I Want a Refund! Smith and Wesson Handgun Disappoints

by Patrick Kane
Clash Daily Contributor

(The following is satire.)

Dear Smith and or Wesson,

I recently purchased one of your M&P 40 Semi-automatic Assault Handguns (link below), and DEMAND a refund. Growing up, my family never owned a gun, and I was steadfast in preserving the tradition until extraordinary circumstances forced me to break it. I have come to know the Smith and Wesson name throughout the years as one of the World’s preeminent gun manufactures. So, when making my first gun purchase, I found myself immediately gravitating towards your products because they were the best/only brand name I knew. I purchased the gun in January of 2013 from a gun shop in Denver, and I could not imagine a way in which I could have made a bigger waste of my hard earned 700 dollars. While I do not know much about guns, I know enough to recognize a faulty product when I see it.   

I don’t want to get into much detail, but to put it simply, my neighbor is a menace. He is a nightmare turned flesh, turned home owner, and he has terrorized me and my neighbors from the moment he and his family moved in. Until their sordid advent our neighborhood was a respectable place, no one ever rocked the boat and everyone was content to live in a quiet, and thus respectable, manner. The man has NO respect for our neighborhood’s revered HOA regulations. He would let his grass grow past the mandated height threshold and did not water his lawn the mandated 4.6 weekly times. He would stick non-approved yard signs in his lawn without any regard to how the rest of the community felt about them. His savage children would play in the streets without elbow pads nor goggles, and his dog was allowed to roam the unkept wilderness of his front yard un-leashed in front of his non-beige coloured house. I will end here, however I could fill up a dissertation’s page quota with his offenses (and have done so on my blog if it is needed for reference). 

My many attempts to reason with this anarchist proved bootless, as time after time I found our HOA sanctions against him crumpled and stained in his garbage cans. His blatant disregard for authority and order put the entire neighborhood in distress. Harrowing thoughts of the savagery happening in the walls next to mine cost me countless hours sleep, unfathomable mental anguish, and a sickly variety of other assorted infirmity. I knew if order was to be restored to my neighborhood, I would need more than pink slips and phone calls. I purchased your M&P 40 Semiautomatic Assault Handgun, praying it would end the nightmare. 

I brought the gun home and gingerly set it on my kitchen table with a box of ammunition. Refreshed and relaxed, I went to sleep, anxious to see what the morning would bring. I woke up in the morning with a calm that I had not felt since my neighbor had moved in. I rushed down the stairs like a child at Christmas, gnashing my teeth joyously at what wonders awaited me downstairs.

However, like a child at Christmas, I quickly realized my wishes had not been granted. There on the table was my gun, exactly where I had left it.  Distraught, I looked outside to see my neighbor, cheerfully playing with his children in the yard. Not only had the gun failed to kill my neighbor, but it did not seem to have moved an inch since I set it on the table. It had the entire night to itself, I figured it had to have done something in that time.  

Intent to find answers, I inspected the gun’s packaging, and after peering through the first few pages, felt a wave of relief wash over me. I realized I had only bought a semi-automatic assault handgun, not an automatic one. I would have to manually load it with ammunition if I wanted it to kill my neighbor, this model could not do that on it’s own. So I loaded the gun, pointed the gun west towards my neighbor’s house, and even whispered, “Please kill my neighbor” into it’s cold metal trigger to facilitate it’s sordid task as much as I could while still keeping my hands clean. I set off to work assured and confident that my neighbor’s anarchic rein over the neighborhood would soon end.