Mommy’s Got a Gun

Drove down to my son’s place in South Carolina last weekend.  You have to really love someone to drive 9 hours down I-95 South, in the rain on a Friday afternoon to help them pack their stuff into a Uhaul from a third floor apartment with no help from any burly young Naval officers.  Do it again if it meant spending 12 hours with any of my kids.  Parenthood – a synonym for insanity.

I re-learned a few other principle’s as well -

• long trips are made to feel twice as long when you don’t have a Sirius Satellite radio in your vehicle
• no cruise control sucks
• AM radio reception has the same clarity today as it did in 1973
• NPR is not a good substitute for anything
• and the further south you travel, the more country-western channels populate FM waves

Brutal.  Made worse a few hours later by driving home at 2am (I had to get the truck back to Uhaul by 12:30 pm).  I was hoping Coast to Coast AM, the delightful paranormal AM program hosted by George Noory, would have a memorable guest on.  It wasn’t George, it was Ian someone and the show was not a memorable one.  Some noteworthy Coast to Coast AM programs (at least memorable to me):

• A woman had a feral child in her basement.  She wanted to know how she could get near it and keep it.  Like a pet I presume.
• Nancy Leider and her May 2003 apocalyptic warning that Planet X was about to crash into the earth.
• Sylvia Browne’s prediction that the victims of the Sago Mine Disaster would be found alive.
• Any show where a psychic predicts what will happen in the coming year.

Sigh*  Good show.  Wish they had it on Sirius.

So, I drove to South Carolina to help Navy Son pack stuff up.  He promised to make chicken curry for dinner (it was fabulous – I need to learn how to make that stuff) and we decided to go to a local shooting range to lob a few bullets around. 

I’ve never been to a shooting range before, nor have I ever shot a gun.  The experience was entirely new.  A shooting range smells and sounds like a bowling alley -- without the balls.  Bowling balls, I mean.  The walls are plenty drenched with testosterone – I could actually feel the hormone being leeched out of me.  Handguns, pistols, bows, scopes, AK27s, even cotton candy pink rifles with knives on the end were bought and sold as a matter of course.  Word on the street was that some yahoo walked in to a shooting range one day and tried to rob the place.  He was shot 48 times.  Idiot.  Walking into a facility where milling about were men who had been waiting 35 years for just such an opportunity. 

Navy Son had an M-16 and his friend had 2 pistols – one was a 9mm Sig Sauer.  We got 2 targets – one was the typical round target and the other was a white man holding a white woman hostage while he pointed a gun at you.  I presumed she was his emotionally abused whore jacked up on meth and he was using her as a shield to escape the police.  He never would have shot her, but he knew Johnny Law would do everything he could to save her worthless life.  I shot her in the neck.

I also shot him in the neck and head, but had less luck with the testicles than I had hoped.  He wasn’t de-manned, but he sure was gonna limp out of there.  Navy son disarmed him by shooting him several times in the hand. 

I was so delighted with the 9mm that I swung it around pointing it in my face to get a closer look and I think I scared the boys a bit.  They reached for me urging me to be careful.  It was still loaded and the safety was off, my hand was on the trigger.

I did that twice. 

Still, it was a thrill that I enjoyed immensely.  Worth the 18 hour drive alone really; but then so was the chicken curry and spending altogether too brief a time with the boy. 

And then I brought home Gunner; Navy Son’s beagle.

That’s a whole other story.