IF YOU LIKE WEIRD NEWS ARTICLES that allow you to infer a helluva lot more than the article actually says, today’s Seattle Times (July 20, 2013) did not disappoint! This is the bizarre headline: “Sorry, hunters: Shooting down drones is not OK with FAA.” Does that really need saying, let alone making the news?
It is accompanied by an equally bizarre sub-title: “People who fire guns at drones are endangering the public as well as property and could be prosecuted and fined, the Federal Aviation Administration warned Friday.”
Sorry, hunters: Shooting down drones is not OK with FAA.
According to the Associated Press, it seems that the minuscule community of Deer Trail, Colorado, is considering an ordinance that would grant hunting permits to its citizens to shoot at drones. Even more amazing: Deer Trail would also offer a bounty of $100 for each drone downed!
Apparently, the ordinance is symbolic: even the author of the proposal acknowledged it was unlikely that drones were scouting out Deer Trail. But, said Phillip Steel, “I don’t want to live in a surveillance society. I don’t feel like being in a virtual society. This is a pre-emptive strike.”
Of course, the spy-happy US government laughed at the whole affair: “FAA officials say that once regulations are in place, thousands of drones will be used across the US for many purposes, from helping farmers . . . to tracking sea lions . . . to aiding search-and-rescue missions.”
Right. Of course, they will. And perhaps a wee bit more, too.
A better title for this piece—if the DLM (Damn Liberal Media) cared about us instead of them—might be “FAA sending thousands of drones into US skies not OK with US citizens.”
Just another wedge issue
Anyway, the interesting thing to me is that if we were somehow able to remove Republican-created “wedge issues”—such as abortion, illegal aliens (anybody remember when those people were known as migrant farmers and led by Cesar Chavez?), and the non-existent homoseckshual agenda—from the table, there are an amazing number of issues in which so-called conservatives are in accord with so-called liberals.
Here is a situation in Deer Trail—symbolic or real—where we liberals may end up cheerleaders for conservative hunters to start using their military-grade weapons to take shots at tax-payer-funded, non-military aircraft!
Hence this post’s heading: “can liberals be cheerleaders for conservatives with guns yes we can!”
As Lt. Col. Frank Slade would say, “Hoowah!”
Mystically liberal Virgo enjoys long walks alone in the city at night in the rain with an umbrella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig who strives to live by the maxim, “It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.
I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a college dropout (twice!). Occupationally, I have been a bartender, jewelry engraver, bouncer, landscape artist, and FEMA crew chief following the Great Flood of ’72 (and that was a job that I should never, ever have left).
I am also the final author of the original O’Sullivan Woodside price guides for record collectors and the original author of the Goldmine price guides for record collectors. As such, I was often referred to as the Price Guide Guru, and—as everyone should know—it behooves one to heed the words of a guru. (Unless, of course, you’re the Beatles.)