Once upon a time there were two brothers. We'll call them Cain and Able, not because they are inherently good or bad, but just because we need a couple of names for this story, and everyone's heard of the brothers named Able and Cain, right? So we'll call them Cain and Able. Anyway, they have a pretty big farm and are doing well, well, as well as farmers ever do. There is a pond by their farm and on the other side of the pond is a small village. A little old woman lives in the village and the brothers are kind of partial to her. I mean every time they go to visit she serves them tea and cookies (except she calls them biscuits, there's just no accounting for people's quirks).
One day Queenie, for that's what the boys call her, sends the boys a message saying that some punk kids are throwing rocks at her house and would they mind very much speaking to them. Well, the boys are a trifle irritated at this. Who do these kids think they are? Throwing rocks at people's houses. The nerve of them! The boys decide that Cain should go over to the village and talk to these kids, so he picks up his shotgun and heads on over. I mean, you never know what kind of trouble you're going to run into.
Once he gets over there he finds the situation is a little more serious than Queenie let on. Seems that we don't just have a group of rowdy kids, we've got a well organized gang of thugs, and they aren't just throwing a few rocks, they are basically terrorizing the whole village. Cain realizes this might be more than he can handle by himself, so he calls up mean old Uncle Joe, who has a big farm on the other side of the village. He doesn't really get along with Joe, but Joe agrees that something needs to be done about these hooligans, so the two of them load up their shotguns and go to town. In short order the thugs are vanquished and peace returns to the village, more or less.
Word of Cain's success spreads far and wide and now whenever anybody has any trouble with their local hooligans, they call on the brothers, and Cain, being an agreeable fellow, picks up his shotgun and goes to take a look at the problem.
Problem is that now the problem isn't a well organized gang of thugs, or even a bunch of hooligans. It's more like an infestation of cockroaches, and everyone who has ever lived in the Southern United States knows cockroaches are just a fact of life. And in any case, a shotgun is not the weapon of choice for dealing with them. Too much collateral damage.
But Cain has become attached to his shotgun. It worked well in cleaning out the thugs from the village, it ought to work well for exterminating any kind of vermin, so he goes to visit the people who have problems and he plies his shotgun with a free hand and everyone thinks this is just a great thing. Well, most everyone. Like I said, there is lot of collateral damage when you are hunting cockroaches with a shotgun. There's a few pets get knocked off, and few kids get hit by some stray pellets, nothing serious mind you, but it gets some people's hackles up, and they start playing tricks on Cain, like tying his bootlaces together so he falls on his face going down the stairs. Little things like that.
A shotgun is the wrong weapon to use when trying to eradicate vermin like cockroaches.
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