James Jacques Joseph Tissot, At the Rifle Range
I’ve got a thirty-eight special, and a Colt forty-five, and a thirty-two-twenty, and a Winchester seventy-three, and a hard-shooting pistol just as long as my right arm, but, I don’t know, somehow I just don’t feel safe. . . .
Actually——that’s a joke! I’ve never used a gun. All right, I admit it, I’ve used STEN and UZI once or twice in a puzzle, and I used NRA (as Will Nediger points out) just last week. But if any of you solvers out there have purchased a submachine gun, or joined the NRA, because you found these things mentioned in my puzzles, please, for your own sake as well as mine, return the gun, cancel the membership, and—why not?—donate the refund, or your next round of dues, to this website!
Guns bother me. They’re useful neither for self-protection (since the proverbial “bad guy with a gun” always enjoys the crucial advantage of surprise) nor for restraining undue government power (the US military has us all outgunned). So, as part of my world-improvement program (and a sort of sequel to Crossword 116) I’ve here turned them (or anyway the letters that compose their names) to more benign uses.
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