Bullets of Rain Read Online Free PDF Page B

irresponsibly when it comes to their basic rights or freedoms, and I'm not any of them."
        "God, you're starting to sound like an ad for the NRA. All that Second Amendment garbage made sense during the Revolutionary War, but not now. Now you've got gun nuts hiding behind the Constitution, the same way censors hide behind children."
         I love you , Art thinks. Anyone else would button their lip, be less honest, let it ride. Nevertheless, this was an argument, and they had both sailed through debate at the collegiate level, which made them ruthless.
        "You're what those 'gun nuts' call a 'limping bunny in the meadow.' "
        That gets a rise out of her. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" Now she is looking directly at him, but he is ready for the double-barreled blast of her gaze.
        "Think it over: If you're a hungry predator, what do you dream about? A limping bunny in the meadow. Bunnies are tasty and can't hurt you when you kill them. Limping bunnies can't bounce away and make you waste energy by chasing them. A meadow is a wide-open space with no place to hide; the grass betrays the bunny's every move."
        "What if the bunny is limping because it has gangrene?" she says. "What if the bunny is faking it so the predator will step into a bear trap hidden by the grass?" She waggles her eyebrows.
        "Limping bunnies are people who don't consider the reality of their own vulnerability. Like people who expect the police to protect them from burglars in the house. Like drunks who act out in public with strangers because they never think those strangers might kick them in the face until they die while they scream for help."
        "So you're saying that the muffin in the leather mini and fuck-me pumps, who's staggering around a bar parking lot at two-thirty in the morning, deserves to be attacked, right?"
        "No. But she is a limping bunny."
        "That is still the stupidest thing I've ever heard," she says, wincing from its truth. "What does that have to do with all that 'We the People' stuff people use as an excuse to arm up for their own personal world war?"
        "Every time the word people appears in the Constitution, it refers to an individual right, not a collective one. The mechanism of change is inherent in the document. If the country doesn't like it anymore, then we'll have a sort of Prohibition on firearms, and we all saw how that eradicated alcohol, right?"
        "So as a result of that kind of thinking-which is called paralogia, by the way-everybody now packs a zillion guns."
        "No, they don't. The issues are so polarized that it's a hot-button topic just by existing. There's nobody who doesn't have a furiously extreme position on guns; there are no gun moderates. Everyone is passionate. What most normal citizens don't know is that most times a gun is used for self-defense, it is not fired. All the times they're not fired are never included in the statistics… but suicides are. No fair."
        "You know as well as I do that statistics mean nothing. Zero. Either side can use the same damned statistics to support whatever position they favor, because it's all selective vision.''
        "Okay, then look at it this way: Most normal citizens have never actually had the experience of feeling like prey. Of being helpless, and having a predator grinning at them."
        He is accessing a thorny memory, and he knows it. Lorelle had been date-raped in college by a charming footballer whose draft prospects went swirling because he felt he was owed sex. Of the two, Lorelle had recovered more admirably.
        "Low blow, Arthur." She makes a little hissing noise of disgust, because he is breaking the rule about making the conflict personal. "Even if I'd had a gun, I wouldn't have shot him. I don't think it's right to take another human life."
        "Guy wasn't a human in any sense of the word. Chances are, if you'd had a gun, you would never