You remember the horror and disillusionment you felt in, oh, fourth grade when you learned in your American History class that cowboys used to regularly line up children in one-room schoolhouses across the west and mow them down with their Colt Peacemakers? Yeah, neither do we. Which makes the tightly wadded panties and pusilanimous hand-wringing over the Fort Worth Stock Yard’s reenactments of wild west shootouts a little bit curious. But we live in a politically correct time of knee-jerk, ill-considered over-reactions. Even in Texas . . .
Someone named Dennis Merrell, sporting jeans, a big buckle and a black Resistol just to establish his Texan bona fides, recently whined to a WFAA reporter (via fishandgame.com) that, “To me, it’s a little insensitive, in light of the Aurora and the Connecticut shootings.” Apparently having missed a daily supplement or two, he went on, evidently with the families of the Sandy Hook victims in mind:
That family is not going to celebrate and, God forbid, if one of them was down here and saw this gun fight … It’s not really anything to make a show out of.
Strange, but we weren’t aware that it was compulsory to attend a gunfight reenactment while visiting the Lone Star State. We were under the apparently mistaken impression that anyone who paid to take the tour and see the actors pretend to shoot each other did so of their own free will.
But since even make-believe shooting is now beyond the pale, it’s probably only a matter of time, then, until Gettysburg is forced to stop their battlefield reenactments out of respect for those who would otherwise be forced to view them. And don’t get us started on the Revolutionary War. Again, we’re living in interesting times. [h/t Mark C.]