Category: The Gun Thing

Many years ago, we had a Christmas party at our old house, and after everyone had said all the greetings, settled down and got their drinks, it was Show & Tell Time, whereby the guests got to fondle and coo over my latest gun acquisitions. For some reason, this always took quite some time.

Anyway, at some point the place looked like some 1930s-era gangster’s hideout, with rifles, shotguns and handguns scattered all over the place. Whereupon one of the lady guests looked around, and said: “Aaahhh… Christmas at Kim’s!”

Much laughter followed.

It’s not only at Christmas. The other night I was busy cleaning out our walk-in closet off the bathroom. Basically, it’s a room which has seen very little traffic over the past few years, because Connie had moved the few clothes she needed into the spare room next to the den, and I generally live out of the armoire in the bedroom anyway.

So there I was, doing some archaeological research into the detritus that had gathered in one corner, and discovered the following:

Yes, that’s two hundred rounds of Winchester .45 ACP hardball. No idea when I bought it, how it got there or anything else. (Finding Random Ammo in my house is not that unusual; I once found five hundred rounds of 5.56mm ammo in the garage — and I’ve never owned an AR-15.)

But that wasn’t all. Underneath the ammo was a little blue box. Inside:

Yes, a little Heritage Arms single-action revolver in .22 LR / .22 WM. No idea how that got there. I have a vague memory that it once belonged to one of the kids, but how it got into that forgotten corner of the closet? Like the fathers of Madonna’s adopted children: a complete mystery.

More alarming still, there’s still one more corner of the closet as yet undisturbed…

Everyone seems to have been overcome with joy that the reign of Emperor Urkel saw this massive growth in gun sales, with x jillion FBI checks per month, lines outside gun shows or whatever.  Ruger and S&W share prices grew substantially, gun dealers couldn’t get enough guns into stock quickly enough, yadda yadda yadda.

Well excuse me for peeing on everybody’s parade here, but quite frankly, the downside of everybody suddenly wanting a gun is that the prices of the damn things have climbed into the stratosphere — at a gun show recently, I saw a Century Arms something-clone selling for $1100 (!). I mean, a Century Arms rifle for more than a grand? I nearly passed out. There are no good deals at gun shows anymore. The only guns which aren’t selling at firstborn-demanding prices seem to be double-barreled shotguns, and that’s because I guess they aren’t sexy enough for the New Buyers. Not that it matters much: a new AyA No.2 Round Action side-by-side now runs for about what it cost ten years ago ($7,900), i.e. they’re still expensive.

Don’t even get me started on the complete disappearance of rimfire ammo: .22 Long Rifle, when you could get it, was approaching 10 cents a round for crappy Bosnian stuff, and .22 Win Mag still costs about as much per round as practice .45 ACP. Thank gawd that I had a few thousand (okay, twenty-odd thousand) rounds of .22 LR and .22 WM squirreled away in Ye Olde Ammoe Locquer, or else I’d have got really angry.

I remember once suggesting the “seven-cent solution” (a .22 bullet in the back of the skull) for some politician, Teddy Kennedy most likely, and being chided by a Reader that I shouldn’t waste my expensive .22 ammo on that dirtbag. Boy, how ironic is that now when bulk Aguila, which I used to feed to my dog as a treat, now costs well over 10 cents per round.

And prices aren’t going down anytime soon, either. I see that .22 LR is at least being manufactured again, which has eased the availability thereof a bit; but my favorite CCI Mini-Mag is still unaffordable. Ugh. I need to stop now before I bust something. I’d shoot up my TV in disgust, but the ammo costs more to replace than the Sony.