Everybody’s still talking about Gov. Kristi Noem shooting down that dog but it wasn’t the first time an animal fell victim to an owner’s gunfire. As Mammy (Hattie McDaniel) explained in Gone With the Wind, when Bonny fell and broke her neck, “Mr. Rhett grabbed his gun and run out and shoot that poor pony. And for a minute, I think he gonna shoot himself.” Movies also abound with scenes of people shooting people. “I must have killed more people than Cecil B. De Mille,” recalled the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder) in Blazing Saddles. The guns are also blazing in popular song.
After a late-night gambling session, as Lloyd Price sang it, Stagger Lee went home, got his forty-four, and shot Billy. I mean, he “shot that poor boy so bad.” Johnny Cash landed in Folsom Prison because “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.” And as Jimi Hendrix put it, when Joe found his old lady messing around town, “I gave her the gun. I SHOT HER.” On the other hand, in a case no song or screenwriter could invent, a lady pulls the trigger on two men.
In 1985 in Placerville, California, Colleen Batten shot dead Jim Batten, her second husband. In 2013, Colleen Harris shot dead her third husband, Bob Harris. She shot them both in the same house, in the same bedroom, both times with a shotgun. The same lawyer represented Colleen in both trials, which did not turn out the same. When not tracking dog-killer Kristi Noem, or monitoring the trials of Donald Trump, you can read about it in Shotgun Weddings, and check out this video.
