August 8, 2019
My father gave me a gun for my fourteenth birthday. I asked; he chose.
Surprise! It was a twenty gauge pump action shotgun. I still have it, decades later. It still works like new. Holds one in the chamber and two more in the magazine.
There is a wooden dowel in the magazine, commonly called a plug. It’s still there. Removal is simple and would raise capacity to five rounds. The reason for the plug is that state game laws, at least at the time, forbade going into the field with more than three rounds in the gun. I recently looked online to see if this was still the case and could not find any information on the subject. Maybe there is some sensitivity that state laws afford more protection to wildlife than to women and children at Walmart.
I would have liked to own a machine gun; but it was against the law. And I accepted the reasoning. Law enforcement could make a cogent argument against the weapons, pointing back to the days of Pretty Boy Floyd and Machine Gun Kelly with their Thompson sub machine guns (“Hand me that choppa!” Oh Brother…). And anyway, life on the farm wasn’t war. Still, I thought TV’s Sergeant Saunders was cool. He had a Thompson and every week saved a little bit of the world (which shall forever be Combat) from the Jerries who were lurking in every barn and farmhouse in France. We had a barn and farmhouse. I was afraid. I was a child.
I subscribed to Guns and Ammo and looked forward to the arrival of each new edition. I don’t recall there being much about military weapons, except occasionally by way of historical retrospective. My dad got Field and Stream. It had advertisements and reviews for, mainly, rifles and shotguns, alongside a great deal of fishing and camping gear, tales of survival in the wild, the one that got away, the bear that almost got the hunter, or maybe got the companion, and such. Dad was mainly interested in the fishing parts. Although he had a double barrel twelve gauge, and could use it, he had given up hunting because all the gun gave him was dead birds, which he didn’t actually want. Hunting was mostly the result of peer pressure from clients to remind each other that each was a real man. He was, so he gave up hunting because it didn’t suit him. Mom was happy with that decision, since it fell to her to pluck and gut the birds. What a stench! (“The steam will rise from my guts and I will sing no more.”- Jack White, Seven Nation Army). Once, by way of demonstrating how miserable this made her, she showed me how the little finger was used to push pheasant poop out the anal sphincter from inside the carcass. I became a vegetarian but remained a gun owner.
My wife briefly joined the NRA. She was in it for the free swag – especially the NRA caps. These are useful when you have to tell a carload of armed strangers that, no, they are not welcome to discharge firearms on your property under the guise of hunting, even if they promise to abstain from sipping from the flask while doing so. The cap makes them figure you already have the hunting base covered and it might be risky to intrude, given your evident love of guns. If you just tell them you’re a vegetarian and prefer your friendly local wildlife alive, no respect and occasional poaching. This can escalate to the threat level of potential armed conflict. So we kept the cap, but didn’t renew.
With NRA membership comes American Rifleman. Compared to Guns and Ammo and Field and Stream of yesteryear, the rag was a real eye-opener – containing as it did almost nothing but ads for para-military weapons. Assault rifles and handguns cover to cover. For the former, fifty and sixty round clips. For the latter, nine round clips for “concealed carry” and nineteen round clips for “home defense.”
Since I can hit what I’m pointing it at, I figure one roughly sixty-two caliber slug from the old pump action ought to be all that “home defense” should ever require at the distances encountered going room to room, up stairs, down stairs, in the hall. Looking for Colonel Mustard in the parlor. Concealed carry is not an option with a blunderbuss and not one that I would want under any circumstances. It reeks of premeditated murder rather than defense. Handguns are good when ordering the troops up and out of the trenches and are the most common choice of the suicidal, Kurt Cobain notwithstanding, as well as failed world dominators in their bunkers. Home defense? Most commonly used by family members against family members, including kids who couldn’t pick up, much less load, a long gun.
It seems to me, looking back at myself, that one of the central problems with assault rifles is their appearance. As with Sergeant Saunders’s Thompson, it’s hard to make an argument for them on legitimate hunting or personal defense grounds. But style matters; and if you grew up on Mortal Kombat, assault rifles have the look you want. This goes double if you’re a wannabe with the mind of a child, who would be rejected by the local police force or the military on grounds of lack of mental stability (or are, in fact, a child). If that’s you, and you’re still determined to save the world despite that badge or uniform for which you just can’t hope to qualify, a double barrel twelve gauge, even loaded with ball bearing equivalents, just isn’t gonna cut it in your mind. (Even though it would more than cut it in any reality most might imagine – I’m talking about the Real Reality here). Wouldn’t look right. Accessorize the AR-15 or AK-47 with the 60 round clip. Even though it will reduce ballistic performance, for good measure screw on a silencer. Looks great in profile. I take that back. Cuts down on flame spitting out the muzzle. Forget it. Retain only for photo ops online. Anyway, you want them to hear you, right? This is your swan song after all. With a silencer, you might hear actual cries of actual human anguish. Because real people don’t die in three dimensions the way actors do on screens. This could diminish the realization of your fantasy. Leave the silencer home. Rat-a-tat tat is the right soundtrack for this.
A study of the progression in gun advertising from early Guns and Ammo to the current American Rifleman would make a nice term paper (serving suggestion) and would also give the lie to the NRA’s preposterous assertion that American gun rights have somehow been eroding over time. The opposite is true. The government is not coming for your guns; the gun manufacturers are coming for your wallet. To this end, the NRA is currently advocating the inalienable right to a silencer to go with that concealed carry/home defense thingamabob they sold you on. They say it’s to protect your hearing – presumably while you’re out killing, since practice is almost always done wearing muffs, which are better. But more presumably so that one could better get away with one’s deed after preemptively defending oneself against whatever it was one was planning to defend oneself against after one decided to slip the Death Dealer 9 clip into the “carry gun” for “concealed carry” before leaving the home. And after making sure the “car gun” was ready. And that there were extra clips under the seat. And more in the glove compartment and some in the trunk. And after keeping as many DeathDealer 19 and 60 clips as could be afforded back home – for home defense in case the police showed up.
https://youtu.be/FqTAiUgOaqo
MOE
M.I.C.H. – Modernity, Intelligence, Complexity, Humanity
