Dig up duels for safety, education

Let’s bring back dueling.

Face it: Pretty soon everyone’s going to have a gun anyway, what with “campus carry” and all, and guys with guns know matters of honor must be settled.

So the 20-somethings will be shooting each other anyway, out there on the campus quad or grove or courtyard, concourse, catwalk, riverpark, whatever, and of course the problem with that is, someone else could get hurt.

You may find this hard to believe, but despite what it says in the Second Amendment, most of these minutemen aren’t well regulated. They’ll shoot at each other anywhere — crowded bar, public street, shopping mall, whatever.

That’s just dangerous, so it would be way safer were we to institute some rules, and pick a proper venue for resolving personal affronts.

This could be a spectator sport, and educational, too, as so much of our story is penned in blood drawn by bullets and blades. Take Alexander Hamilton, for example: He got killed in a duel, and now he’s got a Grammy-winning musical.

In a secure, gated venue where authorities could set up a checkpoint to make sure everyone has a gun in case the combatants forgot theirs, you not only could charge admission, but offer concessions, too: killer red velvet cupcakes, bloody barbecue, gut sausage, ketchup.

Tankards of ale would be available as usual.

To illustrate the rich role dueling plays in our history, participants on the field could dress in period costume, and perhaps some period music could be played, such as “Saturday Night Special,” “Janie’s Got a Gun,” or “Gimme Back My Bullets.”

Each participant would be due an honorable introduction, including his lineage, his exploits, his standing in the community, his criminal history, and his grievance.

An officiate thereafter would present the dueling pistols, so that each might check the action by firing a test shot into a decorative Artbeat sandbag that spills its contents in an shimmering, multicolored spiral.

Each aggrieved party then would get only one bullet. If one kills the other, then the Jumbotron plays a montage of the loser’s life, perhaps set to whatever theme song he picked (“Eye of the Tiger,” “We Are the Champions,” “I Will Survive,” etc.).

How the loser falls dead would be crucial to his overall performance. Clutch at the wound and stagger and offer some last words, and you may win favor among the public, as a witness later might say, “George can’t shoot, but he sure died good.”

A rare advantage to this would be its use in politics, where we hear civility has disappeared. If so, then we’re back to our early history, when we had none, and duels were an accepted mode of conflict resolution.

Political contests often came to duels back then, so imagine how quickly we’d have our presidential party nominees if we let them shoot each other over personal insults like they used to.

Had Columbus the only dueling ground in the United States, they would have to shoot it out here. Think of it as comparable to a debate that is live on TV, but not so long.

So look around and see if you can find some dueling ground. Here it used to be down by the river, but later the law forced guys to go across the river to what then was Indian territory.

Hey, if we built an Indian casino over there to host dueling, we could bet on it.

This story was originally published April 10, 2016 at 11:16 PM with the headline "Dig up duels for safety, education."