We live in a fairly big house. It was once full of kids and dogs, but now it’s just me, and my wife and a big lab-shepherd mix that terrorizes any unsuspecting delivery driver.
As the years pile up, it gets harder to stay ahead of the gun stuff. The house is pretty much sloping piles with paths through the middle. It was suggested recently by some busybody that “everything has a place” is a concept I should explore. I didn’t bother explaining that I ran out of “places” long ago.
Every section has an unplanned theme of sorts. The rather large garage, for example, contains mostly ammo. I put up shelves, but they filled up years ago. Those paths not bordered by stacked ammo have buckets and buckets filled with empty brass. Another path is walled in with piled-up shooting bags, gun cases and unused reloading equipment. Yet another path contains mainly fishing gear, but that doesn’t count; everybody has that stuff.
Big shelving units split the two-car garage. They are filled with targets, sandbags, shooting rests, chronographs and lots of plastic bins full of holsters, slings, knives and other shooting-type gear. I tried to organize them years ago and label each one. I suppose they are still relatively pure in their contents, but only because so much other stuff is piled in front of them and access takes some serious commitment—something I can rarely locate.
The front door opens to a dining room with a large trestle table. We have not eaten a meal there in a very long time. That “flat surface” is too convenient to dump what’s in my hands when I come home. What’s there is fluid and subject to change. A quick look just now revealed several binoculars, two rangefinders and a bunch of targets, both used and unused. Lots of ammo, some boxed, most is not, and more than a few magazines (both the paper variety and the bullet-holding type). There are a bunch of knives, some reloading dies, a few books, tools and a gun or two.
There are benches on both sides. One is covered with ammo, cameras and a bunch of tools I bought for my shop and haven’t lugged out there yet. The other bench has a large box of bullet molds, more ammo and a box of tools I was photographing for a new book a month back.
While I was looking it all over and moving things around to see what was underneath, I spotted my wife joyfully weeping in the corner. I realized that she thought I would finally make good on the vow to clean it up.
“No time for that right now, honey. Tomorrow for sure.”
The poor woman didn’t fully understand what she was getting into when she married me. The home she grew up in was like a museum with a large cleaning staff. It was spotless and nothing was ever out of place. She tried that approach after we got married and stubbornly stuck with it for a long time. Now, though, she has just given up. The only path to simplicity now is to get rid of all the gun stuff, that’s crazy talk.
Our living room and bedroom only have a few guns each—maybe the requisite six or seven, I didn’t count. The dominant feature of these rooms is books. Lots and lots of books. Shelves full and piles on every flat surface. Many are about guns, shooting, reloading and related subjects.
Like normal folks, we have a basket by the door where we put our car keys when we come home. Ours is large because it contains his and her carry guns, holsters, speedloaders, speedstrips and a multitude of extra magazines. Sometimes even keys.
Other than a washer and dryer, the cellar is full of reloading benches. I would like to say they are neat and orderly, but my mom would have punished me for lying.
If this were a Jeff Foxworthy routine it might go like this:
“If you have more money invested in ammo than you have in your savings account, you might be a gun guy.”
That’s not fair, ammo is expensive these days.
“If you ever found a gun that you didn’t know you lost, you just might be a gun guy.”
Just one? This happens all the time. I once was going through some stuff that had been in storage for years and found a pistol I had not missed.
A few weeks back, I was looking in my gun vault for a gun I needed for an ammo test and I found a rifle behind it on the rack that I had forgotten I even owned. Taking it to the range that day was like Christmas, only better, because there’s no fruitcake.
So, yeah. I suppose if you look at this in total, it’s pretty undeniable. I am a gun guy.
