I’ve been getting to know my own country again. A break from overseas projects has given me the opportunity to travel closer to home. Instead of more exotic places, I’ve been spending time in places that are entirely un-exotic.

Everywhere I land has its own charms and quirks and special treats, if I try just a little to find them. But the business traveler mostly sees airports, office buildings and hotel properties that are traded from chain to chain without much changing. I like it, though, in a way.

I can get used to the generic sameness of American cities and towns. I get exactly what I expect, and can’t really complain about a boring, clean, spacious hotel room for $98. With HBO on the TV at night, free breakfast buffet, and a redoubtable waitress in her 50s, who refills my coffee, smiles flirtatiously and calls me “hon”.

Oddly enough, work has been taking me mostly to Red States in the South and West, where people are ignorant and crazy, and impossible to understand.

***

Tony is an entrepreneur in a western state. He’s a stocky, soft-spoken man of middle height, in his 40s. He started an online business selling household products at wholesale prices. To his shock and delight, business has been growing remarkably fast. The little pre-fab steel warehouse behind his house can’t stock enough inventory anymore. And he needs employees now. He was interested in hearing about an enterprise I’m working on, to combine the efforts of several companies like his.

We’d talked business for a long while at his kitchen table, and now we were just talking. Talking about his wife and kids and the camping trips they like to take. Discussing some interesting places I’d been to, that he was curious about. And touching on the differences between his world and mine. My host poured me a Diet Coke, disappeared for a minute, then returned.

“You ever see one of these?” Tony asked, proudly showing me an evil-looking handgun.

“May I?” I asked, extending my hand.

“Sure,” he said, handing it over. “It’s unloaded,” he added, showing me the magazine. “Chamber’s empty.”

I held the scary weapon in my hands and considered it. “Ruger .22 long rifle,” I said, reading the manufacturer’s details stamped on the side. “Is this… is this an integral suppressor?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said, smiling, confirming that the pistol’s long barrel concealed what most of us would call a built-in silencer.

“Is this thing legal?” was my next question.

“It is here,” he laughed. “I don’t know about back in New York.”

“It looks like an assassin’s gun,” I said.

“The SEALs use ‘em.”

“Tony, what could you possibly need a weapon like this for?” I asked.

“That,” he said, slowly shaking his head, “is a dumb question. I don’t need the damn thing.”

I waited for him to expand on that. Instead he said, “You wanna try it out?”

I looked at the gun. Looked at Tony. Thought about it. “Well… Hell, yeah.”

***

It was a nice morning, warm and bright and clear. As we left the air-conditioned cool of Tony’s house, I rolled up my sleeves and put my Yankees cap and Ray Bans back on. Pulled a pack of gum from my jeans, popped out a piece for myself and handed the pack to Tony.

“I don’t expect you, uh… you own any guns,” Tony said, as we strolled away from his house, my boots and his sneakers making sibilance in the grass.

I glanced down at him. “Actually, I do. I inherited a very old Lee-Enfield .303 rifle from my Dad and Granddad. I keep it at a little cabin upstate.”

“You get any deer with it?” he asked.

“Do you hunt?” I countered.

“Yeah, I go out a couple times a year,” he said, eyeing me. “Still got some venison in the big freezer. Why? You against hunting?”

“No, I wouldn’t say that, Tony,” I replied. “I wouldn’t say that at all. But I found out it just wasn’t for me. I shot a white-tailed buck once. It was pretty exciting. But when we found him… I just don’t have the stomach for it. So now I’m comfortable being a hypocrite who loves to eat meat, and just shoots the hell out of logs behind my cabin every few months.”

Tony thought about that. “Fair enough,” he said, finally.

Soon we came to a stop about 50 feet distant from two stout, weather beaten tables lying on their side, their bullet-pocked tops toward us. Tony handed me the empty Ruger. “You know how to load it?”

“I think so,” I said, and he handed me a magazine.

The gun was impossibly light. I aimed and fired two shots, hitting the top left corner of one of the tables. There was almost no kick, and the suppressed barrel uttered nothing but two polite little throat-clearing coughs. It sounded and felt less like discharging a firearm than it did like shooting out those red paper stars with an air rifle at a small-town fair.

I aimed again, fired the remaining eight rounds in the magazine, and hit much closer to the center of the table.

“Not bad at all,” judged Tony. “But lemme show you how it’s done, son,” he smiled. He rapid-fired a new magazine in a tight grouping dead center.

As we hunted in the grass, picking up our spent brass, Tony asked, “So now tell me. Was that fun?”

“Yes, it was.”

“You want to do it again?” he asked.

“Yes, please.”

Tony began to reload tiny rounds, one by one, into the magazines. “You know, out here, people get pretty irritated with folks out East trying to tell us about our Second Amendment rights. Where our rights start and end. Can you understand that?”

“I guess I can,” I admitted.

“I own a .308 and a 12 gauge, both Remingtons, because they’re beautiful weapons, an AR-15, a Glock 17, a Glock 20 and this little beauty,” he said holding up the Ruger. “I keep ‘em all in a steel-reinforced gun locker, trigger locks on each one.”

“That’s very responsible,” I nodded.

“Now don’t you think people back in New York should have the same gun ownership rights that I do?” he asked.

“Nope,” I said. “I sure don’t. I like gun control laws, within reason. And I think the gun control laws in New York are reasonable.”

He looked at me, eyebrows up. “Are you telling me I haven’t changed your mind even a little bit?”

“Not even a little bit,” I said, looking back at him and smiling.

He laughed. “You’re abusing my hospitality.”

“Gee, I hope not,” I said, and meant it.

“Naw, not really,” said Tony, handing me back the reloaded pistol. “Let’s kill that table a few more times, then look at that paperwork you brought.”

We killed that table good. Then we went back to his house, signed the paperwork, drank some beer and talked some more about his world and mine.

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