GUNS
GUNS SNUG NUNS’ SUSS, GUS.
I was just talking to somebody about guns. I never knew my dad owned a gun until he ended himself with one. I suspect he procured it for the one purpose it served, even if he had purchased it years earlier. I never saw the gun but I found a box of bullets in the kitchen cabinet. I told John, the downstairs neighbor who found my dad, to get rid of them. I bet kept the bullets for himself.
A person I was talking to is from Texas, where buying guns is as easy as walking into a pawn shop. He said he bought his .38 a couple of years ago and does not even need a license for it unless he intends to carry it, which he does not. Legal ownership of guns in NYC, on the other hand, is pretty rare. It is not a subject near or dear to me but that’s somehow how this conversation began.
My sister, when she moved back home to take care of our mother, told me she found a gun buried in a file cabinet under a bunch of junk. I was surprised to learn this, since mother had always loathed guns. We never even had toy guns of any kind. She maintained that her brother would have lived a long life had he not owned a gun. His house was burglarized and the robber used his (my mother’s brother’s) gun to kill him. The robber arrived unarmed. Simply having a gun, mother said, makes it infinitely more likely that you will be shot yourself. That logic is kind of hard to dispute.
So how did she end up with a revolver? I actually suspect she did not even know it was there. It must have been a parting gift or something just left behind by… I think his name was Matthew… a guy who moved in with mother for a couple of years. I never met him but was told he was something of a gun nut. My sister disposed of the gun without any comment, and mother never mentioned it. So for that I suspect she just did not know it was there, but she certainly knew guns were present while that dude was living with her.
The only guns I’ve ever held, as far as I can remember, were in grade school at a summer camp rifle range. I think they were BB guns. I still have the targets I shot at. I scanned them and posted them somewhere on my web site, with my Chosatonga and Sequoyah pictures. The world needs to know what kind of a sharpshooter I was in grade school, right?
I have a foggy memory of holding some kind of gun and spinning the ammo chamber, but I think that was either a prop of some sort or just a decorative piece. We had, for some reason, a long-barrel rifle hanging over the living room in Tampa. But that was a decorative thing that we got in Africa. So that was considered classy. As a weapon I don’t think that gun could have done much damage. It looked like a pea-shooter.
My dad always bragged that in 30+ years of military service he never once carried a gun. He said this to assure me that if I joined the military, like he wanted me to, that I would never see combat. I respect those who do but I never even considered joining the military. My mother once threatened to kill herself if I joined the military. That threat, or whatever it was, did not influence my disinterest in a military career. I always thought it was a strange comment, though. I thought of it years on, when every conversation I had with her started with her saying “I want to die” or a similar sentiment.
