Bad Tourists & Shooting Ranges

What is the gun fascination?

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Sorry for the Barbie pic with this title, but I don’t exactly have pics of us shooting and I never will. I do have a pic of a hide out in a Cu Chi tunnel in Vietnam which this newsletter is based on. The hide out was creepy and small.

What in the world!

“Oh fuck man, that was so cool. It was just bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, one right after another.” The testosterone was rampant as four grown men, three in their early twenties and one pushing 60 gathered into a group and shared stories of their experience shooting automatic weapons. Previously on our tour of the Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam, these men had not engaged with one another, but now they had a common interest and were best buds. For the equivalent of $80 USD guests at the tunnels can shoot a round. 50 years prior 45,000 Vietnamese men and women had died building and defending these tunnels. There was no data on how many Americans lost their lives in or near the tunnels, but 58,200 were killed in the Vietnam War overall. And here we are amongst grown men, playing guns in their Nike shirts and white sneakers laughing and joking as if they just got off The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror ride at Disney. And we wonder why we have a gun problem, but we are the lucky ones because they cannot get guns in their country. I fear what would happen if men like this had easy access to guns like we do in the USA in own their country. Guns are not toys for big boys, they are serious killing machines.