If you're a cooking enthusiast, you're probably familiar with Penzey's Spices. Because of their high quality, they've been my exclusive go to for such things for over two decades. That is until the owner of the company, Bill Penzey, essentially told me he doesn't want further business from me or anyone else in the firearm community. This began with one of his recent newsletters, which as usual, contained a mix of 'buy this shit' and social commentary. He tends to lean to the left, but his rhetoric has been mostly innocuous; not that I opened many of them. However, when a recent newsletter titled "Guns Are Dumb" hit my inbox, you know damned well I opened it. I've pasted the commentary portion of the newsletter at the bottom, but the TL;DR is only hunters and law enforcement should have guns. Others aren't responsible enough to have them and should rely on their kitchen cutlery for defense.
The dude signs his newsletters, with his email address, so I sent him a note indicating how I thought he was being condescending and that I found his views both uninformed and frankly asinine. Bill reads his email and responded less than 20 minutes later doubling down on one of his talking points as well as being an even greater ass hat. Copy paste:
“Responsible Gun owner” is an oxymoron and NRA propaganda. There is nothing responsible about bringing an item into your home that will increase the chance of violent death for you and your family members five-fold. But you are indeed free to invent absurd realities where your gun makes you that special hero. Pew-pew.
I believe what he was trying to convey was "I'm an even greater ass hat than you thought and don't want any business from the firearms community or anyone else who recognizes how much of a douche I am. Can you please spread that message for me?"
Yes sir! I've already started taking care of that for you because I aim (no pun intended) to please.
Fucking dickhead.
The Newsletter
And guns are dumb. Yes, hunting, and ranching, and law enforcement, but even then there are substantial risks. But owning a gun as though it is some sort of safety accessory is stupid. It’s like spending hundreds of dollars to add a self-destruct button to your life. At any moment, all it takes is one pull of the trigger, and just like that all the goodness in your life can be gone, never to return. Guns are dumb.
And guns are dumb. Yes, hunting, and ranching, and law enforcement, but even then there are substantial risks. But owning a gun as though it is some sort of safety accessory is stupid. It’s like spending hundreds of dollars to add a self-destruct button to your life. At any moment, all it takes is one pull of the trigger, and just like that all the goodness in your life can be gone, never to return. Guns are dumb.
We should all feel safe, and as humans, long before we had cooking we had weapons. But if you ever need a weapon, just look around you, they are everywhere. These days the kitchen of every American home rivals the arsenal of a good-sized medieval village. And who even needs the pointy things when you have cast iron? But guns are different. They try to sell you on the idea that guns give you control, yet with one pull of the trigger whatever happens next will forever be in someone else’s hands.
With yesterday’s verdict in Kenosha there were many headlines. Some spoke of freedom, and self-defense, and innocence, but once you pull the trigger there is no going back to what you were before. There is no return to innocence. Bring a gun into your home and it’s far less likely to take the life of a stranger in self-defense than it is to kill someone you love through accident, suicide, or your anger. A lot of the time someone wanting to own a gun is a pretty good sign that they’re the kind of person who shouldn’t have one. Guns are dumb.
I know that for many of you yesterday’s verdict and the joy it sent through the pro-gun crowd brought a sense of goodness slipping away. I get that. For me, in times like these I find cooking brings perspective. Once I came to see cooking as what it is, an act of kindness, the news lost much of its power to bring me down.
Even though the news presents itself as having its finger on the pulse of where we are at, it in reality shows little more than the couple dozen most out of the ordinary events that took place in the past day. Much of the news is horribly unkind. But to see cooking as kindness is to understand that for each and every event horrible enough to make the national news there are hundreds of thousands of acts of kindness happening in kitchens all across the country every day. Even on the worst of days there is so much more goodness. Please try to see it if you can.
If you are a hunter or if your job requires a gun, sure. But if you have a gun out of a sense of safety get rid of it asap. It is nothing more than a self-destruct button for the goodness in your life and in the lives of those you love. Guns are dumb.
