Guns are neither good nor evil. They simply are. Back in the day, The History Channel — you know, back when they had shows about actual history — had a program called Tales of the Gun, which made the point that guns served both heroes and villains alike, and that's certainly true. It's something a lot of people don't really seem to get.
Either that or they know it; they just don't care.
Take the far-left Seattle publication known as The Stranger.
They seem to think that Idaho, in picking the Winchester 1873 rifle as their state gun, picked "the evilest possible state gun."
The 1873 Winchester is described on the ballot as “the gun that won the West,” a euphemistic whitewash for our long genocide of the Indigenous peoples beyond the Mississippi (if you ever want to feel really cynical, look up what the Union Army was doing in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War). The Single Action Army revolver carries much the same reputation, while the Remington 700 is a deer hunting rifle so beloved by outdoorsmen that the US military has used them to snipe people across the globe for decades.
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That’s the problem with choosing to honor a firearm in the first place. Killing machines are inherently problematic things. Like most elections, the choice for voters came down to selecting the least worst option, and as they often do, Idaho voters picked the worst one: the Winchester 1873.
Now, it's already been said that the reason this question was even on the ballot in the first place was to generate interest in the midterm elections and to get people out to vote. I'm not sure that something like this would work, particularly in such an important midterm, but we all know this is almost nothing at all.
Of course, folks in Idaho probably couldn't give less of a damn of whatever someone at The Stranger thinks of their choice. The Winchester 1873 was, in fact, the gun that won the West, and contrary to revisionist historians, not everything about westward expansion was bad and not every American Indian encountered was a noble, peaceful being who simply wanted to live unmolested. There was more than enough sinning from both sides that we'd do well to simply acknowledge it and move on.
But the gun itself had no say in what it was used for. None of them did. They don't have a say. They don't think, feel, or have opinions.
There is no "evilest" gun.
There are just guns that have been used by bad people to do bad things, but those same guns have done good. Those Winchester 1873s were used to stop attacks and robberies. They were used to put down vicious men who would kill you for snoring too loudly. They were used to put food on the table, particularly in lean times.
None of that was evil.
I get that thinking having a state gun is dumb. I think it's kind of a non-issue sort of thing, but if Georgia were to get its crap straight and get to the point again where we have a similar vote, I'll have an opinion and probably be insufferable about why I'm right. I can understand that point of view, but I'm not going to agree with it.
And I won't just turn the other cheek when someone calls an inanimate object that's incapable of hurting anyone in and of itself "evil."