What Orange Tip?

By now, I'm sure you've heard the story of the student who attempted suicide-by-cop; they're now harvesting the organs from his brain-dead body. There are two tragedies here: one, a young man sought a "permanent solution to a temporary problem" who will soon die after "dozens" of cries for help to his acquaintances; the other, a law enforcement officer was forced to honor with deadly force the credible threat to his own life, only to discover post-shooting that the threat was not real. The tragedy is sure to energize the gun-fearing wussies on the left to slap even more Nanny State restrictions on gun and toy gun ownership. I agree with Head on this matter. It's all about personal responsibility.

On several of my tours to Korea, many of us enjoyed playing the Assassin Game (as a matter of fact, I was Godfather of the first game in our unit back in '82). At first we started out with very toy-looking guns with rubber-tipped darts. On my later tours, we discovered Airsoft pistols like the one above and allowed them in the game. I built personal responsibility into the rules of the game:

• No hits in a workplace.
• No more than two witnesses to the hit; no LE or security witnesses at all.
  
• No hits on anybody except the one person whose contract you carry. Hitting your own assassin in self-defense gets you a week's reprieve from being hunted.

Everything ran great and everybody had fun until some morons who'd already been eliminated from the game got irresponsible with their "weapons" and ended up plunking someone not involved in the game. The innocent bystander would report it to the First Sergeant...who'd then ban the game entirely. I don't know if the perps responsible for the complaints ever received any punishment. It's always the law-biding gun owners who lose out when someone uses a weapon unlawfully or irresponsibly.

BTW: The "Glock 23" above kept me sane during my year-long hiatus from shooting on my final tour. I didn't play Assassin (even though two-thirds of my tour was pre-9/11), but I did set up some Armymen in my apartment to plink and keep my aim honed. This is a special Korean Glock 23, because it's marked "9 X 19" instead of ".40 S & W." I also had the Beretta to keep acquainted with the shape of the M9 until I decided my career would draw to a close at the end of the tour.

In case you're interested, the "contracts" were notecards containing the name of the person to be hit, signed by the Godfather, who shuffled the cards and generated the "Hit List." The Godfather would deliver a contract to the person whose name appeared above the name on the contract. The hitman whose name was on the bottom got a contract on the name at the top of the list. When I was GF, I also published a chatty newsletter describing the hits of the week; I got to deal out cool gangster nicknames for the unlucky players.