I need to go to the shooters club and try out my people shooter pistol!
Now for the back story
When I was a boy my father used to laugh at his father, and retell how Briggs would light a cigar and predict that this old world was moving so fast, the day would come when everybody, men and women both, would either have that 44 on them or where they could get to it really quick!
When my father got laughs over Brigg’s grave at Decoration Day, if there was one 44 in Polk County either Dr Robinson or maybe my father’s beautiful cousin Toots’ rich banker husband naval aviator Captain Chester Wainscott owned them. Ordinary people didn’t own real handguns, except maybe a .22.
Briggs died in 1952, and my Mammy in 1960.
And only scared old women kept a shotgun under their bed, sixty years ago.
As we drove through the shattered and destroyed towns of Preston, Hermitage, Wheatland, and Weaubleau my wife kept nagging me, you have to own a hundred guns and you tell me there’s not even one in your trunk?
I said if you’ll pull over up here at Collins there’s a gun shop in the old bank building, and I’ll buy a gun so you’ll feel safer. What kind of gun do you want? She said one like that one you bought me only more powerful, but with a safety!
And when we pulled in, she said would you please get us coffee at that gas station, and I said honey the sign reads $3.59, it closed at the start of the Great Recession, in the late oughts.
She said don’t leave me alone out here very long and don’t tell my friends I want a gun!
I walked in a gun shop where every gun without any exception was a people shooter, to try out a Ruger Glock, and they’d sold out. There was a sort of a pit bull looking dog behind the counter, very friendly.
And they had a row of plastic pistols with alloy steel slides and one had a tag of $200.
I looked at it, and it had a manual safety and extra long trigger pull. I saw it was a Taurus and took out two hundred dollar bills and said I’ll take it
cash money out the door, if you’ll throw in a box of hollow points, and he asked for my driver’s liscence.
And I went back outside and looked towards Humansville and saw the boarded up buildings and the brand new marijuana grow farm and thought my Grandfather LeRoy Briggs, was truly a prophet.
I cleared the FBI check as I always do, and loaded my wife’s new gun with 12 rounds in each mag and one up the pipe, while she got us coffee at the sprawling travel stop across in sight of the ruins of the Cattleman Auction Company where I ran cattle in the back pens and shoveled cow shit as a boy.
I showed her how the safety worked, put the gun in the console, and we drove off to visit our 300 acre farm.
And I realized what Rank Stranger, was all about.
Where I grew up, is a very rough neighborhood today, you know?
