Monday, August 20, 2012

The Furniture Formerly Known as Gun Cabinet

I'm not a fan of guns, to put it mildly. Having been caught in cross-fire on my job, I have negative opinions of the things.

When my father-in-law (great guy, Frank!) was alive, he was an avid hunter. He had quite a lot of guns for various types of hunting. Most of his guns (but not all) were on display in a gun cabinet. When Frank died the guns were eliminated. But the gun cabinet was still there.

One day his widow (Faye) got the idea of having a carpenter come in to modify the gun cabinet. He did so, and now it's a china cabinet. Recreating a thing meant for the repose of guns into something of peace. Appropriate work for a carpenter...

Formerly a gun cabinet. Now a china cabinet.

2 comments:

  1. My late father-in-law had so many firearms, he left them strewn all over the floor.

    After he died when we came to visit, I remember tripping over them.

    My mother-in-law did sell all of them.

    So much for the NRA fantasy that gun-owners are safety oriented.

    I think the NRA is a terrorist organization. I wish at least some politicians would have the guts to stand up to them.

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  2. I don't like guns, at all. I was around them all of my life because my father always had at least one gun in the house for various reasons. Once, when I was a kid and was being threatened at school, I came close to grabbing his .45 from the drawer where he kept it with a loaded clip. Instead, I thought better of it at the last minute and instead went to school and beat the shit out of one of the bullies who was harassing me (8th grade, Central Junior High, Macon GA).

    I gave the guns I had from my father to the Pineville NC Police Dept. who destroyed them. The worst of them was a .38 snub-nosed revolver that was so inaccurate that I once missed a target with it even holding the barrel a few inches from said target.

    A week doesn't go by in this nation without a mass murder by use of guns. I've been caught in crossfire while at work on three different occasions. In the worst such, a bullet almost hit me--went past my left thigh (fired from behind me) and entered the ground just in front of me. I watched the pine bark fly as the bullet penetrated the ground a step in front of me. This is what the NRA has given us.

    One thing that my dad did was instill in me the idea that EVERY gun is loaded, even if it isn't loaded. And never to point a gun at ANYONE for ANY reason, even if the gun isn't even a real gun. This is because my own father shot his best friend when they were both teenagers. My dad was working in his father's grocery store. He was sitting behind the counter and reached down and pulled the trigger on what had been an unloaded .45 that my grandfather kept for protection. Unknown to my dad, one of his older brothers had gone behind the counter, inserted the clip, and jacked a bullet into the chamber. The bullet penetrated the counter (slowing it a little) went through my dad's friends leather jacket (slowing it a tad more) and into the boy's stomach. My dad said that when he vaulted over the counter his pal's jacket was actually on fire. The boy survived and forgave my father.

    But growing up, although around guns, I knew how horrible they could be.

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