The Roundup

Well, it came in the mail today. They always said it would, and it did. I was one who scoffed at their wild-eyed predictions, their doomsday scenarios, their dungeons in the sky. I would listen with a very small grin on my face as they spoke, picturing the obligatory tin-foil hats atop their pointy heads.

It came in the mail. How innocuous; really, what a paltry approach to this sort of thing. Give the bad news to a letter carrier and have it dropped in my mailbox. I didn't see it coming. I didn't see it arrive. And here it is in my hands, an order from my government.

Turn in your guns. By the end of the month. Not even a "please".

That's dicey for me, because I've bought and sold (or given away) an awful lot of guns in the past fifteen years. There was the 9mm I pawned, the .38 that went to the plumber as payment for service rendered, that horrible .41 magnum I sold to Tommy the Pressman. Then there was the .22 I gave to Roy for Christmas, the other .22 I swapped to Greg for a guitar, and the other .22 that went to...

Well, you get the picture. And those were just the handguns (the rifles - oh, God). Kind of hard to turn all that stuff in now. I sure hope Uncle Sam understands.

April Fool, by the way. But you knew that, didn't you? Seventeen months into his first term, President Obama hasn't bothered to take away my guns. Or your guns. Or anyone else's guns. Wait, let me guess; he just hasn't done it yet. Here's your tin foil.

The notion - no, the fear that a Democratic president is out to confiscate our weapons has been fomented by right-wing lunatics for decades now. Did Bill Clinton take our guns? No. Jimmy Carter? Nah. How about LBJ/JFK? Nope. Truman? Please. Roosevelt?

Anybody?

Never happened. It turns out that the same people who have been throwing that boogeyman under your bed every night are the same ones who told you that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. That stem cells were evil. That the rich needed tax cuts.

Now they say that Obama is a socialist. That he's not an American citizen. That health care is tyranny. That global warming is a hoax. And that the rich, of course, need even more tax cuts. It's so evident as to sting like a slap in the face.

Everything conservatives think, believe and know is wrong. That's why I support the new Obama initiative to open re-education camps for those in the minority who are so clearly headed in the wrong direction (and would like to take the rest of us with them).

Say, I did it again, didn't I? That's two pranks in one column - no fair. Oh, well. For some people, for some reason, it seems like every day is April Fool's Day.

pH 4.o1.1o