Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3211 to 3215 (2nd to 6th May 2016)
Zebetite:
Shotgun or harpoon, if I were presented with a bartender this hostile I'd just turn around and leave. What a piece of work.
War Sparrow:
I wonder if her job description said something about "pretend you're a cranky old bartender/former sailor from the late 1800s" to fit into the theme of the bar and she is doing the best she can. Or she is a psych major doing a social norm experiment.
jheartney:
The shotgun was highly inappropriate; this is not a spaghetti western, or some brainless Hollywood action flick. The harpoon is a much better choice all around; it converts the story from a criminal assault on Clinton into a comic about silly chest-beating.
I don't get why switching out a bad storytelling choice for a much better one is a Bad Thing™. This would be true even if the shotgun version had been uploaded intentionally.
WRT the idea that intra-comic violence was normalized in the early days of Faye threatening to punch Marten, I don't think it's comparable. Faye's violence never used firearms, and the tone was that it had much more bark than bite. Faye never actually injured anyone, I don't believe. By contrast, the shotgun could have brought maiming and death. Further, Faye was a character known, for the most part, to her victims, and they would have understood that her punches were not about inflicting injury. The bartender here is not someone known to Clinton, and he could well have been in fear of his life from what amounts to a stranger.
mustang6172:
I recall Faye once knocking a drunk Marten to the floor.
Morituri:
Guns are a weird topic in the USA.
As the population gets more urban, reasons to own them (by which I mean, sane reasons) are applicable to fewer and fewer people. But there are places out under the sky where they really are necessary and appropriate tools.
A good medium-size rifle is how you keep coyotes from taking your sheep and calves. A shotgun puts pheasant and quail on the table when you couldn't afford to buy them in a store. A small rifle lets you keep gophers and prairie dogs down so horses don't break their damn legs. And a magnum pistol can scare off a bear, even one that's in the act of charging - usually. (You don't actually aim at the bear, at least not with the first shot - usually you don't need to. If it doesn't scare off however, you'll need the rest of the clip, quickly, to have a good chance of stopping it.)A high-powered rifle is the necessary and appropriate tool for taking wild pigs, which are an invasive species savaging the California ecology - and also good eating.
For the first half of my life, when there were at least a dozen firearms in the house, and from the age of 12 I used one at least once a week, I never even CONSIDERED pointing one at a human being - it would be unnecessary, and besides insane. We took a gun safety course in school, and there was even a marksmanship team in high school that won a few trophies.
But cities are different. In cities I don't have any of those problems or needs and I have no need here for firearms, But there are people around here who think ONLY of shooting humans when they think about guns. "Self defense" for most of them, or just thinking that owning one is a cool power trip for others. And other people who think that shooting people is the only reason why guns exist and want to ban them all. Either way, down to the core of my soul I can't help thinking that's completely crazy. Humans, and legitimate targets that you have an actual reason to shoot, are entirely different categories.
And then you get deranged weirdos who go out and shoot people they don't even know, for no reason that's even comprehensible to a sane person. I don't understand that AT ALL. Where I grew up, everybody knew everybody - there were no strangers ANYWHERE. You can dislike someone you know, but I have no idea how people can hate complete strangers they know nothing about, enough to kill them.
Anyway, legislation that's probably going to get passed in response to all these insane weirdos in cities is going to make things really tough on ranchers and people who live out in boondock. Lots of horses with broken legs, missing sheep and calves every dry season, rats shitting in the feed bins, etc. Just another case of a minority getting screwed over because of crazy city people.
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