Dialogue: Shooting from the lip on life and the right to die

By KATE BELGRAVE

I'd like to begin today's column about euthanasia by letting you know that I spent part of the weekend touching up my shooting skills.

The interest in shooting a big gun and in getting euthanasia off the ground were not related. It was just that this fabulous outing with firearms reminded me of something.

It reminded me of a point that we Westerners tend to forget when we're bleating on about life being so precious, and about keeping old or sick persons alive past a point that anyone finds strictly interesting, and about fertilising 50-year-old women and about saving all spectacularly premature babies, even those that are hardly past zygote class and yap, yap, yap ...

Basically, handling a gun reminded me how wonderfully cheap human life is.

You don't necessarily have to shoot anyone for real to get a feel for this. You just need to hold a gun for a while, shoot off a couple of rounds, generally embrace a weapon that was designed at a time when life was considered a privilege, not a right.

There is something fantastically honest about such a weapon. You don't use it to blow anyone's head off any more, of course, but that isn't the point.

The point is that a gun speaks of a time when the average punter was slightly less inclined towards chit-chat, slightly less inclined to believe that the world would not continue if he or whomever he was executing ceased to exist.

In its own bent, lovable way, a gun speaks of a real grip on the true priorities - of, if you will, the human ego working out somewhere along the line that it was probably important to design a weapon that would keep itself in check.

It's all beautifully simple. This is the thing. A gun only ever has one thing on its mind. When you heft a loaded one aloft down at the range, you begin to understand this.

Even the little guns aren't in it to make friends. Everything about the pistolette I was discharging suggested an eagerness to get to the point.

The he-shooters out on the rifle-range tend to laugh the handgun crowd off. I just smile like a lady when this happens and think of Clint Eastwood staggering round in a barbed-wire tourniquet saying "Yeah, punk," and "Nah, forget more horses, when I'm done we'll have us two horses too many," and "Make my day."

Yep, rifles are for people who can't bring themselves to see the whites of the other guy's eyes.

Anyway, the gun was made to kill and ... that's it. Even down on the range - where you're safe, sound and principled - this truth is never far from your mind.

A handgun is heavy, portentous. You have to make a deliberate effort to lift it and, probably more importantly, control it.

The bullets also seem to understand the point of the exercise. They lie there in your hand - fat, ugly, warm, pointy-nosed, kind of sticky, and with a genius for staying trained on your target, even when you drop them.

The action of pulling the trigger reinforces any point about guns that you might have missed thus far.

The kick is so brutal that you're lying on your back before you know it, watching that bullet kick for Pluto. The purest power.

Simple pleasures and simple philosophies. You have no idea how attractive I find such things these days. I am particularly fond of anyone - or any activity - that suggests human life is not quite as important as some (read doctors and Christians) so desperately want to think it is.

I mean, let's face it, one well-placed, medium-sized asteroid would dislodge us from the universe forever.

We are so very mortal, and it seems to me that anyone who objects to legalising euthanasia (read doctors and Christians) is a little too keen to pretend that death isn't a large part of life.

I know what I'm talking about, too, for once.

My own sister died a disgusting and spectacularly drawn-out death from cancer but, alas, no amount of railing delayed the inevitable. Human life is cheap. So - why not play the game?