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Articles
By
Dave & Ariel Lindorff
Accredited
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Associated |
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Sarah Palin and Me: Two Kids With Guns |
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Posted By Dave Lindorff September 2, 2008
Sarah Palin and I may not have much in common,
but we do share an early history of bloodlust.
We both got guns before we were teenagers.
According to a report in the British Times
newspaper, Palin took a shotgun at age 10,
crawled through the grass in back of her house
with it, took aim at a bunny “and blew its
furry little head off.”
For my part, I got my parents to let me buy a
single-shot .22 rifle when I turned 12, and
proceeded to go out in the woods, alone and
with friends, to shoot at targets, trees, and
the occasional animal. A crack shot, I
remember picking off what I thought was a dove
perched at the top of a tree a good 200 yards
away. I nailed it, but when I went to the base
of the tree, what I discovered was a dead
robin. Oh well.
A few dead animals later, near Thanksgiving, I
got it in my head that I wanted to shoot my
own bird, so a friend whose family had a rack
of shotguns and I went out with two 12-gauges
looking for turkey or grouse. We had bad luck
all day, though my friend Bob almost shot a
great horned owl that startled us, and which
he mistook for a turkey (luckily he missed!).
Late in the day, and about to head home in
frustration, we flushed a grouse. As it
started to take off, I got off a shot and hit
it, but not very well. It went fluttering off
into the brush. We chased it down and finally
caught it. I picked the terrified animal up
and held it in my two hands, feeling its heart
beating frantically. The bird was bleeding
from the shot that had perforated its body,
and it was looking around in terror and
struggling to get out of my grip.
At that point I started to cry. I felt like a
monster. We didn’t know what to do. I suppose
I should have just wrung its neck to put it
out of its misery, but I didn’t have the
courage to do that—to actually kill a living
thing by hand. So I held it out, and Bob put
the barrel of his gun to its head and fired. I
was left holding just the motionless body. Its
“feathered little head” was just missing.
That was the end of my hunting. That
realization that animals feel not just pain,
but terror, touched me deeply. I had always
loved animals, but until that moment, I had
separated my affection for cats, dogs, ponies
and wild creatures, from the things that I
would shoot. It’s not terribly logical, but
somehow, when I was young looking at an animal
through a gunsight reduced it to an object,
instead of the living, breathing, feeling
thing that it really was.
For Palin, though, shooting that first rabbit
was just the beginning of a life of slaughter
for fun. This Christian fundamentalist, who
believes in creationism and the preciousness
of prenatal human life, spent the intervening
years since that first bunny kill shooting
God’s creatures of all kinds: moose, caribou,
and even wolves, which she has hunted from
helicopter—probably the bottom of the barrel
when it comes to sportsmanship.
Now I know there are probably millions of
Christian hunters who have all kinds of
rationalizations for why blowing away God’s
creatures for fun is in line with Bible
teachings —“man’s dominion over the animals”
and all that stuff—but I have to say that I
find her and their lack of introspection
troubling. (At the time the Bible was being
written, I doubt that hunting for sport even
existed, at least among the common people.
People killed animals for food.)
No doubt the gun lovers of America will love
Palin’s story, but there are plenty of
Republican animal lovers--and maybe even some
hunters--who may be as revolted as I am at her
love of the kill—particularly of those animals
like wolves that are increasingly threatened
even in Alaska, and that display such
intelligence and such socially interconnected
and developed lives.
Just as it is jarring to read that a woman
who, as a top government official, actively
opposes the teaching of sex education in the
schools sees no irony in having her own
17-year-old daughter, clearly in need of some
basic sex ed, get pregnant, it is jarring to
me to see a woman who claims to be a devout
Christian reveling in the slaughter for sport
of God’s wild creatures.
Sarah Palin and I parted ways after our first
few kills. Mine converted me from a pre-teen
gun nut into an anti-war activist. Hers seems
to have simply left her thirsting for more.
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