[HTML1]
Since its release in 1968, Night of the Living Dead has become a cult movie classic. Director George Romero pioneered (or re-pioneered) a genre that suggested quite strongly that the undead make terrible neighbors. Zombies have poor diet choices and are even less interesting than a Senate sub-committee panel. Most people want to avoid them like the plague that they carry. AMC has followed in the zombie tradition with a TV mini-series—The Walking Dead—about human survivors faced with legions of zombies created by a catastrophic plague . . .
The most disturbing part of The Walking Dead: its preoccupation with the soap opera lives of its principal characters, a situation that will have viewers rooting for the zombies on more than one occasion. In every episode.
But the latest episode had soap opera mixed in with gun issues and the debate seemed pretty ridiculous in view of the circumstances. A couple with a young son roughly about 12 years old locked horns about whether the kid should get some gun training. The kid wanted to learn how to use a weapon and his mother was against the idea. Huh?
In an earlier episode, said boy (who remembers names?) had been accidentally shot by a rifle bullet that traveled through a deer. He survived the experience after some serious surgery and apparently that left a bad impression on his mother about misuse of weapons. Perhaps even a bigger impression than soulless zombies that dine on living flesh and have pretty poor table manners.
Eventually the woman acquiesced to her husband’s request and allowed the boy to begin weapons training. Am I the only one who failed to see why an ability to use a firearm under these conditions is essentially a no-brainer? Incidentally, a brain seems to be filet mignon for the zombie crowd so failure to shoot hungry zombies may make the term very accurate.
On their best day mini-series are ground zero for advancing soap opera plots, but I was a little confused about the point of a gun debate in the middle of a zombie program. So confused that I was unable to discern which side of the gun debate was being advanced by the Walking Dead writers with this particular plotline.
And so I put it to TTAG’s Armed Intelligentsia: is anyone on planet earth stupid enough to NOT want a gun when they really, really need it? If so, has anyone notified the people who run the Darwin awards? Meanwhile, OK, yes, I’m going to ask. Which gun would be best for a young man facing the undead on a regular basis?