Peace? Out!

My best friend in Colorado is a classic gun-totin’, Nader-votin’ type who took me to a gun show today. I thought he was looking to entertain me, but he later basically admitted that his plan was to be entertained by introducing a “liberal” friend into a hostile environment. In other words, to drag me to the place where I would be most likely to get my ass beat, or at least where certain Bon Jovi lyrics were most likely to become personally relevant to me. Which hurts. Not the thought that he might thus imperil me, but that evidently he considers me a liberal. Ethos or no, I think even being called a nihilist would be better than that.

Anyway, it turned out well in the end, because the show was fantastic in every possible way. It’s interesting to note that you are required to check your guns when you enter but they don’t check ID’s, which points to one of the most salient differences between a bar and a warehouse full of deadly weapons: six-year-olds are only allowed in the latter. Then after going inside… Maybe I do spend too much time surrounded by leftists. It’s not just that I’ve probably never been in a room with that many people that wouldn’t have a minute for Greenpeace. I guess I knew that there really were that many heavily armed maniacs running around buying up anti-personnel automatic weapons, but it’s like termites: you know there are tons of them around, but since you almost never seen them all together before you don’t feel uncomfortable about it.

I wasn’t really in the buying spirit, though I did quite like the bumper sticker that read “Michael Jackson does to little boys what Obama is doing to America,” and a book I found on making and properly wearing an aluminium foil hat, including what to do in the event of a CBF (catastrophic beanie failure) emergency, possibly as a result of “psychotronically controlled birds” stealing it off your head. My friend was feeling a little dissatisfied with the scope rifle he owns, so I found him a booth that barters guns for Stinger missiles, but he didn’t bite. I also sort of wanted to rent the cannon that one of five decent-looking girls in the building was offering, but on the other hand I might have just been suffering from the fact that spending a couple of hours in a crowd that my friend well described as surprisingly Renaissance Fair-esque is functionally equivalent to wearing beer goggles.

I must say that almost everyone there that we met was rather soft-spoken and polite. A fair number of them seemed to enjoy making jokes about hanging liberals from trees and so forth, but to be fair I imagine they would have acted differently if they believed there was any danger that there might actually be any there. Nevertheless, with all the Lugers and AK’s on display, I feel like it casts a little bit of doubt on one’s claim to be a super-patriot and defender of American liberty if one is parading around with the armaments of Nazi Germany.

4 Responses to “Peace? Out!”

  1. shonk Says:

    “aluminium”?!? Damned Anglophile.

    Also, I’m pretty sure Mikhail Kalashnikov would be appalled to hear his most famous design referred to as a Nazi armament: “It is the Germans who are responsible for the fact that I became a fabricator of arms. If not for them, I would have constructed agricultural machines.”

  2. Curt Says:

    I’m quite well aware that AK’s are Soviet. I spent most of the day teasing Mitz about the fact that they’re his country’s greatest invention. But the line “the armaments of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia” doesn’t sound as punchy, and it makes so difference as to the basic point. So sue me.

  3. Tom Says:

    Uh don’t want to be a pedant (although perhaps I’m in the right place), but wouldn’t Americans who believe in the holiest of holy documents, the Constitution, which was written with Jesus’s mother’s tears, think that somebody who kinda digs weapons could be described as a liberal, if a liberal is someone who likes freedom, and the Constitution supports the freedom to bear arms? Am I missing something? How can I be properly informed anyway, now that the number of newspapers published in Britain that aren’t shit has been whittled down to two (now that the Independent has been bought by an ex-KGB agent for £1)? Maybe the Russians have more influence than we would like to admit…….

    Incidentally, I thought you might like this guy’s column: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/22/charlie-brooker-newspapers-dangerous-drug

  4. Curt Says:

    So that’s the amphetamine that Z has been taking that makes him stay up all night making long-distance calls to friends in other countries. Good to know. He used to be the chemist, now he’s the chemistry experiment.

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