Gun-Buying Panic Finally Gains Some Logical Support

What is there to write about, except coronavirus?

I guess I could write about my mother’s giant credenza. I think it’s called a credenza, anyway. You would have to ask a guy who likes musicals. It’s an eight-foot-long china cabinet. I got rid of it today. It’s on the way to a consignment shop.

My dad didn’t buy my mother nice furniture or cars. We always got Buicks at cost from my grandfather’s dealership. We got used furniture or things from outlets. Then when my parents divorced, my dad got a girlfriend and let her fill his house with Miami Vice-style furniture that cost a fortune. It included a thousand-dollar credenza. Made from particle board.

My mother earned her own money after the divorce, and when my parents reunited, she bought furniture from an old lady who bought estate goods. That’s where the credenza came from. In addition to being a gigantic, heavy piece of furniture no heterosexual man needs, it’s a reminder of family dysfunction.

Now that it’s gone, I can move my indoor workbenches downstairs into the dining room, which I have been using as a storage area. It will be nice not walking upstairs every time I need a wrench.

If I leave this place, it will be a blessing to be rid of heavy furniture I never liked to begin with. Moving costs money. On the way out of Miami, a mover tried to charge my dad a grand for packing and moving one mirror.

I still have my mother’s bedroom furniture, which is not particularly good. It’s real wood and all that, but the fit and finish are not great. I think it was from an outlet. It’s about like Thomasville, but it seems like the quality control is lacking. No way am I paying anyone to move it. I have the first dresser my parents bought when they married. I already gave away the matching bed. When I was in high school, the dresser and bed were in my bedroom. High school itself was fine, but my life at home was not, so I look forward to not having that dresser.

I also want to unload her first set of sterling flatware. Both sets, in fact. The first set is just plain ugly, and the second set is ostentatious. It’s too fancy. I love my mother, but her taste was limited by her Eastern Kentucky roots.

Actually, now that I think about it, my grandmother had much better taste. That’s odd.

My mother collected Waterford crystal, which I do not like. It’s heavy and lacking in grace. Waterford makes fine vases and such, but no one wants a wine goblet that weighs a pound and looks like…a vase.

It would be nice to have heirlooms around, but what do you do when they’re ugly or they remind you of miserable times? The nice shotgun and terrible, cheap revolver I inherited from my grandfather remind me of good times. The furniture is different.

Actually, I inherited the shotgun from my dad. My grandmother gave it to him.

My dad’s mother, who did not give anyone a shotgun, knitted two afghans for our family. I threw one out a long time ago, and I’m still planning to take the other one to Goodwill. She was a very cold lady. She wasn’t nasty to us, but she had no interest in my sister or me. Didn’t send us Christmas gifts or cards. Didn’t call. On top of that, she liked olive green, which is a depressing color. Every time I look at anything she owned, I think about the fact that she was a stranger to me.

If the afghan were wool, I might be more reluctant to part with it. It’s synthetic.

I have the feeling that I’m cutting myself loose from things. Part of this involves my dad. Yesterday, I found out he had a Linkedin account, so I canceled it. I unsubscribed him from emails from the Kentucky Bar. I took him off a Morgan Stanley list.

I have canceled many accounts for him in the past. When an account has contacts, I look at them to see what kind of people he associated with. It’s interesting to see how many were the sort of people who take advantage of older men they think have money.

A woman who was an associate at his law firm emailed him a while back, out of the blue. At first, I didn’t think anything of it, but then I decided to Google and see if she had divorced recently. I didn’t come up with anything. I emailed her from his account and let her know he had died. No response! Not a good sign. Seems pretty cold. But I can’t draw conclusions. Maybe my email went to her spam folder.

She and her husband have separate Facebook pages. His photo shows him with another man. Hers is a picture of a sunset. No human beings. There are also a couple of photos of her alone on a beach with her dog. Her husband tended to rub folks the wrong way. Maybe things didn’t work out.

It’s funny how smart you get when you get old. It’s too bad I didn’t have any older people to give me good advice when I was young.

It’s not exactly unheard-of for middle-aged women with financial problems to see older men as lifeboats. It’s a nasty business. When you start to fail, you don’t want to be at the mercy of someone who has been wishing for your death from the second the ring slipped on.

There were a couple of single women who emailed my dad regularly during his last years. I find it extremely hard to believe they were interested in him for reasons that were not financial. He was very overweight, and he was past 80. My grandfather had very young admirers when he was around 70, but he was tall and thin, and women had always liked him. Not everyone ages that way.

Anyway. Coronavirus. The epidemic is progressing very slowly, but the madness is still going viral, to use an appropriate metaphor. California’s governor just told his citizens they have to stay home. It’s an order. Oddly, he does not plan to enforce it. Because he can’t. Let’s be real. But he still had the nerve to issue it.

He says people can only go out for essential errands. He says you can’t go to work unless you’re in an essential business. I can already picture the confusion and inintended bad results. What if your essential errand involves a business that isn’t officially essential? Uh oh.

You can’t just imprison a whole state and expect it to work.

Here’s something weird: there are major cities where the mayors have banned the arrest of people who rob houses and commit other types of theft. I think the point is to reduce the load on skeletonized city employee rosters.

I’ll try to be helpful here. When you issue an order like that, you may think you’re saying, “We will not arrest people who steal.” What you’re really saying is, “Go out and steal, right now. You can even break in people’s houses.” That’s how people will take it. You’re also saying, “Buy guns and ammunition so you can protect your home or protect yourself while you steal.” You’re telling people the purge has commenced.

Supposedly, all sorts of hypocritical leftists (redundant) are dashing to gun stores to buy weapons they don’t know how to use. I’m sure this will end well. I wonder how many noobs got their hands pinched by semiauto slides at gun ranges today.

People who pretended to be against the Second Amendment are showing they’re all for it when they think they need it. Why didn’t they just admit it in the first place?

One big difference between leftism and conservatism is that leftism is often a pose. Leftists get to say all sorts of nice things they don’t mean. They get to virtue-signal. Leftist men do it to get gullible women in bed. Conservatism is different, because conservatives have to say things people don’t like to hear. Leftists are like divorced dads who fill their kids with candy and burgers on the weekend. Conservatives are like the moms who make them do their homework and brush their teeth. Naturally, leftism attracts more hypocrites.

With regard to the gun situation, people like me are sitting at home, relaxing. I have enough ammunition to start a South American insurgency or support a typical Tuesday in Baltimore. I didn’t buy it to shoot people, for the most part. I just like to buy in bulk and get good prices. I like shooting recreationally. In the past, I used to think a lot about defending my property, but the closer I get to God, the less that mindset appeals to me.

I’ve been thinking about getting a full-sized Glock. I used to have one. I bought it because my sister, whom I had helped push into rehab, was threatening to send her addict friends after me. They are very lucky she didn’t follow through. I sold it because I didn’t like the caliber or the memories.

The other day, I saw Jerry Miculek carrying at home. He’s a freak pistol shooter. I subscribed to his Youtube channel. He does things you would not believe. He said he carried openly while working on his property. I generally carry a compact Glock with 11 rounds in it. I had to ask myself why I was cheating myself. On my own property, I can carry anything I want. It doesn’t have to fit in a pocket.

I thought about getting a Glock 40. This is a full-size 10mm. I’m already set up for 10mm, so the caliber is not a problem.

I have to think about it. Carrying in a pocket is very nice. Holstered guns are a pain in the butt. They bump into things. They’re hard to draw. I can draw from a pocket in one second.

Added capacity would be nice, but I could just as easily put an extra magazine in another pocket.

A longer sight radius would make for better accuracy, but I shoot just as well with my compact as I do with a full-size 1911. If you’re an assailant within a hundred feet of me, you are in serious danger.

The only way to make a real step upward in long-range accuracy is to carry a long gun or use a red dot sight. I think. Not sure about the red dot. I know nearly nothing about them.

A Glock 40 would give me 16 shots without a magazine change. I now have 11. I should also admit I’m carrying a 9mm at the moment. The 10mm was heavier, and the gun I’m carrying is one I bought for my dad. It has sentimental value.

On the one hand, I have no interest in shooting people; I want to return good for evil. On the other, I still carry, because I might be wrong, or I might have to defend someone else, so shouldn’t I do it right?

Someone said I should get a long-slide Glock. They have longer barrels. The only real advantage is higher velocity. I’m getting 1250 fps from the 10mm right now, with 180-grain hollowpoints. That’s awfully good already. It’s about like a .357, with a bigger wound channel. How much overkill do you need?

I could try carrying a 1911 in a holster to see how I like it. I don’t think I have any defensive .45 ammo, though, unless I’ve forgotten where it is. I’ll bet it’s fun trying to buy it right now. I may have some defensive .38 Super ammo, but I don’t want to carry my pretty barbecue gun and scratch it up.

Actually, I do have a lot of .45 hollowpoints. I had forgotten. I made them myself. I don’t know how good the bullets are. I got them for nothing when I bought my press.

I’m trying to be improved by the pandemic instead of rotting. This morning, I felt that God was telling me to get a grip on myself. I was starting to be overly critical of the people who are panicking, as though I were somehow superior. I made comments on Yahoo News stories, and some were snippy. Ordinarily, I avoid reading the news, and I do not make comments. This afternoon, I went back and deleted them all, except for one, which I thought was acceptable.

I can actually understand why people with dependents are panicking. I give them a little slack. When you have mouths to feed, it’s probably harder to resist buying 10 cartons of eggs. It’s still not smart, and it’s morally wrong, but the pressure is greater.

I do not understand the people who are purely selfish with no discernible excuse. Ellen DeGeneres has been hiding at home for days, and she has had the tone-deafness to post about it on social media. “I’m cowering in the living room of one of my mansions, and I’m sending the maids out for tofu.” This is the opposite of inspiring. I’m surprised she doesn’t understand how bad she looks. Well, no I’m not. She lives in a bubble, surrounded by toadies.

In 1941, celebrities ran down to recruiting stations and joined the armed services. Wow. That’s a little different, isn’t it? Jimmy Stewart, who had to stuff himself to make the induction weight requirement, flew a bunch of dangerous missions. He actually enlisted long before the war started. When he died, he was a general. Lots of celebrities were war heroes (John Wayne, who was having an affair with Marlene Dietrich, notably excepted). Now celebrities post snowflaky messages about their terror of getting the sniffles.

Tom Hanks showed a lot of class. He and his wife submitted to quarantine, and as I recall, he said it was about like having a cold.

I’m hoping the epidemic poops out here, as it did in China, in a month or so. T.B. Joshua predicted the Chinese coronavirus collapse. He seems to think his prophecy is for the entire world. I’m not so sure, but he knows more than I do. If this thing goes away quickly, it will be a nice, relatively painless warning we can all profit from.

Even if it doesn’t go away quickly, we will probably get used to it before long, and then we’ll start to get pretty angry about the ludicrous forecasts and insane restrictions. Life should become more normal by June regardless of whether the epidemic goes away.

I guess I should go to the store and see if they have any cheap rib eyes available. I have been trying to think of different things to fix for dinner that aren’t a lot of work. Seems like I keep coming back to beef. Maybe I should buy a pound of shrimp and have a giant shrimp cocktail.

I’ll check the toilet paper situation out. There is no way I’ll buy any, though. I can’t stand between needy people and their miracle cure.