Humor

You don’t lose it when you don’t use it
by Mitch Jayne

Rural Missourians from all over the state love the Constitution and don’t care which states came up with it.

One of our favorite stories about folks who think that banning guns is the answer to crime, concerns an old Pennsylvania Quaker who caught a man trying to steal the family’s fattening calf, which the thief had on a rope. The Quaker held a cocked and pointed shotgun. “I would not harm thee for the world, friend,” the Quaker was quoted as saying, “but thee art standing where I propose to shoot.”

It always reminds me of the Ozark adage I learned from a long-ago neighbor, “The reason folks around here are so trusting and hospitable to strangers is that we keep a gun behind the door in case we misjudged.”

I remembered this when an old friend of mine sent me some family history he is trying to put together for his children. He had grown up in Dent County, and one story that stuck with him was back in Depression times, when his grandparents tried to help hungry wayfarers when they could with some sort of handout.

The old folks’ generosity always worked well for them until one day two bad guys tried to push in the screen door, and the old man reached above the door, grabbed the .22 he kept for chicken hawks and shot at them both, hitting at least one of them as they ran. That didn’t end the old couple’s sharing what they had, but the .22 stayed above the door as part of the deal with the natural world.

The best example of hanging onto rural hospitality while prepared for the worst that could happen was a wonderful old lady I knew who lived alone in her Reynolds County home and always looked forward to company. She was a gentle old soul, whose house always smelled of spices and the boiled coffee that simmered all day on her wood stove, in case company dropped by.

What a strange visitor might not know was that she killed a turkey ever spring, a deer every fall, and kept a 10-gauge sawed-off shotgun beside the kitchen door for “predators,” as she put it. Just looking at those hammers, I could hear the icy sound they’d make being cocked.

When I kidded her about her small size as compared to that cannon, she said something worth remembering. “I only shot it once, to see if I could,” she told me, “and I can. That’s all me and anyone who looks down it needs to know.”

“Did you ever come close to using it?” I asked her, smiling at the picture of this little whipcord lady facing down a robber.

“Oh, my, no!” she chuckled. “But I’ve had to show it to a couple of hard-mouth drunks and drifters. It beats a dog every time for puttin’ the bad’uns back in their cars!”

That’s a pretty good recommendation, I’d think, for not messing with the Second Amendment. You don’t lose it just because you don’t have to use it.

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