It was Monday, March 21, 1988. It was a chilly, sloppy morning that was fixing to turn into springtime, sooner or later.<\/p>\n
Mark and Bill, the bassist and drummer respectively in my former band, were the youngest two brothers of a big, brawling Irish-Catholic family of eight – five brothers and three sisters. All eight of them were reliably left-of-center (more accurately, socialist) on every issue; they were also blazingly smart, articulate people; although only the two oldest brothers had gone to college, all eight of them were among the best-read people I’d ever met in my life; Bill – a tenth-grade dropout – was better-read than most Masters’ candidates in literature that I’ve met; his knowledge of James Joyce is rivalled by only one person I know<\/a>.<\/p>\n And after our various band practices, we usually adjourned to glorious hours-long discussions of politics, literature, and history, that usually ended around 2AM and left everyone wanting more. Naturally, they all knew I’d been a conservative talk show host – it was fairly safe to say I was the only conservative pundit in the Twin Cities music scene at the time. So the debates were pretty intense – but fun.<\/p>\n One of the issues we disagreed about the most strongly was gun control. Neil – the brother just older than Mark, who had lived in New York and was a competitive weightlifter when he wasn’t working his day job (as a mover) was the most vigorously anti-gun; “if you’re a man, you shouldn’t need <\/em>a gun”, he’d say – and usually change the subject when I responded “so what if you’re a 75 year old man? Or a 90 pound woman? Or a guy in a wheelchair”.<\/p>\n Mark didn’t like guns because of some legal issues in his teenage years; it was a legal matter, so he abstained pretty intensely.<\/p>\n Bill, the drummer? Well, with him the debate was largely philosophical and intellectual.<\/p>\n Until today.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n The phone rang at 8AM. It was Bill.<\/p>\n “Mitch? You gotta help me buy a gun”.<\/p>\n He related the story; he’d been mugged the night before. Some thug had made off with about $300 in cash. That followed a breakin that’d happened a few months earlier that had netted a TV and some cheap stereo gear (and thankfully none of the musical instruments in the basement).<\/p>\n Bill had had enough. Although he knew Minnesota’s concealed-carry law at the time would never grant him a permit to carry in public, he wanted to secure his home – and secure it but good<\/em>.<\/p>\n I picked him up around 10. We drove to Richfield Gun and Pawn.<\/p>\n He made a beeline to the store’s large, well-trafficked Assault Rifle section, and started eyeing a Norinco AK47.<\/p>\n I tactfully talked him away from it; for home defense, either a shotgun or a handgun were a much better idea.<\/p>\n I directed him toward a really nifty 12 gauge riot gun. We walked toward the counter…<\/p>\n …and he saw the SKS carbine. It was like a magnetic attraction.<\/p>\n “Bill”, I said, trying to nag him out of it. But between the firepower (semi-automatic, ten round stripper clip-fed magazine) and the price (about $100 at the time), it…well, “sent the message” he wanted sent.<\/p>\n I talked him into buying a box of soft-point rounds (the better for shooting indoors) along with a couple of boxes of cheap Egyptian hardball, and we drove out to Bill’s Gun Range in Robbinsdale. We set up on the line, I walked him through the safety rules (it’s always loaded), and he fired the first shots of his life, busting off five shots at a paper target.<\/p>\n And he came up smiling. My first convert.<\/p>\n Another true believer.<\/p>\n I had created a monster, as events turned out – but in a good way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was Monday, March 21, 1988. It was a chilly, sloppy morning that was fixing to turn into springtime, sooner or later. Mark and Bill, the bassist and drummer respectively in my former band, were the youngest two brothers of a big, brawling Irish-Catholic family of eight – five brothers and three sisters. All eight […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-twenty-years-ago-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1990\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}