RUBBER BANDS ARE JUST OUTRIGHT EVIL

Oh the evils of rubber bands, you certainly must know of at least some of them. I mean, when you were a kid way back around the mischievous age of 9 - 12 you almost certainly shot rubber bands off of your thumb or forefinger (held cocked like a pistol) at other kids. Maybe even sometimes you were just so downright evil with them to have shot them at the mailman from behind cover of a bush, or at a passerby from out of your window while you hid in the safety of the room, or at your family dog or cat and had everyone wondering why Fido or kitty just jumped up on mom's lap like that, or maybe you even had the steel nerves of a true desperado and you shot at your teacher while she was writing out a homework assignment on the blackboard.

That was kid stuff though, rubber bands were and are a lot more evil than shooting em off of your fingers. Don't know what I mean - oh come now sure you do and you know because you probably did it but just don't want to admit it. The next step up was the rubber band launched off of the ruler trick. It was a pretty simple step up from shooting them off your finger, but with a ruler you got a lot more velocity and there fore a lot more ouch on the receiving end. Another things about shooting them off of rulers was the fact that you could put about at least a dozen of em stretched onto a ruler, and fire em off rapidly with just repeated flicks of your thumb. Sort of a rubber band machine gun. I loved shooting em that way, really got the class bully good one day Of course I never did any of that just saw the bullies doing it and felt their sting. Later on they actually came out with some wooden guns that could hold a whole lot of rubber bands and fire em in rapid succession, but sadly I was grown up by then and Peter Pan had thrown me out of the club.

Those things pale though when you consider other atrocities that are caused by the evil rubber band. I was up on my uncle's farm one day several years ago and the talk got to farm animals of which he had several such as goats, sheep, and a darned big porker. He got to talking about different things and brought up a subject he had breached to me a few times over the years as far back as when I was a young teen. That subject was rubber bands, and although he did not call them evil it was obvious to a smart fella like me that yes indeed that is just what they were - evil as sin. I mean here was my uncle telling me about all the uses of them that he knew about throughout the years and one of em was to emasculate farm animals. Yep, you heard me right, to cut of the nuts of a young male pig or bull or sheep or whatever. I told him he was crazy but he insisted that in days of old a farmer who wanted a more docile animal - a steer so to speak - would wrap a rubber band around the testicles of a young bull or other farm animal and sooner of later they would die off, shrivel up and fall off likes nuts falling out of a oak tree. I again reminded him he was crazy but he stuck to his guns.

My uncle was a learned man (Cornell) and he also told me of another ruse, this one on humans. No not to make them sing alto, I did say another use! He swore to me that in the days when doctors were fewer and further between, and cars were less available, all within his lifetime, that there had been a sure fire cure, a self cure mind you (otherwise one done by only the most intimate of friends and they really would have had to have liked you a lot) for hemorrhoids. Yep, just the same as the farm animal nuts. Wrap the rubber band tightly as you can around the base of a roid, and sooner of later that dies off and falls off too. I cannot imagine the scar it must leave. Let me correct that last, oh yes I can but without giving out too much information allow me to say not because of having ever done that with a rubber band. Ouch - that is evil indeed I don't care if the result is a blessed event, the means is just too nasty.

For years I just thought my uncle a harmless kook when it came to these things; in other words I just did not believe him. Then one day I found a farm supply catalogue. It had a whole slew of bands and banding devices for castrating animals advertised on one page. There were rubber bands of various sizes, all thick as you could imagine, and all requiring a stretching device to open em wide enough to get em over the obstacles and into place. Sort of a pair of pliers that worked in reverse. Man those rubber bands are evil indeed. Look at all the nasty things that people thought up because of them, and all the pain they inflicted because of them.

Of course it wasn't always the rubber band itself that caused the pain. Sometimes just like guns it was not the object that we wish to call evil or ban that causes the actual harm but rather the projectile they fire that does the evil deed itself. So like a gun needing bullets, the rubber band was left needing something to fire. Leave it to the mind of a kid to come up with making a rubber band into an object to shoot projectiles. Yep - I am talking about that evil little shiny booger the paper clip! I don't know what cesspool of a mind thought up that one, but my bet is that the kid who thought of it first was a Catholic School kid being taught by nuns and lectured to by priests. Just something about them that brings out the worst in a kid, I know from experience. Once rubber bands were given paper clips as ammo, well it should have stood to reason that they should have been banned, and paper clips should have been taxed at the rate of 500% per clip, if not by the individual states then by the combined legislative powers of the House of representatives and the Senate with signature of the President added to the bill. I mean, just how much more evil did they have to prove themselves before such legislation was enacted. For some reason that legislation never came about, not even after rubber bands were used to make crude bow strings for the uuber evil homemade bow and arrow sets, or the extremely evil homemade crossbows both using things like pointed straws or small sticks as arrow projectiles.

You may be wondering if, after all these years, rubber bands have not been banned then why make a stink about them now! I'll tell you why - because they just keep on proving themselves to be absolutely evil that is why. I mean just take a look at what kids some people are doing with them now in order to have fun with them and guns. Can you imagine that - having fun with rubber bands and guns! Outrageous I tell you. Just click on the link while I go look to see if I have any evil rubber bands like those in the video:

http://shock.military.com/Shock/videos.do?displayContent=181438&page=1

If for some reason in the future that link goes down, then go to You Tube and search for: bump fire rubber band.

So now that you took some time to watch the video, while I took the time to search for rubber bands all to no avail, what do you think? I'll tell you what I think. I think I have spent enough time writing about this, and enough time looking for rubber bands I do not have; and I have come to the conclusion that I have two choices. I am going to either have to handcuff myself to something in my house and throw the key across the room, or I am going to give into temptation and go out to my local office supply store to buy myself a big box of thick rubber bands, just like the ones in that video, then grab my son's AK and some ammo and head to the range. Nope I am not waiting for him to get home from wherever he is, no sir - the temptation to go out and do evil have some fun with rubber bands and a rifle is just too much. If I do that though, I can just envision 3,000 or so rounds of 7.62x39 ammo we had in the ammo locker winding up as just that - ammo we HAD in the ammo locker! If I shoot it all up I'd have to replace all that ammo at the premium prices they are currently asking and that would take a bite, a huge one at that, out of the Christmas present funds I have on hand.

Decisions - decisions all whilst being tempted by Siren's Song of the rubber band! I can hear them twanging now between the rat-tat-tats of the AK. You see, I told you they were evil those nasty rubber bands! They are the Saturday Night specials of the office supply world, cheap yet deadly. I wonder how it is that wise and prudent overbearing pompous politicians, who know better than the rest of us, like Senators: Chuck Schumer, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Frank Lautenberg, Diane Feinstein, or Representatives: Carolyn McCarthy, Nancy Pelosi, John Conyers, Anthony Weiner, Sheila Jackson or their like have not seen the same evils of the rubber band and have not yet had them banned. Oh the deep dark ruthless evil inherent in the rubber band, there just ought to be a law against em.

All the best,
Glenn B

Where in Hades are those darned handcuffs when I need em??????????