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It's not that the policemen involved in this circular firing squad were merely bad shots. I mean, twenty-plus bullets! At close quarters, nearly point-blank! It's a miracle that neither of them got killed!
Or rather, not a miracle, but a law of nature.
What's a matter you, Shoeboy? Don't you go to the movies? Don't you watch TV? The movies and the teevee have been trying to teach you something for years, and you still haven't learned? Why even Eric S. Raymond has absorbed this wisdom, and as we all know, he's, ah, shall we say, distracted.
The natural fact is, virtue is a shield against bullets. I know that's hard for a modern atheistic person to digest, though it was self-evident to the boy soldiers of Iran during their '80s war with Iraq. Considering how tough a sell it's going to be, that's why the almighty media do not simply plop this notion before you as a bare fact, as though it were something simple and readily comprehensible, like the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics. Instead, having consideration for your delicate sensibility and limited credulity, they slip it to you as a myth.
Here's just one example of the myth. Dja ever see the movie Rambo? OK, don't tune out yet, I know you're saying, "Rambo?! That, that, that trashy trash! How common, how plebian, how declasse!" Oh indeed I share your distaste. But still, be still and listen awhile. There's a scene in Rambo where our steroid-freak hero is running through the jungle (cue up John Fogerty) with, get this, a fifty-cal cradled in his muscular arms. (Of course in real life if a guy picked up a fifty-cal in his arms in Vietnam and managed to hold on while squeezing the trigger, the recoil would bounce him all the way to Honolulu. Sure the circumstances are false, it's a myth, remember?) He bursts into an opening cut out in the underbrush. (Yeah, right, typical Vietnamese in postwar Vietnam hang out in junglee clearings. But hey it's a myth!)
Standing here and there in the clearing are approximately one hundred fiendish VC soldiers. These are extras. They are disposable! Well, each of these Mao-capped fiends is toting the famous Kalashnikov AK-47 automatic rifle. Yes, the one which, during the Vietnam War, our soldiers (real soldiers amidst genuine mortal combat, mind you, not mere mythical characters) would toss away their shiny new overpriced jam-o-matic M-16s and use these instead, because they shoot so damn good.
They (the VC fiends in concert) take one look at Monsieur Rimbaud's sweat-gleaming bulging musculature, non-yellow skin, and fold-free epicanthes, and then they all cry out as one (in Vietnamese of course) "Holy s&^%t! It's that f*%$#n Uncle Sam!" and with that free-n-easy lack of fire control that's so characteristic of movie extras, they all open fire at once. Now think about it. One hundred enemies, three hundred rounds a minute, one target. That's five hundred rounds per second, a rate of fire roughly comparable to that of a minigun.
This is where the miracle of virtue comes into play. If they were blasting away at something neutral and inanimate, such as a paper target, even if all those Orientals were stink-o out of their minds drunk on sake so they were firing literally at random - some straight up, some down into the dirt, some directly into their own feet, knees or chests - it only stands to reason that n bullets distributed across the entire sphere, times the surface angle of a target with an aspect of k steradians divided by four pi, when you run n to a high enough number, is going to result in the statistical near certainty of a hit somewhere on that target. But they are not firing at paper. They are firing at a good guy.
And that, simply enough, is the essence of the miracle. You just can't hit a good guy. No matter how many rounds you fire. Conversely, you can't miss a bad guy, or in the example above, you can't miss all the bad guys. For don't you remember the denouement of that exciting scene? Yes, by the Good Lord, by the time the director yelled "Cut," every last one of those little yellowy-red devils had been struck by unscathed mighty Rimbaud's shreiking fifty-caliber rounds, and was lying face down in the clearing, bleeding, dying or dead! Virtue always triumphs!
Well, that explains the peculiar doings in Seattle. Fear not, Shoeboy! Contrary to appearances, you and your fellow Seattlites are being protected by qualified shooters! All that practice down at the Tukwila range would surely have paid off, had the circumstances been such that they were shooting at someone other than a good guy. If their target had been, rather than a fellow virtuous Boy in Blue, instead, say, an immigrant street vendor, why they might not have hit with every round, but I'd bet anything they'd have scored a good, say, seventeen out of forty-one.
Yours WD "not a gun" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
Getting into my Chevrolet Magic Fire, I drove slowly back to the office. - L. Rosen
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