Ending the Year with a Bang

Maybe shoot off one last post for 2023? Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Grandson Quentin’s end-of-year visit is off, or rather postponed. He’s been spending the holidays with his parents in Las Vegas. They were going to put him on a Southwest flight to Tucson yesterday but mom and dad came down with Covid. Quentin shares the symptoms they’re experiencing, though so far he tests negative. Discretion being the better part of valor … and Donna and I being in the prime demographic for Covid … it seemed wiser to cancel the flight and try again another day. Oh well.

In preparation for his visit, I visited the gun store where Donna worked for many years. I’d planned to take Quentin to an indoor range to give our pistols a workout, but after shooting with Polly earlier this year was pretty much out of bullets. I have a 9mm automatic and a .357 revolver, and needed a couple of boxes of ammo for each. The first was easy to find, but not the second. I’m pretty sure some of the men standing around the store worked there but none of them seemed interested in helping, so I walked to the front to ask the cashier. Who just shrugged. Literally. I wound up asking another customer if he’d seen any boxes of .357 ammo and he helped me find some.

Now I’d told both the cashier and the customer that I was taking my grandson to an indoor range to shoot targets. Both men knew that people who own .357 revolvers normally use cheaper .38 special ammunition in them for target practice, saving the heavier and more powerful .357 magnum rounds for serious work like blowing home invaders’ heads off. But they chose not to tell me that, and to smirk together at my lack of knowledge instead. I know because when I went back to the cashier to pay for my ammo I overheard them at it.

Well, that fits. It fits with the online gun trolls who try to discredit anyone who advocates sensible gun regulation with nitpicky bullshit about not knowing the A in AR-15 stands for Armalite, or for calling a pistol a gun or whatever. It fits with the MAGA coal-rollin’ poseurs who slouch around Home Depot bestrapped with enough weaponry to equip a SWAT team. I don’t like gun guys. I don’t like gun culture. So why even own a gun, let alone two? I ask myself that all the time.

I wound up buying ammo from a smaller gun shop closer to where we live, where the clerk was happy to help me find what I needed and didn’t feel it necessary to look down on me for not being a firearms expert. At least not while I was standing right there, like the assholes at the other place!

My sisters and I stay in touch and share family news by text. The other day we somehow got to talking about famous people we have met. My sister Charleen, who’s active in Republican politics in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, sent this photo:

That’s Charlie in the middle. But who the hell are those other people? None of us had any inkling, so Charlie told us. It’s these guys:

That’s right, the Missouri couple who, in July 2020, felt so threatened by Black Lives Matter protesters marching through their St. Louis neighborhood that they stood their ground on their front lawn, shouting at the marchers and pointing guns at them. Heroes, no doubt, in Show Me State Republican and NRA circles. I love my sister. I really do. But I don’t know if the two of us could get through a Thanksgiving dinner without bloodshed.

I exaggerate, of course! I would dearly love to spend a Thanksgiving with Charlie and my other sisters. We’d just be careful what we talk about at the table, like every other family.

With that, I wish you all a happy new year!