Posted on 04/30/2008 4:36:36 PM PDT by Ptarmigan
Just a piece of cold steel
I am a gun. I was designed primarily as a weapon of defense. I have been reviled, hated, feared and declared unlawful.
Many have spoken out against me and have slandered my name and maligned my actions.
Yet, I am but a cold piece of steel - I have no will or volition. I cannot aim or cause harm to anyone.
While within me there lies awful potential, it requires an outside agency for it to come to completion.
I have never killed, murdered or maimed anyone intentionally. But I have been used by others to do all this and more.
It requires a man's hand, a man's hatred and a man's will for the cold steel contained within me to become deadly. It requires a total disregard for a neighbor, friend, husband, wife or brother for my power and force to become deadly.
If you wish to stop senseless killings and violence, you must look beyond my slick finish and ergonomic design. You must look within the heart of a man darkened by hatred, prejudice and a lack of appreciation for others.
It is in that dark space where murder is conceived and where the resolve to perpetuate the madness for which I am blamed begins.
Every person should look deep within for any attitudes of intolerance toward others and underlying animosities which could generate these actions.
For as long as men are brothers with respect, appreciation and love for one another, I am but a piece of steel.
L. Malcolm Seal, Jasper
LOL.......!
GUNS are great, It was GUNS that destroyed the power monopoly of teh aristocracy in Europe and brought democracy into the world.
A lifetime of training as an armed knight was worthless when facing a determined peasant with a musket.
I wish I had a gun made out of Reardon metal.
That’s a nasty pile of steel!
THE great guns slay from a league away, the death- bolts fly unseen,
And bellowing hill replies to hill, machine to brute machine,
But still in the end when the long lines bend and the battle hangs in doubt
They take to the steel in the same old way that their fathers fought it out--
It is man to man and breast to breast and eye to bloodshot eye
And the reach and twist of the thrusting wrist, as it was in the days gone by!
Along the shaken hills the guns their drumming thunder roll--
But the keen blades thrill with the lust to kill that leaps from the slayer's soul!
For hand and heart and living steel, one pulse of hate they feel.
Is your clan afraid of the naked blade? Does it flinch from the bitter steel?
Perish your dreams of conquest then, your swollen hopes and bold,
For empire dwells with the stabbing blade, as it did in the days of old!
--Donald Robert Perry Marquis, The Bayonet, 1914
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