A rough day in Milwaukee

Your boss yells at you. At lunch, the waitress spills coffee on you. You head home in the heat, and the freeway traffic slows from a crawl to a stop. You finally reach the house. Your wife nags you, your teenager rolls his eyes when you ask him to turn down his so-called music. You escape to the backyard to mow the lawn that you've put off mowing for two weeks.

You fill the tank, you choke the engine, you yank the cord. You yank it again. And again. You flood the engine. You starve the engine. You do everything you can think of. The mower won't start. No way. What's a guy to do?

A gentleman in Milwaukee did what most of us would like to do. He pulled out his sawed off shotgun and blew the mechanical guts out of his @&%#$ lawnmower. As he told the police, "I can do that, it's my lawn mower and my yard so I can shoot it if I want."

The cops disagreed.

Joe Sixpack faces a maximum fine of $11,000, and 6 1/4 years in prison. Possession of a sawed off shotgun, even in your own yard, is a felony it seems. Also frowned on is disorderly conduct while armed.

I'm hoping to hear the howls of righteous anger from the NRA. Where now is our Second Amendment right to bear arms? Surely if a guy can carry concealed weapons in national parks, as the NRA now argues, he can possess an unconcealed shotgun on his own property? His own land? His own private domain?? His sacred castle, where the common law declares him to be the King?

And what kind of country are we now, if a man can't shoot his own lawnmower when it refuses to mow? You're telling me that giving an inanimate object a little well-deserved discipline is "disorderly conduct"? What next? A man can't put down his own miserable hound when it won't hunt? He can't beat some common sense into his own ornery kids? He can't "explain" to his wife, in terms she'll understand, that she'd best listen up good, because he's only going to say it once? "Wives, be subject to your husbands," that's what the Good Book says. It does, read it. It surely does.

Anytime I've got to choose between my God-given Second Amendment rights, rights our founding fathers died for, and the right of a lawnmower to sit there, silent and unmolested, after being asked politely several times to do the one single thing it was bought for -- well, I'll take the U.S. Constitution, thank you very much.

When our gun rights are mowed down, only mowers will have guns. You think about that, ok? Ok. 'Nuff said.