This Has Been Bugging Me

Okay, bear with me on this. About seven years ago, while I was in Casper, Wyoming (which is, incidentally, named after a Lieutenant "Caspar" Collins, but got misspelled by some railroad clerk), a letter to the editor appeared in the Casper Star-Tribune. To my lasting shame, I did not save it, but it went pretty much like this:

Dear Editor: Several nights last week, there was an unmarked black helicopter over Casper, shining a spotlight onto the houses of people who own unregistered guns. When is the government going to stop its harassment?

Okay, so this letter raised a number of questions, and I've had them all bottled up in me for some time. And here we go.

Question One: If there's a black helicopter at night, and it's shining a spotlight down at you, how can you tell it's unmarked? It seems like it would be hard to make out fine detail like that.

Question Two: Let's say you're standing outside at night, and you see an unmarked black helicopter shining spotlights at various houses. Wouldn't you have to take careful notes before you knew which set of houses were being targeted? What if it's "houses with more than two dogs" or something?

Question Three: If the government is shining spotlights on the houses of people with unlicensed guns, doesn't that imply that they already know who hasn't licensed their guns? So why do they want guns to be licensed if they already have a list?

Question Four: Come to think of it, we're talking about Wyoming. Doesn't everyone have unlicensed guns? We're talking about a state that has a cowboy on the license plates. They like their right to bear arms up there, that's all I'm saying.

Question Five: And for that matter, if you're the sort of person who believes the government is sending out unmarked black helicopters to harass you, why do you think that the local newspaper is going to help you out? What kind of paranoid conspiracy theorist are you? How come the mass media isn't in league with the space aliens living in the hollow earth?

Question Six: How come the Star-Tribune printed this thing? I didn't read too many of the letters-to-the-editor pages while I was there (and for the life of me, I can't imagine why not), so I don't know if there was a running discussion about the unmarked black helicopters. But it seems like running letters like this is just asking for trouble. Even if the "trouble" in question takes the form of smart-mouths like me making fun of your newspaper seven years later.

By the way, while I'm at it, you can't find a better headline than "Artist coats Wyoming house with cheese as bemused locals watch.