By 505Mark
One of my shooting buddies long ago came to the realization that what his wife doesn’t know, won’t get her mad enough at him to pick up one of his guns and shoot him. I have seen her shoot and I have seen her angry. He was smart to be cautious. I am at their house, picking him up for a morning of shooting at the range, with naturally the winner of some invented and totally bogus shooting contest picking up the check for lunch afterward. The two of us are out in his garage, where we have just finished loading up my truck with his gear. “Honey, we’re leaving now!” . . .
His wife comes out and smiles at us and comes up to give him a hug and a kiss goodbye. As they hug he says, “We’ll have to hit the store to pick up some ammo.” Still smiling, a bit frostily it seems to me, she looks over his shoulder at his ammo shelves where he has exactly one box of each caliber he shoots. “Well then, you boys have a good time,” she says, as she recognizes that he does not, in fact, have enough ammo.
At the local big box store – naturally this was back before any ammo shortage – he buys three boxes each of .45 ACP and .38 Special, and two 500 round bricks of .22LR. “You still hiding ammo from her?” I ask, knowing that he will return home with one full box each of .45 and .38, and one unopened box of .22LR, each of which will be carefully hidden at the back of the top shelves of cabinets in his garage. He has done this for years.
“Hell, yes,” he says, adding “I don’t want her thinking I’m some paranoid prepper.”
“But you are a paranoid prepper,” I say, laughing, though I fundamentally think he is more right than not.
“Yeah, well, there’s that,” he says with complete seriousness as he plops down a credit card for the purchase.