"Nothing in here worth dying for"

Posted Saturday morning, December 7, 2019.

Outside the Mannionville Post Office. Friday afternoon, December 6, 2019.

I can’t imagine being this scared. I can’t imagine being this angry. I can’t imagine being this paranoid. I can’t imagine driving around our relatively peaceful and peaceable neck of the woods with the equivalent of a “BEWARE OF ME!” sign on my car, warning away anyone who happens to park next to me at whatever Tombstone, Dodge City, or Deadwood  I imagine I’ve ventured into to buy groceries or mail a letter or feeling the need to. I can imagine, though, finding the message that goes with the gun silhouette down in the lefthand corner of the gate funny---”BECAUSE SHOOTING TWICE IS JUST SILLY”---because I did. I admit it. It gave me a chuckle.

Ditto the little decal in the driver-side front window that said “Nothing In Here Worth Dying For”.

I’m not a gun control absolutist. I’m not anti-gun. I don’t shrug it off every time I have a close encounter with the owner of a gun who just has to let the world know he---or she---owns a gun, although I wonder why he or she feels a need to let the world know they have a gun. But I’m not automatically---sorry---alarmed. I’m sure I’d feel differently if I lived somewhere children die regularly in the crossfire or if I was black or brown or if I had more first-hand experience with domestic violence or if I lived in an open-carry state and regularly found myself in line at a McDonald’s or a Target with the kind of overgrown idiot child who thought he was making a statement beyond “Watch Out For Me! I’m an Overgrown Idiot Child Who Spends Way Too Much Time Online in Right Wing Chat Rooms” carrying openly. And I do feel differently when I think about it. 

But I grew up in a place where gun ownership usually told you nothing for certain about the gun owners except that they were hunters. And I grew up in an era when gallows humor like this was just that---humor. And I grew up in a time when there were still people alive who remembered when bandits roamed the land and that wasn’t that long ago back then---Bonnie and Clyde and Baby Face Nelson had their heydays in the 1930s, and they were essentially old-fashioned Western outlaws driving fast cars instead of riding fast horses and murdering lawmen and innocent civilians who were unlucky enough to be standing between them and the money they wanted with Tommy guns and the same make and model six-shooters the James Brothers carried. The collective memory never forgets.

Gun ownership isn’t a part of my heritage. My great-grandfather Mannion owned a small confectionery and grocery store in downtown Troy, New York, where Pop Mannion worked as a soda jerk and stockboy when he was a kid, but I I can't recall Pop ever mentioning that Great-grandpop kept any weapons of protection, even a baseball bat, handy in case of robbers. The store was probably protected by its location in a safe and well-trafficked, well-policed neighborhood and, I like to imagine---forgive me, this is the romantic in me---the racketeers Great-grandpop sold illegitimate lottery numbers for. 

The gun owners I’ve known haven’t included any members of my immediate family, but they have included good friends like our friend Chris the Cop, who used to stow the locked and unloaded pistol he carried under his carseat under our bed when he and his family came over for dinner, and a good pal at the Iowa Writers' Workshop who used to kill the chickens her family was having for dinner by shooting them with her rifle from the back porch of her farm house back home in Tennessee. She was a good shot. Had to be. Plugged them right in the head when they were on the move. What I’m getting at is that for most of the gun owners I’ve known personally, their guns were tools not toys. I’ve never had the need for that particular tool any more than I’ve had a need for a stone-cutting saw or a drill press. But I understand why other people might need one.

So, yeah, I laughed. Reflexively. But I did wonder, and I am wondering. This truck has been parked in the lot at the post office the last three times I've made a postal run. It was likely not a coincidence and he---or she---was there on the same stamp-buying, letter-mailing, mailbox-checking I was. There were no or few other customers the times I was there, and the few who were didn’t look like they were that type, if you know what I mean. But then I might just be biased. It’s possible that truck belongs to one of the seasonal postal workers---I’d never noticed it there before---but more probably it’s owned by one of the regulars at the little deli and coffee shop and grocery next door that shares the parking lot with the post office. 

It’s a good bet the owner’s a Trump voter but it’s not a certain bet. Notice the decal covering the whole rear window is an ad for Harley-Davidson. Trump hasn’t been all that fond of Harley-Davidson. He boasts of having bikers on his side, but I guess he imagines they all ride Suzukis. He was all in for Harley-Davidson when the company’s profits fell back in April, thanks to his tariff war.  But last August he was calling for a boycott.. In my (decidedly limited) experience, Harley owners are more loyal to their bikes than to their own mothers. And, here’s a shocker: lots of Democrats, even liberals, own guns and ride motorcycles. There are no partisan stickers or decals on the truck to announce his party affiliation either way. 

Well, the “Don’t Tread on Me” sticker’s pretty much a giveaway. But, again, not necessarily.

The reason I’d bet the driver’s a Republican is that this is a Republican area. We have to keep in mind that most Republicans voted for Trump and are sticking with him because he’s a Republican. Gun-owners are feeling defensive and belligerent these days, even the ones who aren’t fetishists and nutters and paranoids. They think liberals want to take away all their guns, not just the assault rifles. And they’ve got reason to think so.  No, Obama wasn’t going to take away their guns. But many Obama-voters would like to. They would just as soon see all firearms banned and they make no secret of it. But this guy isn’t belligerent, at least not in comparison to the owners of many other Trump trucks on the roads. Trump didn’t invent all the to.weirdness and hate he inspires and exploits. “Protected by Smith and Wesson” and “They Can Take My Gun When They Pry It Out of My Cold Dead Hands” adorned car and truck bumpers along with stickers proclaiming  “Nixon’s the One”.

That's it. I don't have much of a point to make. I'm just giving you a sense of what it's like to live around here. If you happen to be a member of the elite political media and you're reading this, I hope you're noting that we all don't live in bubbles.

There are two other things I want to call attention to, though. The truck is a Ford F-150 and there’s a toolchest in the bed. It’s my observation that among the various makes and models of pickups F-150s are the most likely to be working trucks as opposed to big shiny boy toys. And, if I were to buy a pickup---something I regular dream of being able to do---my first choice would be a Nissan Frontier. My second choice would be an F-150. 

Not this color though.

I’m thinking royal blue.

Filed under Life in These United States.

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Recommended background reading: If you want to get a sense of Bonnie and Clyde as old-fashioned Western outlaws, you can watch the movie, naturally. But I think you'd get a better impression not just of those two but of the likes of Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, the Barker gang, and John Dillinger as outlaws operating in what was in many ways still the Wild West from Bryon Burrough's book "Public Enemies", which is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

Comments

[CJColucci]

"Because shooting twice is just silly" -- Just about any professional whose job potentially involves shooting people is trained to shoot twice, sometimes three times, then re-assess the situation and, if necessary, shoot again.