a new and improved gun

 I believe the long version of that joke was a shaggy dog story.  You know what the punchline is so you just drag the story out, making up stuff as you go along, and not until the listeners are about to walk away do you hit them with the punchline.  Like the story about Mel Famy famous big league pitcher, who one time had a beer between innings and that tasted so good that the next inning he had two, and as the game went on he had more and more beer, and walked more and more guys. and you can drag it out by innings or add a side story about his sweetheart in the stands and her puppy, Babe, and just as your listeners are getting really tired of the whole thing, he walks in the winning run and afterwards one of the guys on the other team points to all the empty beer bottles on the mound and says, "That's the beer that made  Mel Famy walk us."

Menthol had been around awhile but I think filters were just coming into existence as we were growing up, and shorties, there were still shorties.  As I recall there was a shorty unfiltered Kool cigarette that popped quite a wallop.

It's an old story about blacks preferring menthol cigarettes.  I think that is where I picked up the habit, from hanging with black guys in my hippie days.  It is more likely to kill you than regular cigs, so they would like to get rid of it.  The way they get rid of cigs is by taxing the hell out of them because this way the city or the state gets more dough and that is a win-win.  One of the arguments for not going after menthol is that it is a tax that falls disproportionally on those who can afford it the least.

If the actors took gun safety lessons then we would have no use for these guys who are getting paid good money to do one thing, keep loaded guns away from the cameras.  One job.  It does not seem that hard.  And you know actors, many of them drunks or hop heads or otherwise irresponsible as artists tend to be.  How can you trust them?

You would think that if you paid some outside guys cash to do that one thing, that would be the responsible thing, and maybe that would work if it was like poison or something.  But this is guns, and those giddy gun guys are going to flock to any job where they get to be around guns, and even a stable guy hanging around those giddies is likely to become giddy himself.

There used to be a thing about not letting kids have toy guns.  I had toy guns all my childhood.  I remember one glorious Christmas when all the kids in the neighborhood got something called a burp gun.  Kind of like an AR-15 as I remember. It made some kind of noise when you pulled the trigger and maybe there were sparks.  After Christmas dinner, which we made quick work of, we all got out on the streets and killed each other deep into the night.  

There may have been a bruise or two, or maybe even a skinned knee in all that hullabaloo, but nobody got killed.  All guns, except of course, Old Betsy, should be like that.