Gun Does the Waltz Around the Room
In the end, blazes of glory, are nothing short of...glorious. Right?
“I know what you did.”
I sat on a brown naugahyde couch pressed up against beaver board paneling. The carpet at my feet was blue shag, to complete the picture.
The man that was speaking to me was shirtless, 6’5” tall and about 260 pounds. The looks he shot me as he paced back and forth were sly, conspiratorial. Paranoid.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. He had had one nervous breakdown. One he had told me about.
“You know what the fuck I’m talking about. Don’t deny it.”
I wasn’t about to. I had no idea what I had done. But the reality of it was, on any given day, in just about any moment of my life, I’ve been doing something that deserved whatever it seemed I was going to get.
…[A] gun I had sold him, he had resold and it had been used to murder someone.
He pulled out a gun. I smiled. In primates, those who study primates have said, smiling was almost always a sign of submission. Smiling with the teeth together. Smiling with the teeth apart and the lips curled back though…primate threat level 5. I did the latter.
“Ah, cool. Lemme see it!” I extended my hand and he waved the gun away from it. He paced, muttered, brandished and I repeated, “C’mon…Lemme see it. Where’d you get it?”
Eventually he broke… “It’s cool right!? Here!”…and he passed me the gun. It was the first handgun I had held, weighty and important, it made you feel both weighty and important. More so than a toaster. Or a hammer. Or even a knife.
Which is why as 2020 goes, COVID shutdown or not, nothing has managed to soften the hammer and coffin and so here in America we’ve continued expressing ourselves in weighty and important ways. At friends and neighbors, people with the temerity to go to supermarkets, nightclubs. Six year olds who spill their water. People who drive too slowly. People who have given you handjobs. All recipients of the finer points of our 2nd Amendment.
In time I came to have a Federal Firearms License, encouraged to get it by a survivalist friend of mine because “you never know.” This allowed me to have the only record, t-shirt, poster, video, jewelry, tattoo parlor and gun store in the world for a period of time. I had basic rules though, as laid out then by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF): I would not sell to known felons, mental patients or people who I knew to be selling to known felons and mental patients.
So I sold to investigative journalists who had been on the business end of poison pen threats. I sold to anthropologists. I sold to my grandmother, fer chrissakes. I also had to keep paperwork on sales for at least seven years. Unless any of the guns “came back.” Which was a nice way of saying were “used in the commissioning of a crime”.
In other words getting a call from the BATF was not about IF. It was about WHEN.
And when it came it came on account of the person I knew it would. The one who bought the same gun, six times in a row. The same one that resold Czech 9mms that wholesaled for $65 to people he had charged $600 for them. I had stopped selling to him. I had to stop selling to him. He was a liability and would later blame antidepressants for his risk tasking behaviors. He had to blame something.
…[T]he issue then becomes can we live with those who are being shot being shot…
As it turns out a gun I had sold him, he had resold and it had been used to murder someone. In Mexico. The BATF wanted his name and number. I called him. A heads up seemed sporting. He avoided my calls. Anyone calling him more than once was a probable cause for alarm and so he ducked me and I did what any responsible adult would have done: I gave the BATF what they asked for.
The Feds later got him for drug trafficking. He made headlines as he had it explained it away by saying that he had had to deal drugs to pay for a care facility for a mother who had contracted Alzheimers. All of which was true. That is: his mother did have Alzheimers, and care facilities are expensive. But he had to blame someone.
That was my call to stop selling guns though. Under Clinton the BATF had gotten more muscular and wanted millions of dollars of insurance, and that sellers not be within 100 yards of schools, and be open to regular spot checks. All of which was too much for what amounted to a hobby on my part.
But, day after day after day, people who thought they’d be home later to feed the cat, or their kids, or themselves, never make it home, mostly on account of them making headlines, the wrong kind of headlines. Which was a cause for some contemplation. As is our love affair with the gun and its symbolic connection to the fact that Americans demand to be taken seriously always, at all times, because fear is serious.
And unlikely to be addressed by guns. Which cause fewer problems than their numbers would indicate. By which I mean given the number of guns in circulation it’s a wonder we’re all not being shot every day, all the time. But we’re not. So the issue then becomes can we live with those who are being shot being shot. And is being shot to death just the price we have to pay to live in the land of the free to be shot to death?
I don’t know. But I do know this: I don’t want any of the rest of you to have guns. I also know this: I firmly believe I need them to protect myself from all of the rest of you.
“I know what you did.”
He sat on a mildewed couch press up against the side of the garage where I lived. He was still 6’5” tall. And still 260. I was shirtless and stalked back and forth in front of him.
“What are you talking about?”
“You know what the fuck I’m talking about. Don’t deny it.”
I kept this up right up to the great reveal: a .45 Colt semi-auto. I waved it. He didn’t move. He didn’t smile. “Lemme see it.”
“Ah, I’m just fucking with you, man. Here…” And I gave it to him. He was still rattled. I could see he had no memory of our earlier gun moment. “You remember when you did that to me?!”
He didn’t. He hadn’t. He checked the gun to see if the safety was on. It was. He checked to see if it was loaded. It wasn’t.
He passed it back. We never spoke of it again. Nor did I. Until today.