My Irish Up: Rock around the Glock

Mike Corrigan

By Mike Corrigan

BN Columnist

I have never owned a gun, but now that either Obama or Romney has been elected, or even if it was just a tie, the time seems right.

The way things are going, you never know when a firefight will break out on your street, or when you might be called on to fail to make a non-fatal citizen’s arrest. Be Prepared, I say. Because, these days, with civic leaders all across the country handing out concealed weapons permits like Halloween candy, probably even the Boy Scouts are armed.

So, I went to a gun show. Never having handled any firearm except for that M-16 in the Army (Rifle Range H, Ft. Dix, N.J., October, 1969, double-feed), I didn’t know what make and model to get. Naturally, being male, I didn’t want to admit to complete cluelessness about firearms, but, being male, I also knew I could bluff my way through it. (It’s called savoir faire, for those of you who don’t have it.)

The first booth right inside the door looked promising, as the proprietor was brandishing a bazooka and swearing at a police officer. I ran my hands over the beautiful weapon padlocked to the counter.

“Help you, Slick?” the man said.

“I was looking for um, something along the lines of… say, this?” I said.

“That’s a BS-650b Cruise Missile. You got two hundred thousand dollars?” he said.

“I said something ‘like this,’” I shot back. “More in the pistol class, though.”

“Look around,” he invited, and he fell to swearing at a woman in the next booth, for practice. I thought I had been looking around, to tell the truth, and was hoping for a bit more guidance. The handguns seemed to be arranged in cases like fine violins, so I mooned at them through the glass awhile. The names sounded familiar and they all looked as if they would deliver death at my hands to anyone who so much as looked at me wrong. I decided I could just get one of the cheap ones, or maybe two, in case I was having a really bad day.

But at this point, the merchant in the first booth and the woman in the next booth began shaking their fists at one another and then she drew on him and fired but missed and winged the police officer, so I got out of there and went to Super-Value-Discount-Half-Price-Mart, where everybody else in town was.

“Help?” said the clerk.

“Just looking,” I said.

“No, help,” he said. “I need to move six units by nine o’clock or I’ll be forced to just work for tips.”

This was more like it. “Sell away,” I said. I learned a lot. That the Glock, for example, fires cardboard bullets, or at least that's what the clerk said. “You don’t want it,” he told me.

“What do I want?”

“You want this little baby right here.” And he hefted a compact Mini-Gatling Gun Thingie, though I’ve cleverly changed the brand name in case you ever imagine you’ll get the drop on me, knowing what I’m carrying.

“An assault weapon?”

“Sure,” he said and slapped me on the shoulder, fellow-killer style. “Say you’re hunting and you come upon a flock of deer (he might not have said ‘flock;’ I wasn’t taking notes). How do you kill them all? Just put this thing on automatic and spray that field. Or, say you have a home invasion. Just fire when ready.”

“What if I want to invade somebody else’s home first? You know, in self-defense?”

“This is your model. It’s all-purpose.”

“Beautiful.”

I bought two, one for the cat. She doesn’t feel safe walking the streets. I also got her a Glock, for alley fights. You just can’t have enough guns these days. It’s a dangerous world.

Mike Corrigan somehow earned a Marksman’s Medal in the U.S. Army. The standards were lower then.