For the last couple weeks I have been getting a lot of the locals coming in with broken shotguns and such. They are often in the shop between 3PM-6PM. It also looks like they have come right from work as they are either covered in grease/dirt or have some type of uniform on.
Now here is where it gets interesting. They are always drunk! I can smell the booze on them from across the shop. So that means that they got off work, drove straight to the local bar, got tanked and then with gun in hand drove to my shop. What a FANTASTIC idea that is. :rolleyes:
I live about 2.5 hours from you and believe me that is considered normal in Western PA. I work shifts and occasionally we will stop at a local bar in the morning for a couple of beers and some wings. Believe me when I say that there are guys who go there every day after work. There is a big banner that reads “Hunters Welcome” - one would think that drinking and hunting would be mutually exclusive, but I suppose not.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been around so many guys who bar-hop on motorcycles, Grant, but that sort of stoopid conduct doesn’t surprise me. In both cases it’s a cultural thing. I don’t understand or excuse either one.
Tomorrow morning I expect a friend of mine to invite me to attend his “ATF Day” party, held annually on the day after Thanksgiving. He and his buds figure that if the government charges an agency with regulating alcohol, tobacco and firearms, then dammit, those three things should be celebrated together. :rolleyes:
So they meet at a farm near Toledo, get falling-down drunk, smoke cigars and shoot things up. (I fear that someday they’ll discover that the agency actually is called ATFE. Gawd.)
I personally enjoy A, T and F, but I don’t mix A and F and won’t hang with shooters who do. I’ll again decline the ATF Day invitation.
Like the others said Grant, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out they actually started at their lunch break and finished the afternoon shift a little more mellow.
When I was stationed in Spokane in the mid 80’s we would stop at a bar for a beer on the way home from hunting(I don’t drink so I was the DD) we would always run into guys who were drinking there breakfast and lunch before their afternoon hunt. That was one of the reasons we always went out early and finished by lunch.
At least they aren’t pointing said weapons in your face while they are loaded. That happened quite a bit at the old gun shop.
Some bubba would come in needing a new scope (a fact he discovered after picking up his rifle for the first time since last hunting season) and would come in the door waving it around like a new jedi showing off his shiny new light saber.
“It’s not loaded!”
And about 1/3 of the time the staff would clear the weapon and ammo would be either in the magazine or in the chamber.
I’m kidding. I used to race @ Malvern and Salem which is close to Grant all the time when I was growing up. When I was a little older I’d spend my summers in Mentor and Painsville (up near Cleveland) and race and practice with some other friends I knew that lived there.
I’ve also been to several Cleveland Lumberjacks games in the day. Just don’t ask me to say anything nice about the Browns or the Bengals
I know, I know. Massillon boy here, born’n’raised. Served a 20-year professional sentence in southern New England, came back here seven years ago. It’s home.
Grant, I actually attended an “end of year shoot” at a trap club in Wyoming where the club actually set up tubs of ice for kegs (6 in all), a roasted hog, free clays, and stadium lights so people could shoot all night until the kegs were gone. Then they all drove home.
If there was ever an argument against evolution, it is the fact that no one was even hurt, let alone killed that night.
