A Little Matter of Lead

by Caire Lane

My son loves guns. He collects them the way a player does women. He doesn’t just handle a gun. He strokes it, caresses it, lingers on its lines, the remarkableness of its handle, its sighting—all the rare and wonderful things that make one gun different and more spectacular than the next.

As you can imagine, this has led to many heated discussions through the years. Heated as in atomic fissionable.

“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. Guns are only tools. If they didn’t have guns, they’d use knives, or something else,” he says.

“Guns don’t shoot themselves. People use them to kill other people. The bigger the magazine, the more people die… And they die faster,” I answer.

KABOOM!

Two months of silence. My son takes more time to cool down then lava after an eruption of Kilauea. He only starts speaking to me again because his wife, my fabulous daughter-in-law, makes him.

“What will the holidays be like for the rest of us, if you two aren’t talking?” she asks. Chilly. Like an iceberg off the Ross Ice Shelf working its way across the dinner table. “Get over it,” she tells him.

My son is not stupid. He knows she’s the best thing he’s got going for him. Whatever she wants, she gets. No apologies, mind you. He just makes an effort to be silently less disagreeable.

His lifelong obsession with guns led him to turn his hobby into a business. He acquired a dealer’s license and opened Protective Arms. Clever, no?

Things were going well, until a guy he knew casually called him from jail. It seems he had a buddy getting released who wanted to purchase a piece. This idiot thinks he can trade my kid for his freedom in a sting operation. My son knows the law and he knows the score. He doesn’t bite. But the trouble is, trouble could come looking for him, in spite of his honesty and good intentions, in the form of a bunch of ex-cons doing a home invasion/robbery to get the goods.

At the time, he’s got two babies and a gorgeous wife in the house, whom he actually loves more than his guns. An easy calculation. Goodbye Protective Arms.

More recently, he started another business, Crash N Flash Productions. Guess what they do. Whenever some shoot-’em-up, action flick, indie producer lands in the area, they look him up. He wrangles the firepower and sets up the wild stunts that vicarious adrenaline junkies pay goo gobs to see at the movies.

This is very lucrative. Sometimes, it’s too good to be true. Like the time the head honcho tried to hire him to ship, transfer, and wrangle the automatics with hundred round clips, submachine guns, and extra ammo to a film shoot in Mogadishu during the height of a civil war.

Mama had to explain that one to him, but he made the right decision. When the guy called back, my son said, “No, man. Not for any amount of money. Do you think my mother raised a fool?” He slammed the phone down so hard, it cracked. I was proud of him. It gave me faith.

You see, we’re about to enter a new election cycle, wherein my son will vote the NRA ticket. Moreover, he will try to browbeat me into voting it, too, in spite of the fact we have diametrically opposed views on the subject…and on almost everything else. In the past, these cycles have done more damage to our relationship—even when I keep my mouth shut—than the James Webb Space Telescope has done to our understanding of the universe.

CRASH! BIG BANG–NO BIG BANG! SLAM, BAM, GOODBYE, MOM!

He’s my kid. So what if I’m the only one in the family who doesn’t carry. We’ll weather it. Like I said, I’ve got faith.