| Elmer Fudd Would Blush |
21 July 2003
|
Bambi Hunts Bring Nevada to New Low
It seems that roulette and Wayne Newton aren't enough for some high rollers in Las Vegas. "Bambi
Hunts" have hit the wire services, and feminists are upset. For $10,000, Real Men Outdoor Productions
Inc. will allow a customer (presumably male) to track and shoot at a woman with a paintball gun. She is
clad only in running shoes, and if she wishes, helmets and goggles for protection -- earning $1,000 for her trouble. One would have thought that "Real Men" would engage in gladiatorial combat to the death, but apparently standards have fallen since His Eminence Cardinal Richelieu outlawed dueling.
There are some who suspect that the entire thing is a hoax to get publicity for a video the company has
made that does feature nude women being "hunted" by paintball toting good ol' boys. It is a parody on
hunting videos that feature the creation of venison by people with guns. The company does have a Las Vegas business license to sell this.
Others, from the Nevada Coalition Against Sexual Violence to Brass Eagle Inc. (makers of paintball guns),
are taking the issue as seriously as one might expect and have kicked their media relations people into
overdrive. And the US Bureau of Land Management is involved since 90% of Nevada is not owned by
Nevadans but by the bureaucracy on the Potomac. The BLM would require a permit for such use of
federal land, and without such permit, the organizers and participants would be subject to a fine according
to the people who own the state.
Clearly, there is no shortage of plebian taste in Nevada (much of it imported from the other 49 states and
abroad), but this leaves no one untarnished. If the thing is real, then the customers are swine, the women
are beneath description, and the organizers parodies of human beings. And if it is not real, then the
country has been duped in a way not seen since Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast back in
the 1930s.