It was supposedly Samuel Taylor Coleridge, circa 1817, who first wrote that enjoying fictional entertainment required \u201ca willing suspension of disbelief.\u201d\u00a0 I was reminded of that yesterday when, in a rare day that didn\u2019t require class, court, or conveyance, the Evil Princess and I took half an afternoon off to go into a movie theater (we vaguely remembered having done so in the past) and watching \u201cJurassic World.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, I\u2019ll try like hell not to say anything that might spoil it for you, but as Backwoods Home<\/em>\u2019s resident gun guy, I need to warn you that you\u2019ll have to willingly suspend your disbelief as to how a lever action rifle such as the Marlin Guide Gun can be fired, not to mention the \u201cless-lethal weapons\u201d stuff.\u00a0 That aside, though, it\u2019s a pretty cool movie.<\/p>\n Mainly, it flashed me back to a theater in Michigan in the early 1990s where some friends and I saw the first \u201cJurassic Park\u201d movie.\u00a0 Then as with this new version, it was the super-hot new movie of the season, and Time <\/em>and Newsweek <\/em>\u00a0and such were saying that it was so scary that parents should preview it before letting their kids see it.\u00a0 My daughters were eager to catch that flick, and the youngest was about eight, so I felt duty-bound to check it out beforehand.<\/p>\n Good Lord\u2026what a validation for those of us who are responsibly armed!<\/p>\n In that first \u201cJurassic Park,\u201d those people had a good idea what they were getting into before they got there, and still <\/em>went unarmed\u2026and paid the price.\u00a0 The time-proven FN FAL 7.62mm semiautomatic battle rifles and the SPAS-12 semiautomatic shotguns were kept in an armory, accessible only to the privileged elite (an allegory here, maybe?) when the dinosaurs started taking over.\u00a0 Soon, there were some human body parts laying next to a jammed SPAS-12; being familiar with that particular weapon, I thought \u201cHey \u2013 that\u2019s <\/em>real!\u201d<\/p>\n Throughout the movie, this or that T-rex was chasing folks and I found myself thinking, \u201cThe .458 Magnum elephant rifle I took to Africa would drop one of those.\u201d\u00a0 I know people who\u2019d pay a king\u2019s ransom to hunt a Tyrannosaurus Rex in Central America. As the packed theater audience cringed with \u201coohs\u201d and \u201caahs\u201d I thought, \u201cWhat\u2019s you people\u2019s problem? Shoot the effing lizards!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n One character described the ominous characteristics of the Velociraptors: about six feet long with tough, leathery skin and sharp fangs and claws.\u00a0 I actually pulled my concealing garment back as I sat in the theater and looked down at the Colt .45 automatic in my holster, and saw the reassuring little green eyes of the Trijicon rear night-sight look back up at me.\u00a0 Six feet tall? Leather jacket? Multiple edged weapons? All over America, cops and law-abiding armed citizens deal with that every day with gear like what I\u2019ve got on in this theater <\/em>in 1993!<\/p>\n And, OMG, the ending of the original \u201cJurassic Park.\u201d\u00a0 For what I later counted as nine minutes or so, two poor little kids struggle desperately to stay ahead of the Velociraptors before their deux ex machina<\/em> rescue. I knew then and there that if those children were my<\/em> kick-ass daughters, they would have long since found their way into their armory and availed themselves of a couple of FN FALs.\u00a0 When the Velociraptors kicked in the door on them, <\/em>there would have been a short burst of well-directed, high-powered gunfire, and my kids would have spent the rest of those nine minutes asking each other, \u201cHow many purses and shoes and belts do you think we can make out of these suckers?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was supposedly Samuel Taylor Coleridge, circa 1817, who first wrote that enjoying fictional entertainment required \u201ca willing suspension of disbelief.\u201d\u00a0 I was reminded of that yesterday when, in a rare day that didn\u2019t require class, court, or conveyance, the Evil Princess and I took half an afternoon off to go into a movie theater […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3205","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}