I grew up in a house with a lot of
guns. And I was thinking, how is it that I
can remember exactly the order they were placed in that gun cabinet (which I
had figured how to open at a very early age). On the top shelf was a flintlock
"pirate pistol" and a small .22 six-shooter. Going down the side was a tiny Walther (more
of a decorative gun for SS officers), a full-size Walther, a US Army issue .45,
a Canadian Army issue .44, a German Luger, a .38, a Colt .45 and maybe a couple
of others. Then there was a row of long guns including my favourite, a
Winchester repeating rifle, "The Gun that Won the West." Then there were a couple of drawers of
assorted ammo and German pins and badges and other war souvenirs.
How do I remember that? I can't remember the row of toys or model
airplanes that decorated my bedroom. Or what the kitchen looked like. It's because there is a special feeling you
get when you hold a gun. Even if it's not loaded. They are a marvel of
engineering and craftsmanship and sometimes even artwork when you look at those
intricately carved handles. It occurs to
me that in the same way that the space race lit a fire under the semi-conductor
industry, the demand for better firearms fueled the industrial age and
manufacturing methods (just a theory).
That feeling you get holding a gun
is especially appealing to a child (maybe also any adult who is not fully developed
mentally or emotionally). I used to take
them out of the gun cabinet just to hold them.
Then I eventually got into the ammo drawer and started loading them and rearranging
the drawer so the old man wouldn't see that some was missing. I would choose a pistol out into the woods behind the house and shoot at trees.
Then came the last day I ever
touched those guns. I was maybe 12 and
charged with babysitting my sister and her friend. The little girls came to me yelling they saw
a prowler outside their window. I immediately went into "alpha-male" protector
mode, snapped open the gun cabinet, grabbed the .45, loaded it up and cocked
it, and just as I walked around the corner to the bedroom, I placed my finger
against the trigger and the gun fired with a big recoil. I had never fired this one and it had much
more of a "hair-trigger" than the others. I looked up to see these
two little girls staring at the floor where I had just put a bullet directly
between two little slippered feet. I managed to camouflage the bullet hole in
the tile floor, the girls never said a word and I never touched a gun again
except one summer when I was a cadet in the militia (and that's a whole other
blog post).