It’s important to take firearms seriously, in the sense that they can be dangerous and should always be treated with the respect and care due to an object of that nature.
Some people, however, well—they take gun stuff a little too seriously, if you catch my meaning. They don’t allow guns and joy to exist in the same room, sometimes not even in the same ZIP code.
Let me file all the identifying information off this story, just in case, and describe to you a customer I once encountered who definitely fit the latter category.
Up front, I need to state that the dude in question was in all other respects an OK guy. His neighbors spoke well of him. He never did weird stuff of the sort that caused him to run afoul of the law. But, he did have a very, um, intense sense of privacy when it came to guns. And I can’t say I blame him for that. I’m all about personal privacy myself and, furthermore, the mid-’90s were a weird time for all this.
Anyway, every time this guy came in to buy ammo, it went like this:
First, he was wearing gloves. He would hand me a cardboard box or a pair of paper grocery sacks which I would immediately set behind the counter. From that point, we would begin an elaborate shuffling dance along the ammunition shelves.
Every couple of steps, we would stop as he’d mutter, sotto voce, something like “Those Winchester .30-30 Silvertips, one box” or “two boxes of those Remington-UMC .45 ACP 230-grain full metal jacket.” Getting these orders, I’d reach behind myself as nonchalantly as I possibly could, grab the requested ammo boxes, and—trying to keep them below countertop level—drop them in the box or bag where we were accumulating this guy’s purchases.
At the end of this procedure, we would wind up at the cash register, where I would have to tally up my customer’s purchases by glancing down into the box and tapping them into the register keys. Once I was done and hit total, he would pay (in cash, of course), and I would make change and heft his box onto the counter for him to cart off. His last act was to give me a gimlet-eyed stare until I tore his receipt into tiny pieces and dropped the minute, shredded flakes into the trash. I never had the heart to explain to him that, like all modern cash registers, ours had a duplicate journal tape that was saved every night for the register countdown.
Why was he doing this? Well, the store had two walls made up of plate-glass windows and he was sure that someone was tracking his ammo purchases. I wasn’t going to be the one to try and explain that there wasn’t anyone in the burger joint or liquor-store parking lots across the street scrutinizing our customers with a telescope. Nobody wants to be the person who tells a very serious person that maybe the mysterious government forces just don’t care that much. If an otherwise normal person wants to be weird (but harmless) about their hobbies, well, that’s not my concern.
It can work similarly with firearms in one of several different ways.
One of the more obvious ones is how Very Serious Tactical Dudes curl their lips in a sneer whenever .22 LR replicas of various tacticool firearms turn up. Very Serious Dudes will cut you some slack for a .22 LR Glock or P320 or AR-pattern carbine, as long as you go into some elaborate contrition about how it’s actually a low-cost training device for your Sooper-Serious centerfire personal-defense firearm.
On the other hand, if you get caught with a rimfire clone of a Heckler & Koch MP5 and are courageous enough to admit that you think HK submachine guns look cool, but you don’t really see the need to buy one and you also think it’s fun to go to the range and occasionally LARP as an ’80s action-movie hero, then you’re a pariah to the tacticool crowd.
Similarly, those folks will give you side-eye if you dare to express an interest in cowboy guns. Don’t you know that single-actions are obsolete? Do you realize that lever-actions aren’t the ideal fighting carbine?
Not even explaining that you’re thinking about getting into Cowboy Action Shooting will get the super-serious guys off your back. After all, these guys sneer at the gamers playing at action-pistol sports like USPSA and IDPA, and those folks are using Glocks and standard-capacity magazines and red-dot sights. There’s no way they’ll give any credence to a sport involving Stetsons and Ariats and stage names while using thumb-buster smokewagons and side-by-side coach guns.
Now, I’m on record as saying that it’s a good idea to spend a lot of range time with any firearm that you intend to carry or use for self-defense. If things go sideways in real life badly enough that you need to go to guns, you want to be able to run that thing without having to spend a lot of brain cycles remembering how it works.
But at the same time, most of us got into guns in the first place because shooting is fun and we thought guns were neat. Why would you want to suck the joy out of that?
I recently ran across a little FIE .25 ACP pistol in a local gun shop.
Does it fill a niche in my defensive battery? No. Am I likely to ever carry the thing? Almost certainly not. Do I think a single-action, metal .25 ACP semi-automatic even really makes sense as a personal-protection choice in a world where Ruger LCPs and Smith & Wesson Bodyguards exist? As the kids would say, “lol no.”
But, it’s very much like the first handgun I ever owned, it was inexpensive, I thought it would be fun to take to the range and, to quote Marie Kondo, it brings me joy.
“Bringing you joy” is too often an overlooked function of firearms and shooting, and it shouldn’t be. Next time you have a whim at the gun counter, don’t fight it; let yourself give in to it—at least once. Who knows? You might accidentally wind up having a good time.
