guns
oh geez! oh yes! oh guns! let me take you way back to the 50s. just pretend, not for real. I would never take anyone back to the 50s for real. before the civil rights movement? before the women's rights movement? nunh-unh. bad times! but the times when I was new in this country and needed my own gun. and worked and worked and worked and worked and saved and saved and saved and saved and talked and talked and talked and talked and finally bought them. two. a .32 revolver and a .22 long rifle semi-automatic rifle. oh man! I was ready for the world! we didn't have shooting ranges in Albuquerque back then, or I didn't know about them. they probably would have been too social anyway. but I could get myself out to apparently public land - it wasn't fenced - so far from houses that I thought shooting a gun was safe out there. no one ever told me no, so it must have been true. I used that reasoning a lot back in those days. I shot the rifle and shot the rifle and shot the rifle until I was pretty good. I never convinced myself I was a sharpshooter, but I liked that I could hit my target so much more often than miss it. after I got my .32, I did the same. I took it out into what I thought was the wilderness and shot it until I hit the target way more often than I didn't. I knew that was important. and I took care of those guns. I cleaned them and oiled them after every shooting - that doesn't mean after every shot fired, that means after every morning or afternoon of shooting. I still remember the shaky feeling of taking my rifle apart the first time, and how damned glad I was when everything went back together right, and that the rifle still worked when I put it back together. I was just as shaky taking my revolver apart the first time and putting it back together, but I had to know how it worked! I was just fascinated by the simple mechanics of each of them! years later when I had to take a BSA engine apart and put it back together, I did it without the shakiness, I'd already disassembled and reassembled my guns lots of times. (oh! a BSA - Birmingham Small Arms - was a British motorcycle way back in the early 70s.) those were the old days for me. I now have a Ruger 9mm, and for a long while I did go to the shooting range to shoot it. lately my feet hurt too badly for me to do that. but I still have the gun, still get it out and look at it. I'm sure I'll go back to the range and shoot it again if or when my feet stop being an excuse for sitting around waiting for them to stop hurting. I couldn't tell you why I need a gun or love a gun, but I sure do.
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