Sven went to the barbershop to get his beard trimmed before his surgery because he wanted to look his best in public, if only should the funeral home have to show up.
When he opened the barbershop door, there stood the barber and a white-haired, freshly buzzed-cut customer opposite him at the counter, sharing a joke. The barber’s eyes and smile grew wide when he saw Sven, and said, ”Haven’t seen you forever, Sven! You're needin’ a beard trim, eh?”
Although his barber chair was empty, Sven remembered that the younger barber hadn’t been there that day back in 2020, and despite his assurances he would do him right the old barber had snagged Sven's turkey neck with his hair clipper. Nodding toward the younger barber working behind him, Sven said, “Yep, an’ I’m lookin’ at that man to do it.” The older barber laughed.
So feeling a little trepidation below the various post-Trump "Miss Me Yet?" posters on the ceiling, admittedly, Sven settled down on a comfortable-looking, over-stuffed chair at a pivot-point near the door. He sat west across the room from the framed military lapel pin collection, the old-time fishing lure display on the east wall, and in-line with the pyramidal stack of Schmidt Beer Wildlife series cans over the barber chairs; the hunting and shooting magazine rack within easy reach.
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| Schmidt Beer Wildlife series cans |
The large screen TV hanging from the ceiling, featured a muted hunting video presenting a review of the AR15 Valkyrie .224 ammunition round made by Federal and its effects on pronghorn antelope, among various other objects, shot from a custom-made bolt action rifle. https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2017/11/02/224-valkyrie-will-get-100gr-bullet-federal-premium-releases-official-data-loads/
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| AR15 Valkyrie .224 ammunition round |
Sven had his masculinity well in check for the visit, wearing his classic khaki-brown Browning hunting cap with its trademark 8-point gold buck head on it, his old scarred Walls Wear chore jacket with hood; his lace-up ankle-high waterproof leather boots that showed some serious-use wear, and a pair of loose-fitting All American painter guy-tradesmen denims that featured an authentic reinforced hammer loop off one hip and two along-leg plier & screwdriver pockets below the other.
Buzzed-cut guy apparently didn’t know that gun ammo at the retail level had been extremely hard to get even here in the leader of Minnesota 2nd Amendment Sanctuary Counties. https://www.americanexperiment.org/roseau-becomes-first-mn-county-designated-as-second-amendment-sanctuary/
Sven knew that any conscientious self-respecting gun owner could always purchase endless supplies of smokeless powder, sizer dies, scales, bullets, primers, and empty cartridges to make their own ammo, 24/7, but manufactured ammunition was virtually impossible to get. So he authoritatively put his two-cents in about it before he was thought a fookin’ liberal right off the bat.
BC man turned toward Sven in acknowledgement, then back to the barber and his son who was finishing up the customer in his chair, and said, “No shit? You couldn’t buy ammunition here? Rifle? Pistol? Surely shotgun shells.”
Sven subtly nodded to affirm that statement as he paged through an environmentally appropriate magazine.
The scissors in the young barber’s flying hands snipped errant hairs from his sitting customer’s head. Turning the barber chair to and fro ever so slightly to see effect, he whirled the chair around toward the huge mirror there with his other hand, gave the customer a mirror to approve his profile, and immediately returned to the conversation at the counter.
“Nuthin’ worth buyin’ anyway.”
“Like what?” asked BC Man. “You could get twelve gauge shells couldn’t you?”
“Oh yeah,” answered the barber’s son, with a coy smile. “Them, even on Sundays.”
Whirling the chair back around with a flourish, he deftly swept the cut hair from the customer's neck with a soft-bristle hand brush, removed the bib from his collar, and dumped the cut hair to the floor, continuing, “But ya can't buy breachin' rounds or the good stuff.”
“Vat da ‘ell is a breaching round?” Sven brusquely asked from offside the conversation, hungry for contemporary knowledge after the social and media restrictions of Covid that so severely impacted all his Right To Know shit.
A loose-leaf advertisement brochure with a photo of a buff individual tattooed with "Ignorance can be fixed; Stupid is Forever,” across a pronoun-accurate ammo bandolier-crossed chest, gripping an AK47 in one hand, and the lengthy scroll of the blood-stained U.S. Constitution in the other, fell from the anti-liberal magazine Sven was paging through for societal impact.
Smiling at its perfect timing, Sven reiterated,”Explain dat vud you? I’m yust an old guy, ‘elp me out, eh. Vat’s a breach-ching round? ”
Remembering his Marine Methods of Entry exercise, the youth explained, "Breaching rounds are designed to destroy doors to quickly force entry into a locked room. There’s not a door in this whole fookin’ county... Or four counties east, west or south that can withstand a fookin’ breaching round!!.”
Demonstrating its application upon an imaginary door, the young barber shouted, '"AVON CALLING! KABOOM!'"
Knowing the drill, after this stirring exposé of military prowess, Sven had to look the Marine directly in the eye and unhesitatingly tell him, "Half its length port to starboard Marine," and so became just another customer in the chair for the young barber, again. Worth the wait.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUGJ-l9cGoA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaching_round
I wrote the above a week before the Uvalde, Texas school shooting of May 24th and mean no disrespect to the tragic loss of 22 children or the gravity of the trauma associated with it. I considered postponing as it fictionally describes an image of an AR15 and it's ammunition on a magazine page; the same type of weapon used in the shooting.
ReplyDeleteI published the story because although it satirizes the pro-gun establishment, particular of this county, this state, and so many others, the Uvalde mass shooting is an everyday commonality that hardly dents its popularity.
President Biden said, "It’s been 340- — 3,448 days — 10 years since I stood up at a high school in Connecticut — a grade school in Connecticut, where another gunman massacred 26 people, including 20 first graders, at Sandy Hook Elementary School."
I personally believe that owning a gun isn't wrong, as I've described in earlier posts, but that the gun-lobby, as adamant as it is to insure that right, should be as adamant that they not get into the wrong hands, again and again.
Thanks for going under cover Sven to bring us this report. I’m in favor of a well regulated militia. But the Constitution also regulates the killing of children.
ReplyDeleteIt needs amending.
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