my cousin has a house in the woods in the austin hill country, on our family's land. by a combination of factor the "critter factor" of the land has increased - this includes rattlesnakes. last week she killed a rattlesnake that was curled up outside her house. it was five feet long, she's not much over five feet tall. she killed it by throughing the big, flat rocks we have on the property. it took five of them to kill it. somewhere around the 3rd she started thinking "i need a fucking gun around here". i know it's surprising to hear of a texan who doesn't have a gun, but it happens. so we're trying to find her a snake gun. i never knew this, but it turns out there such a thing as "snake shot", which is similar to bird shot and rat shot: small gauge shot that fires a field of pellets; dick cheney's preffered weapon. you can also buy a pistol that will fire a rat shot shell. while i was looking around the web for such a pistol, i started seeing links to j. clifford baxter, who was a former enron exec who had killed himself after the scandal broke. one of the things that made his death suspicious was that the .38 he used to kill himself was loaded with rat shot. first of all - no matter how desperate you were, would rat shot really be your choice? and second - it turns out that rat shot is perfect for a murder, since there's no way to trace it back the barrell of the gun that fired it like you can do with a solid bullet. lesson number 1: for your murderous activities, use rat or snake shot. this morning i was reading a washington post article about how the law tends to easier on accidental gun deaths than they do with deaths buy automobile. it's something called "buck fever" - when a hunter is so hyped-up about the hunt that that they make mistakes, like mistaking a 78 year old lawyer for a quail. but it's no big deal; these things happen, it's not the hunter's fault. like the maine hunter who shot and killed a housewife whom - even though he was 188 feet away and had a power scope on his gun - he mistook for a deer. he got off - the woman was wearing white mittens at the time, anybody would mistake that for a deer tail. lesson two: tell them you were "hunting". and never never use a car as a murder weapon. aside from the stiffer penalties for car deaths, it's just not practical. take the guy in north carolina who tried to kill people with his jeep to avenge the deaths of muslims around the world: no deaths and 9 minor injuries. i've said it before and i'll say it again: it's easier to dodge a car than it is a bullet. Also, cars totally fail as a concealed weapon and don't even bother to try to use it indoors. there's a reason you've never heard the phrase "colonel mustard, in the library, with a toyota."