My neighbor,  loves his guns as much as he loves his truck and sometimes he loves them both a little more then he loves his girlfriend.

I stress sometimes.

My neighbor, who fears everything from the water supply to concerns about people who drive electric cars and vote for democrats   tried to convince me I need a gun to protect myself from the evils of the world and that in the end I might love it as much as my Jeep and my dog, ( ha! fat chance )I’m pulling your leg. He didn’t say that. But it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had.

Education, he said as I gave him my full attention, was the key to being a responsible gun owner. If you understood how to handle them you wouldn’t be scared to own one.

So one day at the dog park he gave me a little talk about gun safety.

My takeaway- don’t point it at your face when you are talking and whatever you do, don’t take it out and wave it around because that’s brandishing and THAT is against the law. Plus it’s not safe.

I agreed.

His dog and my dog were peeing on a tree together and I thought how easy it was for dogs.  Did they have to go to meetings or join Facebook groups, or pay dues to a club in order to decide where and how to mark their territory and then defend it?

They do not.

They sniff, they lift their leg, they whiz and voila!  It’s theirs. Easy Peasy.

So. I said, where do you point it? Like how do I decide to aim for the foot or the head or the chest? How long do I have to decide if I need to do a kill shot or a I’m going to hurt you real bad type shot.

Ho Ho Ho, you’re no sniper he says. Just aim and shoot.

Seriously I said. Where do I aim?

I’m a whiz at finding internal organs, I assured him. As a matter of fact, I was paid a tidy sum for that knowledge in the past. So. How do I make that choice? Because really,  I can find those babies in a snap- that would be no problem for me. I was being serious I said. How do people know which organ to aim for?

It comes down to safety. He said blinking really hard. You have to protect yourself, he said. But I could tell he heard the bit about me getting paid for knowing my way around your innards and I’m pretty sure he felt we had gone off topic.

We watched our dogs some more and then I put my finger out and touched his collar bone.

” That’s your subclavian artery. ” I said right there in the dog park as we sat on the park bench.

I did not flinch. I did not laugh. I just pushed down a tiny bit.

” It’s really  simple to find, if you know where to look.”

We went back to watching our dogs run around and play and we never talked about guns again.