Well, here it is, mid-afternoon, and walrus-face has yet to show his mug, explaining and apologizing to his fellow primitives for his boorish conduct. I mean, he’s shown his face for brief moments, but he hasn’t done a damned bit of explaining and apologizing.
I’m suddenly reminded how the brain-damaged primitive hates guns and the second amendment, and decided I’d write about that first, before illuminating our guests from urban northern New Jersey about hunting here in the Sandhills of Nebraska.
That’s another odd contradiction about the sad-faced blubbery whale; if he hates guns so much, why doesn’t he live somewhere in New Jersey with the strictest local gun-control laws, such as, one assumes, Camden or Newark? I’ve heard (but whether correctly or not, I don’t know) that their local gun-control laws make it impossible to own a firearm, and so one reasonably assumes these cities don’t have many, if any, guns around.
If I were the brain-damaged primitive, I’d be checking the newspaper advertisements, for an apartment to rent in those gun-free zones. And rents are probably cheaper there too.
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This is no surprise to anybody here, but it might be a surprise to our guests from urban northern New Jersey that while franksolich is an enthusiastic supporter of the right to bear arms, I’ve never owned a gun in my life. In fact, I’m probably the only adult male in this whole county who doesn’t have a gun.
It’s simply a matter of ability, temperament, and skills.
If one’s deaf, there’s problems with balance, spatial perception, and patience, and those things have to be pretty sharp if one’s to be good at using a firearm. I know that most of all, I’m not a patient person.
My self-defense skills lie in my talent at wielding an S/K adjustable wrench with a 1-3/8†spannage and a 17†handle. Nothing’s ever happened--in my entire life--that I’ve ever had to use such a tool thusly, but I rather suspect I can crumble a malicious person’s skull with it, if I had to.
So even though I don’t own one myself, I’m just as avidly pro-gun as the next guy.
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My chief exposure to firearms was when I was in college, the University of Nebraska, and working for a wholesale hardware distributor. An older brother had gotten me the job, pointing out that besides being a responsible, dependable, conscientious person who paid attention to intricate detail, I wasn’t interested in firearms; bored to death by them.
Eighteen-year-old franksolich was
exactly,
precisely, the sort of person the president of the company wanted for this job, and I was immediately hired. The company at the time had about seventy employees (fifteen in the office, all the others in the warehouse), and I reported directly to the president, bypassing all other channels.
The place where the firearms, ammunition, and sporting goods were kept was a set-apart, secured area. Only the president, one of the two foremen, and I had keys to it. I was the only one allowed to receive, check in, and ship out, anything from that particular area.
It involved more paperwork than any manual labor; sheaves of paperwork, lots of trees.
The brands I recall at the moment--this after all was a very long time ago--included Beretta, Herstal, Browning, Colt, Remington, Great Western, Marlin, Winchester, Barrett, Savage, Smith & Wesson, Springfield, Sturm-Ruger, Benelli, Troy, but there surely were more than that--even though I was the only checker-in and sender-out, it was a major part of the business. Besides the vastly lucrative sportsman’s market, the business also supplied various law-enforcement agencies.
While the domestic firearms were packed pretty good, the foreign-made ones were packed
solid, the weight of the materials (usually wood and grease and steel straps) far exceeding the weight of the individual instrument itself, and pasted with several customs stamps.
Many--not all, but many--of them arrived coated in grease; I was told this was for fingerprint detection (I dunno if that was true or not), and I was always really nervous about those.
Even though the area was restricted, myself being one of only three people with a key, while I was working there, it of course was unlocked, and shortly after someone else had spied a pallet of newly-arrived firearms on the receiving dock, I got visitors, ostensibly taking coffee-breaks when it was nowhere near break-time.
These were guys who’d been with the company for years, and many of them were good friends of my older brother, and myself being a green 18-year-old kid, I could no more keep them out than I could stop the tides. They’d come in, and of the boxes I’d opened--they never touched anything until after I did--they took the instruments out to examine them. And then if there was more than one of them, they’d have a cigarette and sit around comparing the virtues of each one.
I dunno how it was avoided, but no illicit fingerprints were ever detected on the goods. As far as I know.
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The company hosted a big Christmas party every year at the Elk’s Lodge, and gave out presents that one “won†through a lottery. In this kinder and gentler age, such presents weren’t old inventory or overstocks or cheap goods; they were prime quality hardware goods, anything from the latest Corningware eight-place settings to the top-of-the-line Black & Decker power tools to 24-piece sets of Stanley hand-tools to new-model Sunbeam appliances to Briggs & Stratton walking lawn-mowers. &c., &c., &c.
And yes, firearms, exactly three of those each year.
It was most peculiar--even though it was a “lotteryâ€--
every year I worked there (I worked there five years), I won a firearm. In all honesty, I would’ve preferred winning something I could use, but the biggest present I always got (everybody “won†one big present and two or three small ones) was a firearm.
And of course it couldn’t be given to me, because I had no firearms license.
The first year, I won a Winchester shotgun, and managed to trade it with another guy for his 128-piece S/K socket-wrench set. The second year, I won a Browning automatic, and fortunately managed to trade it with another guy for his 32-piece set of S/K large adjustable wrenches. The third year, I won a Winchester--but whether a rifle or shotgun, I no longer remember--and in no time managed to trade it with another guy for a 64-piece set of S/K combination wrenches. And on it went, for five years.
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So…..that was my major experience with firearms; I was always much more interested in being sure the serial numbers were correct, than what sort of instrument it was.
“My†area also included hunting, fishing, and sporting goods, but those lines constantly changed, and so I really didn’t bother learning anything about them, just so I was checking in, and shipping out, the right stuff.
The last Christmas Eve that I worked there, it was during morning coffee-break that day when I abruptly realized I hadn’t gotten a Christmas present yet. After the parents and younger brother died, the older siblings and I drew names for Christmas presents. There were a lot of us, and it included the nephews and in-laws, making fifteen of us. It was a lot easier just to have each person buy one other person a present.
That Christmas, I’d drawn the name of my then-four-year-old nephew.
There was a problem, because I was the one who shut down the whole business on holiday eves (it always closed at noon), the last person to leave, turning out all the lights and locking all the doors. Also, the big family get-together was 400 miles away, and one of my older brothers was coming by circa noon to pick up the present I was supposed to give.
(I didn’t do holidays with the older brothers and sisters and their families,
especially not the religious holidays; they were all much older than I was, and we had little in common anyway. They’d all turned out hippies, liberals, and Democrats, and I’d turned out the way I’d turned out. I either stayed home alone or went to my grandmother’s in northeastern Pennsylvania instead.)
I wasn’t going to be able to get away, and what could a wholesale hardware business possibly have, that would be of interest for a four-year-old?
By chance, after coffee-break, some errand took me to the top floor of the building, the “attic,†where discontinued and written-off inventory was stored. I passed by a pallet on which were stacked cases, circa 3' x 4’ x 2.5’ cardboard boxes, of duck decoys, six per case. When I approached the buyer to inquire of a price, he told me they’d been up there since 1949, and he was surprised anyone’d be interested in buying them.
Because he liked me, and because they’d been written off a long time ago, he quoted ten bucks.
There were twelve cases on the pallet, and of course they were all dust-covered, dirt-covered, bat-excresence-covered, mouse-droppings-covered (but what was inside was still brand-new, remember; the cases had never been opened). The boxes on top had caved-in lids, and they all bulged. I dug out the squarest case, and took that one.
When my brother showed up at the loading-dock to pick up my present to take to the family gathering, he was startled at what I’d expected him to take. Such a very big box, covered with all this crud and junk. “You could’ve at least wrapped it,†he complained; “it’s going to make the inside of my car dirty†(it was too large to fit into the trunk).
My co-workers scoffed and guffawed at the idea. “This little kid’s going to see this great big dirty old box, and then when he opens it up, it’s just going to be duck decoys. Some sort of uncle you are.â€
Well, I did the best I could, I pointed out.