Ronnie Dee--Never Play With Guns

It was the occasion of Bud's wife's birthday party. It was at her parents house and Sandra's stepfather, Harry, was drunk and in a bad mood because her real father, Ralph, had been there and left after a very short visit. Harry took it as an affront and told Brad he needed to see Ralph and have it out with him. So we took him over to Ralph's house. On the way, Bud jokingly told Harry that he might need a gun and showed him a pistol he kept in the glove compartment. We laughed, "Ha Ha," and when we pulled into Ralph's driveway, Harry started to get out of the car and quickly reached in and grabbed the gun.

"Just for insurance," he said, and disappeared into the house.

He was in there for what seemed like a long time and I finally said, "I'm going to look in the window and see what's happening."

I crept along the side of the little box house and peeked in the kitchen window. What I saw made my hair stand on end. Harry had the cocked and loaded gun pointed at Ralph's head and he was very agitated. I beat it back to the car and told Bud.

He said, "Oh, crap, we'd better get in there," and jumped out of the car.

We went in the front door and headed straight for the kitchen. Harry was still yelling at Ralph, who was sitting there looking remarkably calm. Bud sidled up to Harry and grabbed the gun. He gave it to me and I took it back out to the car. They came out a few minutes later and Harry looked like he was about to collapse, which he did in the back seat. We helped him into the house when we got back there and he went straight to bed.

Bud said, "Damn, I should never have shown him the gun in the first place." He got no argument from me.

My next door pal Randy had a bit of misfortune with a gun. Oddly enough, it occured when he was putting in an honest day's work. He was in the service station office talking to some neighborhood kids when he decided to show them a gun that the owner kept in his desk. The facts were sketchy, but the results weren't. The gun "went off" and a kid was killed. Randy was not arrested, but he was sued by the kid's family and I don't remember the final results, but he was entangled in court battles for years.

One summer day, my friend Brad's brother in law, despondent after a row with his wife, snuck into Brad and Sandra's apartment and grabbed Brad's gun. When they returned home some time later, they heard him moaning and crying in the bathroom and ran in to see what was going on. The poor bastard had shot himself in the stomach and was in a bad way.

He was not in grave danger, but he was in a great deal of pain. The gun was a .22 pistol and he had shot himself at an angle across his stomach and the bullet had entered under his navel and zipped all the way around his body, just under the skin, came out and landed in the tub. It was almost funny, but you had to feel kind of sorry for the guy.

Then, sometime in my late teens, I somehow gained possession of a gun. I just don't remember how I came to own a blue .25 caliber Mauser semi-automatic pistol. I was officially "packing heat." Fortunately, I was not on the lam. But I was ready if the situation called for action. This was another in an unfortunate rash of incidents, involving a firearm. My friends knew about it and they were all making plans for armed robberies and such, but I wasn't ready to rush into anything like that just yet. Well, my grandmother found it and hid it. I didn't even miss it for a while, but eventually the subject arose and we had quite a row about it. I finally shamed her into returning it when I accused her of stealing it from me.

I took my gat over to the little gas station in which my friend Steve was working and proudly showed it to him. He was impressed and we passed the gun back and forth, doing all the things responsible gun owners do, like twirling it around and looking down the barrel and flicking the safety on and off, waving it all over the place. Steve finally asked if it still worked.

"I don't know," I said. "My grandmother has had it for a while, so let's see."

I then lifted the gun and pulled the trigger.

Needless to say, the stunned silence after the shot seemed to last a very long time. I looked at Steve and he was still there, staring wide-eyed back at me. I had checked the clip, but forgot to clear the chamber. When we finally snapped out of it, I saw a hole in the front window where the bullet had exited the premises. Fortunately I had not pointed the gun at Steve or myself, much to my immense relief. We were the only ones around and no one across the street seemed to notice. Where the bullet ended up, I have no clue, but I scanned the paper for a few days to be sure no one was hit by a stray bullet.
I asked, "What about the window?," and good ol' Steve had the answer.

"I'll sweep up the glass and scatter it inside here and lay a rock in the middle; then I'll tell Ernie that some kids threw the rock through the window." Believe it or not, it worked and Steve and I were off the hook.

That one had me shook for several days and I would cringe when thinking about how easily I could have shot one of us, or for that matter so could Steve. He handled the gun, too. But something guided my hand to point it out to the side and up, so the bullet went through the window and landed languidly I hoped, somewhere in the distance. I sold the gun shortly after that incident. I had enough gun play for a while.