Signs Of The Time Runner-Up

I’m not sure what it is, but I just had to give that ninja piece its own SOTT post. Perhaps it stems from the fact that some ancestor of mine was a Japanese pirate warlord who pillaged the Western Pacific some five hundred years ago (not too proud of that). Or maybe it’s because an uncle of mine from Canada got me hooked on martial arts films so much so that in the eighties I thought I wanted to be the next Joe Armstrong from the American Ninja series. Now that I think about it, flying around some Caribbean island on a crotch-rocket was all I really wanted to do.

Here’s another piece I recently came across that definitely qualifies as “Signs Of The Time” material. Therefore, I’ll designate it as a runner-up SOTT. While the gun rights movement has made tremendous strides in recent years, gun “control” efforts continue on unabated. An example of this is the attempt to eradicate the image of the gun in popular culture, like in professional sports. From Paul Lukas on the ESPN website last Friday:

You wouldn’t expect to see gun control happening in Texas, but that’s what will be taking place at a few Astros games this year.

Here’s the deal: The Astros are marking their 50th anniversary this season, so they’ll be wearing an assortment of throwback uniforms for Friday home games. That includes the uniform of the Houston Colt .45s, which was the team’s name for the first three years of the franchise’s existence.

But in a move that’s outraging uniform historians and firearms fans alike, the Astros have decided to make a significant tweak to the Colt .45s jersey design. They’re removing the smoking handgun.

Ugh. Whatever your thoughts about the Second Amendment, this is a design disaster. What’s the point of having a “C” formed by a whisp of gunsmoke when there’s no gun to produce the smoke?

(Editor’s note: Italics added for emphasis)

You can read the rest of the piece on the ESPN website here.