Watching all of the news stories about bush league gun nuts on both sides (but mostly one, it seems) has me thinking this morning about country people and firearms. My sense is that my neighbors with acreage are a little baffled at the spectacle, and wonder what the fuss is all about.
I can't say we are "gun people," to the extent I can define the term. I didn't grow up around guns. P grew up on a farm with guns all around, but doesn't appear to have been much of a shooter, for pleasure or for food.
And yet, we have a bunch of guns around the farm. Many, many guns. What is up with that?
Some I'm holding for my eldest son, who left them for safekeeping while he has lived overseas for the last five years. All but one of those sit stored in a secret location, because I'm not quite sure what I'd do here with a rifle topped with a bayonet.
The one we use is a very short-barrelled shotgun that, once again, sits hidden in the house (no use having my blog readers, both of them, chart out where we keep our firearms for some future nocturnal visit) and is loaded for household defense with slugs and buckshot. If we were to have armed visitors in the night, we are a long way from any law enforcement, and are going to have to fend for ourselves. Would I be able to shoot an intruder? I hope never to find out. It's not like aerial combat, where you never see the face of your adversary. Our visitors here might be our equally well-armed neighbors, who regularly pop off rounds at their trailer, sometimes in the dead of night. There might be a drug component to their behavior. It is concerning.
On a day-to-day level, we have the trusty twelve gauge, which sits by the door of my office loaded for periodic use.
(And yes, that's a still next to it. Another story for another day).
Right now we're loaded with birdshot, which works fine for the snakes that sometimes go swimming across the pond. I also shoot it off into the air when the hawks get too close to our birds. Anyone who's gone dove hunting with me will attest that it would be pure coincidence if a pellet nicked one of them.
We also have buckshot, which I hate using because it is so expensive. That is reserved for coyotes and foxes, the predators most likely to cart off one of our full-grown birds. I haven't managed to hit one of them, either, although I can't say it's because I was just trying to scare them. They are wily devils.
I also have been known to draw a bead with the deer rifle, a 7 mm .08, when the coyote comes around. One Sunday afternoon I was sitting on the front porch talking with my sainted mother on the speaker phone, when a black coyote appeared running along a fence line a couple hundred yards away. I stood and dashed into the house.
"Peg, come talk to Mom for a minute."
A few seconds later I came bounding out of the house with rifle in hand, and descended the steps to take a free-hand shot at the galloping canine in the distance. A deafening rifle shot echoed across the pasture.
"What was that?" Mom asked P.
"Oh, Mike just saw a coyote and tried to shoot it. He missed."
On the positive side, we haven't seen him since. Maybe he got the message.
When it's not being used for shooting at coyotes, the rifle has served me for years during deer season, during which it mostly sits in the corner of the shooting house while I nap. On the other hand, its few uses have put a lot of venison on the table.
Finally, our arsenal includes a trusty BB gun I had Amazon deliver a few weeks back.
That's it, sitting on the edge of the truck bed while your author sits in the pool in his birthday suit sipping Jameson's. Yet another story for another day.
As our only nonlethal gun, this one is reserved for the geese and ducks, mostly the geese, who can't stay out of our peppers and eggplants. When shouting at them doesn't work, and I don't feel like crawling out of the pool to run naked across the yard chasing geese, I always have the option of plinking one in the behind with a pellet to lovingly remind him (because it's almost always Gus) that we don't appreciate finding his beak marks all over our produce. I wish I could say it's demonstrably changed his behavior, but geese seem to wake up in a new world every morning.
So here we are, armed to the teeth, but all these guns are really just tools the same as a tractor or an air compressor. I think that's true for most folks around here, except perhaps the meth heads on the other side of our berm. And this viewing of firearms as tools, and very necessary tools at that (I'll concede the BB gun is mostly for fun), likely explains why the whole gun control debate rings so hollow in places like this. If folks in town just treated guns as tools, instead of a fetish item or something to bring to a protest with one's mother driving one there, I have my doubts about whether we'd even be having this discussion.
Or maybe we would. There are lots of people who make their livings keeping everyone stirred up over things that don't really matter. We have the luxury of mostly ignoring them here. Selah.
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