Garveys and Guns - It's Complicated

My late father was a sportsman.  That term had a particular meaning back in the ‘40s, ‘50’s and 60’s.  It didn’t mean he played basketball (the man was 5’ 5’’ for God’s sake) or sat on a couch Sunday afternoons watching football.  It meant he took to the woods and fields each November, and for men of his generation, taking to the woods in the late fall involved rifles and pistols and shotguns.  It wasn’t remarkable, or questioned, it’s what Midwestern guys did – they went hunting, or if it wasn’t hunting season, you found them knee deep in cold, running water, stalking the wild trout.  And if they weren’t hunting or fishing, they were reading about hunting and fishing.  Dad had dozens of outdoor magazines lying around the house, things like Michigan Out of Doors, The Michigan Sportsman, Game and Fish.  I believe I even saw a few copies of American Hunter from the National Rifle Association, back from the time when Wayne LaPierre had his own hair and the NRA hadn’t turned batshit crazy.   No one thought it unusual, or evidence of a flawed character.

In fact, the only character flaw in the Garvey household was my own – I couldn’t stand hunting.  It wasn’t so much the killing – which didn’t happen all that often – but for me, hunting was 1) boring and 2) cold!   We didn’t have the nice synthetic / cotton blend thermal long johns back in the ‘60s when I was invited to join the men out on the back 40.  No sir, what they had were good ol’ prickly union suits you wore under baggy corduroy pants that you tucked into cracked, rubberized boots, which you attempted to insulate with three pairs of wool socks.  You wore a wool shirt, a couple of old sweaters, and last year’s good coat that you grew out of, all of which bulked you up to the point you looked pretty much like Ralphie’s kid brother in “A Christmas Story”.  And I still froze.  I quickly began looking for any excuse to avoid the annual trips Up North.  Eventually, Dad stopped asking.  Thank God, my brother Glenn – the next in line in the Garvey brood – took to it with the same zeal as the old man.

But the thing was – and is – that while I hated the cold, I loved to shoot.  Bing, Bang, Boom!  Music to a kid’s ear.  Dad took me skeet shooting a half dozen times over the years, and it turned out I wasn’t half bad.  Of course, I haven’t shot skeet in something like 16 years, not since the summer I was failing as a manager at the accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand, yet somehow got included in a department outing to a private club in the middle of Lake St. Clair.  I spent the time being my usual embarrassing self, sucking at three hole golf, nearly falling down a ladderway on the partner’s yacht, spilling lunch on the new walking shorts my wife got me especially for this occasion.  Late in the afternoon, the partner took us over to a wooden walkway built along the shoreline, where some of the club attendants had lugged a couple large metal trunks.  He unlocked one, reached in and pulled out a polished, oiled shotgun.  There were four of us, I recall.  Each got a gun and a little box of shells.  One of the club house guys stood behind us and launched little clay discs out into the lake.  And I nailed ‘em.  By God, I nailed ‘em.  Everyone else got one or two; me, something like eight out of ten.  No one could believe it.  One day of glory out of four miserable years.  They let me go the following spring. 

But I digress.

 This last summer, Pat and I visited our son Rob, Captain W. R. Garvey, at Whiteman Air Force Base outside of Kansas City.  He had a little treat for me.  Bright and early Sunday morning, we drove a half hour out into the countryside to a local firing range.  It was nine, nine thirty in the morning, and already 90 degrees.  The place was tres rustic, a field of dried-out weeds surrounded  by trees.  It had three shooting lanes, each with a wooden table at one end and a big mound of dirt to catch the shots at the other.  One was short, one was medium, and the third was long – although I can’t remember the lengths.  The short lane was already in use by four young men Rob recognized as part of the security detail at Whiteman.  A thin, ancient, bent over man in bib coveralls had taken the long one.  He had a cardboard box set down about twenty feet in front of him, and was proceeding to shoot it with the smallest pistol I have ever seen.  The studs to our left, on the other hand, were equipped with serious firepower.  They had two rifles and one short, thick, black thing with a removable magazine sticking down below it.  The sounds around us went plink, plink, boom, boom, KAPOW!!  And when the dust settled, plink, plink, boom, boom, KAPOW!! again.    

 

Rob’s weapons were more mundane, a Ruger 22 caliber rifle with a 10 round magazine, and a Beretta M9 with a clip that holds 15 rounds if you squeeze them in, but usually no more than twelve.  (And yeah, Wayne, I’m using ‘clip’ and ‘magazine’ interchangeably – so sue me, it doesn’t make one damn bit of difference to what I’m writing.)  According to Rob, the Ruger is a "classic" rifle that a lot of kids learn to shoot on, and the M9 is the government-issue sidearm for officers.  Both are semi-automatics.  And way, way more fun because they were.  If I could’ve fit a 30 round clip / magazine / bullet holding thingie to the Beretta, it woulda been even more fun.  And I’m guessing I’m not the only person feels that way.  Couple the fun part with the Midwestern (or name your region) hunting ethos, and a general ‘mind yer own goddamn bidness’ attitude’ and you get an idea where some of the reasonable resistance comes from.   Of course, I’m omitting the Tea Party, Second Amendment-er, mouth frothing, Obama-is-a-Muslim /  fascist / communist-aching-to-deliver-this-country-to-the-devil contingent that drives the rest of the resistance.  My fear is that the combination of the two will be enough to stifle any reforms.  And unless those fighting for change can win over the reasonable opposition, we may be in for a couple more Columbines, Virginia Techs and Newtowns before we get serious about changes to gun laws. 

There, said my piece.  Now back to doing the damn taxes.