In beautiful downtown Wells, Minnesota, there is a large consolidated school, a funky old place slapped together in the early 20th Century and added to over the decades in that haphazard manner which eventually produces a lovely ugliness.
This weekend it will house thousands upon thousands or guns and knives and hordes of scary individuals looking for a loophole.
It's one of the better gun shows in our part of the Plains, and we'll make the trip, a tradition for an unmentionable number of years. It's another of the kind of show I like. The professional dealers with their boring NIB stuff will be leavened with scores of hobbyists trying to sell or swap good stuff they're just tired of.
We used to do a lot of trading in Wells, but my shooting friends have in the past few years adopted the "never-get-rid-of-a-gun" stance, so we'll be armed only with the greenish paper now passing for money. It's been weeks and weeks since any of us have been able to augment our veritable arsenals. Wish us luck.
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This is the show which brought Wells to a certain fame about ten years ago. A West Coast mother and her daughter moved to the little rural town, and Mommie evacuated a brick when she heard "guns" "in" and "school" in the same sentence. So she did what all good mommies do when their child is faced with an immediate and lethal threat. She called the teevee stations who were pleased to send their satellite trucks to the school parking lot. There, they found out that the locals and gun show attendees wouldn't talk to them, just grinned a friendly prairie grin and waved. Of course Mommie talked into the mikes but was quickly declared boring and, by more than a few, stupid. The show went on, and the profits were given to the school, as usual.
It surely makes a man wonder why there isn't much lethal mayhem committed in Wells.
1 comment:
Some years back there was a local Catholic school who had on their premises regular gun shows. This was back in the early 70's, when most of the sellers were private, and many of the exhibitors were just that-exhibitors. "Look at my collection, NO, nothing's for sale." I was attending a local community college, and went to class daily, open-carrying. No one noticed, or cared, and there we no school shootings. Now, with all the security and restrictions, we have school shootings. Can you say 'target rich environment' boys and girls?
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