enemy? Let the Magic 8 Ball calibrations of the musket decide. Either way someone ends up dead and the argument’s over. (Reminiscent of the British legal system where you can get sued for losing a stupid lawsuit… and they’ve got socialized medicine too… I’m telling you, maybe we should reconsider this whole independence thing).

And this whole school shooting thing-- fifth-graders can't fire a musket. Lunatics can't fire a musket. And if they could, big deal? That's one shot. Someone would see them coming anyway, a big damn trombone-like end on that thing, heavy as hell, completely inaccurate. Being a musket owner calls for a certain sense of honesty and integrity because there’s no such thing as carrying a concealed weapon. You have proclaimed to the world your sense of fairness and assured everyone around you that, though you may occasionally be tempted to blow someone’s fucking head off, you are still content to give fate the benefit of the doubt.

© Rachel Starnes 2001