I keep hearing about issues like court cases, or like the
evidence of WMDs in Iraq, as using the metaphor of the “smoking gun”, as in:
failing to find the “smoking gun”, etc. But what if this suspected crime has
been perpetrated by another type of metaphor; like, say, just for the sake of
argument, a bloody knife? Or poison? Or a hired assassin who strangles people?
Why, then naturally they never find the evidence they’re looking for, because
they’re looking for the wrong murder weapon metaphor! Of course you’re not
going to find a smoking gun when a crime was committed using a poisoned dagger! So maybe
what they really need to do is have metaphorensics (that’s metaphor forensics:
a relatively new science) investigators determine what kind of metaphor applies
here: guns, knives, poison, vehicular homicide, strangulation, suffocation with
pillows, etc.; and then, once they know what they’re looking for, at least
metaphorically, the regular investigators/lawyers/police might have a better
chance of uncovering the truth! But you’ll never find the knife if you’re
looking for a gun, and you’ll never even find the murder weapon gun when it’s
not smoking if you insist upon finding a gun which is actively smoking. (Why don’t the investigators just
plant a lit cigarette in a gun and say that’s the one? That would save so much
time!) Besides, smoking is becoming banned in a lot of places anyway, and guns
are probably not exempted* (despite being threatening and all), so looking for
a smoking gun is getting harder and harder all the time, and maybe
investigators need to start thinking of alternate possibilities from now on. In
any case, that’s what I’d do. Because after all, who knows how many crimes go
unsolved simply because they weren’t even perpetrated with a gun to begin with,
what with everyone always looking for smoking guns and all. Heck, if I were a
criminal, I’d avoid guns completely because of this, like they do in England!
(I heard that’s why they don’t use guns: because it confuses investigators! Or else,
maybe they banned guns in England to make it more challenging to solve crimes there.) That way, I’d be a lot less likely ever to get caught!
* You know, it’s possible that all these smoking guns kill
so many people because they’re getting tired of being told they’re not allowed
to smoke anymore. And then they almost always get caught afterwards because
they’re smoking, which makes them so much easier to find, or “sniff out”. But
maybe they don’t care, and they feel like “freedom fighters”, fighting for the
rights of smokers; and because they’re guns, they don’t realize that it’s not
appropriate to kill people over such things as smoking. Or, maybe to them, it
is. (They should just switch to “smokeless powder”, and then they might not get
nagged about it anymore, anyway. Then, they might not even get caught when they
commit other crimes, either.)
