Well, I know I am a bit late to the show, but another weekend and another slew of mass casualty events. I saw a statistic the other day that stated there have been more mass shootings in the US in 2025 than days in the year. Sadly, that wasn't the worst part of the statistic. The part I left out is that this is the second year in a row that has held true.
Again, I don't know if it is a legitimate statistic or not. In my hopeful mind, it seems a bit inflated, but then when you consider the world today, it honestly isn't that unbelievable. You might have noticed in the opening sentence I used the term "mass casualty event" instead of "mass shooting". It's not that I am one of those it's a people problem not a gun problem guys. I mean, I kind of am, but the fact remains, people have managed to find all manner of ways to inflict harm on others through the years.
Aside from gun violence, we now have idiots running around with knives, and people ramming their vehicles into crowds of people. Like WTF!
I was getting ready for work this morning and in the area where we keep our keys and such, I noticed a bit of orange sticking out that I had completely forgotten about. This past Summer when my wife and I were camping just a little bit North of where we live in Michigan, I was heading into a local gas station/convenience store to pick up some worms for fishing.
(The fact that gas stations sell live bait is probably a whole different subject)
Anyway, there was this very nice old man sitting out at a table in front of the store, and he asked me if I wanted to buy a raffle ticket. I'm all about supporting charity, so I figured why not. The photo above is of the ticket. People outside the US, or North America to be specific might find it amusing (or abhorrent) that the first three prizes on the list are weapons.
In fact, gun raffles like this are pretty common in my neck of the woods. I used to sell tickets for an organization that does a ten gun raffle each year. Oddly enough, we would often sell so many tickets that they would end up giving away even more guns. So like they printed off 1000 tickets and gave away 10 guns, then for every 50 tickets over the 1000 they sold, they would give away another gun.
Needless to say, the odds of winning a gun made it pretty easy to sell the tickets.
No lie, half of me thinks "how cool is that?", and the other half is like "this is totally nuts right"?
As you can see from the ticket above, you need to have an ID and likely pass some kind of background check, but it's still probably seems quite foreign to people outside of the US (and maybe Canada).
Of course, the majority of these giveaways and raffles only award long guns. Handguns have a somewhat more strict process in the US, so it's a lot more work for them to give those away. I have been to a few wild game dinners though where they have given away handguns or the cash equivalent (you know, if you already have one of that model... it happens more than you think!).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-gun. Actually, far from it. I own two shotguns and a nice Remington tube feed .22. I once had this really awesome Romania bolt action .22, but I "lost it in the divorce". I also used to have a really sweet lever action 30/30 like you see in the old westerns. It was going to be a deer hunting rifle for me, but I quickly realize I was probably never going to go deer hunting, so I sold it to my good friend for his daughter to use (hunting deer).
I remember growing up, my father had guns in the house. He had a really nice .30-06 (thirty odd six) that sat up on the gun rack in the hallway. Although, there was a fascination with guns (what young boy isn't), there was also a due amount of respect for them. I never would have thought to ever touch that gun on the rack lest I get my ass whooped.
I shot my first real gun when I was 13. It was part of the hunters safety program. To get our hunting license we had to shoot a long gun and then we also had to shoot a revolver that the Sheriff's Deputy that was teaching the class brought with him. If you showed you could properly handle the weapons, you got your license.
I also remember as a kid there was a series of books by an author named C.B. Colby. They covered all kinds of military gear from handguns to machine guns to tanks. My friends and I were constantly checking those books out. The funny thing is, these days, if you even try to search "gun" on a school computer, you likely get blocked!
I wonder if that is part of the problem these days. Guns weren't really given a second thought back then because they were tools. Of course, mental health was managed differently back then as well (good or bad), but it's interesting how much things have changed.
I don't really intend for this post to have a message or to sway you one way or the other. As I said, I just happened upon that raffle ticket this morning, and it got my mind going. What do you think? Is the idea of a gun raffle insane to you or is it just one of those everyday sort of things?
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