In response to Jennifer’s query:
I didn’t “become” a gun nut. I spent most of my formative years (ages 10-18) working behind the counter and in the back room of a gun shop.
While that sounds cool and all, it was the family business, so while most kids that age were out having friends and such, I was selling ammo to the local Cletii during store hours, assembling AR’s from kits after store hours and spending weekendsĂ‚Â shooting either DCM rifle or pre-IDPA pistol courses, reloading my practice ammo or working tables at the local gun shows.
OK, that still sounds much cooler than it actually was.
Let’s just say that it was “so cool” I didn’t even think about firearms for almost a decade after the store closed. I was an owner, but I can count at least eight years that I didn’t put a round downrange. Thankfully, the skills you learn as a child never really leave you, whether it is playing piano or clearing a table of steel plates in a Metal Magic course.
At one point in my youth I wanted to follow in the family tradition and become a Youth Minister, because it all seemed so cool – the camping and everything… Fortunately or not I was not holy enough and was assailed by doubt.
I was assailed by women. Or, as I should probably put it, women who liked “car guys”, since there were very few women back then who liked “gun guys”, and the ones that were out there were already taken. So I moved onto cars.
Which just proves you’re a very rational and smart fella.
I wish I had been assailed by women, damn not even. I didn’t have car-money until I was twenty-three already and had to use my damn student loan. I got around on a bicycle for the longest time – or hitchhiking.