MASKS: Armed and safe

Guns and masks are tools. I enjoy shooting and would defend my family. I’ve also used N95 type masks for a job in a feed plant in college, more recently working around wildfires.

Masks and guns are like insurance for low probability risks that have high cost. Since you can be infected and pass it on without knowing it, I don’t want to take the slightest unnecessary chance of giving a kid or honored elder something that could make them sick.

Just as people carry guns not just for self-protection, but to protect those around them, I wear a mask mainly to protect people around me from my snot cloud.

Last week my wife and I danced at a bar in Jackson Hole, wearing our masks. I’m an overweight man in his 70s, with imperfect lung function. If I can tango in the air at 6,000 feet while wearing a mask, then it’s just not that hard.

Whether you call it COVID or something else, our local hospital is overflowing. Deaths are drastically up from last year. Whatever it is, something bad is going around. I’d probably not get the disease, and might be ornery enough to get over it, but I’m careful about things.

I’m keeping my old gun and carrying a concealed vaccination card with an open-carry mask. That way I don’t breathe your cooties or give mine to you. I’m sure you don’t want my cooties.

“Masks don’t kill people. Germs do.”

MIKE BULLARD

Coeur d’Alene