January 30, 2010

• Gun People

  This morning as I listened to This American Life‘s “Guns” episode, I was impelled to reflect that some people are gun people and others aren’t.  I flashed on a series of vignettes from my life.  The flashes didn’t come to me in the same chronological order in which they are arranged here.  This arrangement is the only way I can hope to recall many of them.

  My parents didn’t own guns.  My father was a fisherman, not a hunter.  I don’t recall any strong feelings expressed either pro- or anti-gun.  In the ’40s and ’50s, “thugs and zoot-suiters,” the gangstas of the day, wielded chains and knives more often than guns.  Eliot Ness had already taken down the Tommy-gun mobsters.  Home invasions were unknown.  It was a different society.

  

  I had toy guns when I was a kid.  My aim was so good that it’s hard, in this image, to see that I had a gun in my hand – it’s pointed right at the lens.  That was a cap pistol, a revolver that could be loaded with a roll of fifty explosive caps.    It smoked and went “pop” like a firecracker when I pulled the trigger.  Even now, the smell of fireworks triggers recall of my cap gun.  I never gained any skill with the lariat, and turned my rope into a whip, like the one wielded by my hero, Lash Larue.

  The first time I ever handled a real gun, I was nineteen and the gun was older than I was.  It was an old British Bulldog revolver that the love of my life had gotten cheap somewhere.  He was a gun person, with gunslinger propensities.  He had worked in Old West re-enactments at Cowtown in Wichita, KS, and had won at least one regional quick draw competition.

  He thought I should learn to shoot, so he took the Bulldog and me out to a rock quarry scattered with rusty old junk cars and had me shoot at one of them.  After the first few shots, he declared me a “natural,” and decided there was no use wasting more ammo teaching me to do something I could already do.

  Years passed, he dumped me and I took up with other men, eventually ending up with an outlaw biker and another borrowed gun.  That came about during a minor gang war in Vallejo, CA.  I was present during a skirmish in that war, and my car, a recognizable red MGB convertible, had been parked nearby.  After my car took a bullet through the windshield while I was driving it, the guys thought I should start carrying some protection, so somebody loaned me a little .25 automatic with sweet feminine pearl handles.  Nobody thought to give me a rig for carrying it, few of my clothes had pockets, so I kept it in my purse.  Fortunately, I never had need to go digging through the debris in there to get it out, and after a while the “war” was settled and I gave it back.

  Until I came to Alaska, I was mostly surrounded by non-gun people with only a few encounters with gun people.  That situation is reversed here.  Especially right here, far out of town, gun people have the rest outnumbered.  Just up the street from me is a guy with survivalist leanings and an arsenal that includes some impressive automatic weapons.  I suspect, based on the size of the arsenal, that he’s planning, should the shit ever hit the fan, to arm the whole neighborhood.  That suits me fine, because my own arsenal is conspicuously lacking in full auto.

  My arsenal is described, and the hows and whys of its acquisition are explained, elsewhere, if you’re curious.  It’s a pretty good story, really.

  

  • 5:51 pm
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