My dad came up with this in one of the small places on the internet he visits. Thought it was rather entertaining, and familiar.
Remus has known a lot of gun people in his life. Or gunmen if you will, the "men" part meaning the species, not the gender. They're a varied and mostly endearing bunch, each expressing the order and flavor of their lives in what and how they shoot. It's not often a case of being like a puppy to a root, although there are those, but rather how it is they prefer to accommodate life as it finds them. Nor are they cut as sharply as the descriptions below, they're just more of one than of the others. Some shade from one to another over time, others define themselves early on but none lack sincerity and all have contemplated the place of the armed citizen in a societal catastrophe.
The "Mountain Man" knows how to get lost and stay lost. He totes a lever action rifle and a single action revolver, likely in the same caliber, often a caliber Teddy Roosevelt favored when he was still governor, or something from the immortal Elmer Keith. His 'other' gun is black powder, percussion cap natch. He tiger-striped the stock himself with smoldering rope. He could, and maybe has, mixed his own powder but one day with another he uses Triple Seven or equivalent. His shotgun is a side-by-side in Damascus steel. Nothing he carries requires a battery. The brass content of his kit exceeds the norm by a couple standard deviations. He's a student of Indian hunting techniques such as opening his mouth when listening intently, or kissing the back of his hand to call in squirrels. Everybody loves that stuff, but we suspect game comes a-runnin for his entertainment value.
The "GI" is ever-evolving. Once known for his '03 Springfield and the indispensable 1911, then for his Garand or M1 Carbine or K98 and the indispensable 1911, now its an AR or an AK or an FAL and the indispensable 1911. He also has MOLLE seat covers in his SUV and wetwipes in woodland pattern. His slightly retro brethren tote an M1A. And the indispensable 1911. His shotgun has a drum magazine and a laser sight and Picatinny rails and designer shotshells and ... He's also a fan of remote sensors and blades. He could set an ambush on a salt flat. The Golden Horde is well advised to never bring a gun to his gun fight.
The "Backpacker" is a Selous Scout-inspired escape and evasion survivalist who only occasionally bugs in, and by that he means a disused dumpster along the Appalachian trail. Tracker hobbyists eventually just sit down, eat their lunch and go home. He packs a nearly negative-weight takedown rifle and a single shot pistol, both in .22 rimfire. Subsonic solids. Guaranteed. For game-getting he takes only head shots. He can do out game faster then we can take off a pair of gloves. Inexplicably, he shoots better than his gun's demonstrable cone of fire. Backpackers are like dirigibles, when the need for one arises nothing else will do.
Then there's the "Shoestring Survivalist". He sports a surplus arm from the Age of Empire, or a battlefield pickup Hakim, or a Bannerman in a caliber once popular but only in the Andes. Whatever it is, it's value doubles when fully loaded. His shotgun may come from a lawn sale, a bolt-action J.C. Higgins say, or a single-rail pump best forgotten and otherwise so. His Model PoS-1 handgun is hidden in a fake #10 can of freeze-dried lentils, third from the left, which is where it will stay, he being certain those urgent recalls are a ruse by the gun grabbers. He's a stranger to bragging rights but whoever said "beware the man with one gun" was talking about guys like him. His mind is free of conflict.
The "Chuck Hunter" wants to stop zombies in the next zip code over. His rifles will shoot at or above 4000 fps. In dense air the bullet will exit the barrel as a grey mist, but even said grey mist will have the optimum ballistic coefficient for grey mist. His 'scope qualifies as a research-grade instrument at third world observatories, his powder measure is compensated for local gravitational anomolies and his triggers break a little earlier in direct sunlight. His best five-shot group will be only a few thousandths bigger than one bullet diameter, and he'll know exactly why. But don't ask, either keep quiet or arrange to have your mail forwarded to his house. Guys like him make being a woodchuck, or a distant marauder, an irrevocably bad idea.
The "Cape Buffalo Hunter" wants to stop bad guys in their tracks with one shot, leaving the corpus delicti strung out along the ground like a schematic. You'll find him behind a big bore rifle lobbing a huge gob-o'-lead. His varmint load is a 405 grainer in .458 Magnum. The true believer will have a .50 BMG. He'll carry a Dirty Harry .44 just for the contrast. His shotgun is a 10 gauge full-choke goose gun with a thirty-six inch barrel, but he feels undergunned nonetheless. He's the go-to guy should an invader's cover need downgrading into mere concealment, betimes.
The "Ninja" wants to condense out of the air, take care of business, then dissolve before our eyes. He favors bullpups or Uzi-pattern weapons and has a mini-pistol concealed in his belt buckle. As a kid he infiltrated the girl's camp by low-crawling through a mile of thornbrush and shale. Don't be surprised if he's also a scuba diver, a BASE jumper and copies Morse at 50 wpm while keeping up his end of a conversation. He's your man if there's a meeting of miscreants in need of breaking up without a lot of fuss. And he'll be back before his beer goes flat.
The "Aristocrat" will have one of every high-dollar rifle made, from a .600 Nitro Express to a .17 HMR, and every pricey shotgun from a 2-inch punt to a .410, with provenance prominently noted, many featuring banknote-quality engraving with precious metal inlays, all set off against mirror-like figured walnut with skip-checkering and bas-relief carvings. His handguns will be displayed under full spectrum lights, some with a note from famous former owners thanking him for adding it to his collection. As he gives you the tour you fear there's a donation jar ahead.
This doesn't exhaust the list. There are the Technicians, Nightwatchers, Cowboys, Bwana On Safari, Reenactors and on and on. We love 'em all and dearly so. Then there's the rest of us. We're the "Accidental Eclectic", to apply the best burnish it will bear. For us real life comes with close constraints so we're buyers of opportunity, chiefly what's on offer at a price we can pay without hitting up the rent money. Again. Whatever it is it'll be plain vanilla, the blister-pack version with the cheery note from Inspector 19 assuring us it was hand crafted with pride using traditional Old World CNC machines. The brochure will have gorgeous photos featuring arcane hand tools, metal curls and oaken workbenches. Apparently we're to believe the gun was built just for us by somebody named Ludwig.
After this the relationship becomes less fraternal. The owner's manual will assume we're wondering what this gun thingy is and why it has a hole in one end. Tips on how to avoid accidentally bumping off ourselves or bystanders will be in bold red font. Close attention will be required however, much of the manual will be for other models, sometimes concurrently. Should we want an accessory or a spare part, the SKU number will be two dozen characters long and, often enough, the list will be by SKU number. So we go from Ludwig's esteemed patron to Suzy's data-entry intern in less than five minutes and find our true standing at last.
Our favorite gun probably came from a long-ago deal too good to pass up when we happened to have the bucks, or near enough, or we traded something outrageous for it, or it was handed down to us, or we bought it second hand as a kid by saving up our summer job money. Now it's a wellspring of almost true stories. We shoot well with it, partly from muscle memory and partly from other memories. Clinging to it is the gauzy presence of hunts and friends and dogs gone by. Early on we came to know it shoots better than we do whereas the one of our dreams merely shoots even more better than we do.
When things got scary we bought our Evil Black Gun, perhaps at a gun show back when they were novelties displayed by the barrel full, like you'd see at a roadside fruit stand. Your Choice: Russian or Chinese or Romanian SKS, $79 This Week Only. All Sales Final. Our shotgun is always almost as good as the one we really want. Perhaps we've taken a Dremel tool and Scotchbrite to the action for that buttery smooth operation and refinished the stock to argue against its doorframe-grade origins. We offset these shortfalls by recalling the impossible shot, say, the grouse that went up off the wrong shoulder and hurried away through the pole timber behind us. He swings. He shoots. He scores! Could we really have done better with a bespoke Purdey?
Teevee newsies portray the gunman as a disembodied hand gripping a fearsome weapon superimposed over a pastiche of flashing emergency lights and yellow crime scene tape. They say gunman in all-caps like in the documentaries about mobsters in fedoras. Their support group, from the Philly Mainline to UCLA to the uppity enclaves of Boston, nods grimly and vows neither they nor their children will ever accept—gasp! choke!—gunmen as legitimate people. In this they reveal more about themselves than of gunmen.
Actual gunmen aren't the feral urban predators who menace the world of journalism majors. The world of real gunmen is one of canoe and campfire and morning dew, of autumnal uplands and the splendor of the high country and beyond, of protecting kith and kin as a first principle, of competing and collecting, of handling the past with respect, of stories and advice and life-long bonds with their fellows. Gun people relive as much as they live because they're participants, not bystanders. They shrink from neither danger nor duty, nor will they be violated without consequence. Deuteronomy's admonition to "choose life" begins with their own so they don't depend on others to step between them and the gunman of the polemics.
Those who would impose their will on actual gunmen must first sever their continuity. Good luck with that. Gun people are a colorful lot, sincere and knowledgeable, hard-nosed but generous and helpful. It's a demanding and sometimes humiliating pastime. It has its mentors, apprentices and journeymen. The same person will be all three by turns. In a meritocracy with serious points for character the tentative and impatient fall away rather quickly. For these reasons and more, decades of hammering away by gun haters have yielded skirmishes won but campaigns lost. And so it will be. The curiosity of the future won't be the real gunman.
Remus has known a lot of gun people in his life. Or gunmen if you will, the "men" part meaning the species, not the gender. They're a varied and mostly endearing bunch, each expressing the order and flavor of their lives in what and how they shoot. It's not often a case of being like a puppy to a root, although there are those, but rather how it is they prefer to accommodate life as it finds them. Nor are they cut as sharply as the descriptions below, they're just more of one than of the others. Some shade from one to another over time, others define themselves early on but none lack sincerity and all have contemplated the place of the armed citizen in a societal catastrophe.
The "Mountain Man" knows how to get lost and stay lost. He totes a lever action rifle and a single action revolver, likely in the same caliber, often a caliber Teddy Roosevelt favored when he was still governor, or something from the immortal Elmer Keith. His 'other' gun is black powder, percussion cap natch. He tiger-striped the stock himself with smoldering rope. He could, and maybe has, mixed his own powder but one day with another he uses Triple Seven or equivalent. His shotgun is a side-by-side in Damascus steel. Nothing he carries requires a battery. The brass content of his kit exceeds the norm by a couple standard deviations. He's a student of Indian hunting techniques such as opening his mouth when listening intently, or kissing the back of his hand to call in squirrels. Everybody loves that stuff, but we suspect game comes a-runnin for his entertainment value.
The "GI" is ever-evolving. Once known for his '03 Springfield and the indispensable 1911, then for his Garand or M1 Carbine or K98 and the indispensable 1911, now its an AR or an AK or an FAL and the indispensable 1911. He also has MOLLE seat covers in his SUV and wetwipes in woodland pattern. His slightly retro brethren tote an M1A. And the indispensable 1911. His shotgun has a drum magazine and a laser sight and Picatinny rails and designer shotshells and ... He's also a fan of remote sensors and blades. He could set an ambush on a salt flat. The Golden Horde is well advised to never bring a gun to his gun fight.
The "Backpacker" is a Selous Scout-inspired escape and evasion survivalist who only occasionally bugs in, and by that he means a disused dumpster along the Appalachian trail. Tracker hobbyists eventually just sit down, eat their lunch and go home. He packs a nearly negative-weight takedown rifle and a single shot pistol, both in .22 rimfire. Subsonic solids. Guaranteed. For game-getting he takes only head shots. He can do out game faster then we can take off a pair of gloves. Inexplicably, he shoots better than his gun's demonstrable cone of fire. Backpackers are like dirigibles, when the need for one arises nothing else will do.
Then there's the "Shoestring Survivalist". He sports a surplus arm from the Age of Empire, or a battlefield pickup Hakim, or a Bannerman in a caliber once popular but only in the Andes. Whatever it is, it's value doubles when fully loaded. His shotgun may come from a lawn sale, a bolt-action J.C. Higgins say, or a single-rail pump best forgotten and otherwise so. His Model PoS-1 handgun is hidden in a fake #10 can of freeze-dried lentils, third from the left, which is where it will stay, he being certain those urgent recalls are a ruse by the gun grabbers. He's a stranger to bragging rights but whoever said "beware the man with one gun" was talking about guys like him. His mind is free of conflict.
The "Chuck Hunter" wants to stop zombies in the next zip code over. His rifles will shoot at or above 4000 fps. In dense air the bullet will exit the barrel as a grey mist, but even said grey mist will have the optimum ballistic coefficient for grey mist. His 'scope qualifies as a research-grade instrument at third world observatories, his powder measure is compensated for local gravitational anomolies and his triggers break a little earlier in direct sunlight. His best five-shot group will be only a few thousandths bigger than one bullet diameter, and he'll know exactly why. But don't ask, either keep quiet or arrange to have your mail forwarded to his house. Guys like him make being a woodchuck, or a distant marauder, an irrevocably bad idea.
The "Cape Buffalo Hunter" wants to stop bad guys in their tracks with one shot, leaving the corpus delicti strung out along the ground like a schematic. You'll find him behind a big bore rifle lobbing a huge gob-o'-lead. His varmint load is a 405 grainer in .458 Magnum. The true believer will have a .50 BMG. He'll carry a Dirty Harry .44 just for the contrast. His shotgun is a 10 gauge full-choke goose gun with a thirty-six inch barrel, but he feels undergunned nonetheless. He's the go-to guy should an invader's cover need downgrading into mere concealment, betimes.
The "Ninja" wants to condense out of the air, take care of business, then dissolve before our eyes. He favors bullpups or Uzi-pattern weapons and has a mini-pistol concealed in his belt buckle. As a kid he infiltrated the girl's camp by low-crawling through a mile of thornbrush and shale. Don't be surprised if he's also a scuba diver, a BASE jumper and copies Morse at 50 wpm while keeping up his end of a conversation. He's your man if there's a meeting of miscreants in need of breaking up without a lot of fuss. And he'll be back before his beer goes flat.
The "Aristocrat" will have one of every high-dollar rifle made, from a .600 Nitro Express to a .17 HMR, and every pricey shotgun from a 2-inch punt to a .410, with provenance prominently noted, many featuring banknote-quality engraving with precious metal inlays, all set off against mirror-like figured walnut with skip-checkering and bas-relief carvings. His handguns will be displayed under full spectrum lights, some with a note from famous former owners thanking him for adding it to his collection. As he gives you the tour you fear there's a donation jar ahead.
This doesn't exhaust the list. There are the Technicians, Nightwatchers, Cowboys, Bwana On Safari, Reenactors and on and on. We love 'em all and dearly so. Then there's the rest of us. We're the "Accidental Eclectic", to apply the best burnish it will bear. For us real life comes with close constraints so we're buyers of opportunity, chiefly what's on offer at a price we can pay without hitting up the rent money. Again. Whatever it is it'll be plain vanilla, the blister-pack version with the cheery note from Inspector 19 assuring us it was hand crafted with pride using traditional Old World CNC machines. The brochure will have gorgeous photos featuring arcane hand tools, metal curls and oaken workbenches. Apparently we're to believe the gun was built just for us by somebody named Ludwig.
After this the relationship becomes less fraternal. The owner's manual will assume we're wondering what this gun thingy is and why it has a hole in one end. Tips on how to avoid accidentally bumping off ourselves or bystanders will be in bold red font. Close attention will be required however, much of the manual will be for other models, sometimes concurrently. Should we want an accessory or a spare part, the SKU number will be two dozen characters long and, often enough, the list will be by SKU number. So we go from Ludwig's esteemed patron to Suzy's data-entry intern in less than five minutes and find our true standing at last.
Our favorite gun probably came from a long-ago deal too good to pass up when we happened to have the bucks, or near enough, or we traded something outrageous for it, or it was handed down to us, or we bought it second hand as a kid by saving up our summer job money. Now it's a wellspring of almost true stories. We shoot well with it, partly from muscle memory and partly from other memories. Clinging to it is the gauzy presence of hunts and friends and dogs gone by. Early on we came to know it shoots better than we do whereas the one of our dreams merely shoots even more better than we do.
When things got scary we bought our Evil Black Gun, perhaps at a gun show back when they were novelties displayed by the barrel full, like you'd see at a roadside fruit stand. Your Choice: Russian or Chinese or Romanian SKS, $79 This Week Only. All Sales Final. Our shotgun is always almost as good as the one we really want. Perhaps we've taken a Dremel tool and Scotchbrite to the action for that buttery smooth operation and refinished the stock to argue against its doorframe-grade origins. We offset these shortfalls by recalling the impossible shot, say, the grouse that went up off the wrong shoulder and hurried away through the pole timber behind us. He swings. He shoots. He scores! Could we really have done better with a bespoke Purdey?
Teevee newsies portray the gunman as a disembodied hand gripping a fearsome weapon superimposed over a pastiche of flashing emergency lights and yellow crime scene tape. They say gunman in all-caps like in the documentaries about mobsters in fedoras. Their support group, from the Philly Mainline to UCLA to the uppity enclaves of Boston, nods grimly and vows neither they nor their children will ever accept—gasp! choke!—gunmen as legitimate people. In this they reveal more about themselves than of gunmen.
Actual gunmen aren't the feral urban predators who menace the world of journalism majors. The world of real gunmen is one of canoe and campfire and morning dew, of autumnal uplands and the splendor of the high country and beyond, of protecting kith and kin as a first principle, of competing and collecting, of handling the past with respect, of stories and advice and life-long bonds with their fellows. Gun people relive as much as they live because they're participants, not bystanders. They shrink from neither danger nor duty, nor will they be violated without consequence. Deuteronomy's admonition to "choose life" begins with their own so they don't depend on others to step between them and the gunman of the polemics.
Those who would impose their will on actual gunmen must first sever their continuity. Good luck with that. Gun people are a colorful lot, sincere and knowledgeable, hard-nosed but generous and helpful. It's a demanding and sometimes humiliating pastime. It has its mentors, apprentices and journeymen. The same person will be all three by turns. In a meritocracy with serious points for character the tentative and impatient fall away rather quickly. For these reasons and more, decades of hammering away by gun haters have yielded skirmishes won but campaigns lost. And so it will be. The curiosity of the future won't be the real gunman.
