The gun show

In terms of fashion, the spectrum at today's gun show was about as narrow as the bola ties that rested atop a vast majority of the vendors' puckering-at-the-buttons short-sleeve dress shirts.

There were orange/brown/yellow camo jumpsuits, leather vests paired with denim button-ups, polyester dress pants with elastic waistbands, too-tight fringed halter tops with the NRA logo, and tapered balloon-seat khakis with "Shoot 'em first, dial 9-1-1 second" t-shirts complete with cartoon characters and faux blood spatters.

There were mullets, buzzcuts, knicked shaved heads and beards as long as Manson's.

Let me be clear, these clothes, these hair "styles" -- I'm not talking solely about the men.

The first picture, shown above, is probably my favorite of the day. One of my companions explained to me no, it wasn't a joke, and no, I shouldn't - really, I shouldn't - ask the rather menacing, rather humorless merchant in Chinese for a pricelist for display case four.

Once I put on my glasses and realized this man wasn't flanked by a pair of Mickey Mouse Club flags but rather two commemorative Nazi banners, the sass on the tip of my tongue crept back into my throat and I quickly aborted playing the will-my-looks-get-me-out-of-any-situation? game.


Of all the thousands of firearms at the show, I was most drawn to this four-barreled beauty. Not for its functionality (it only holds four cartridges, after all), but for its inevitable "holy shit, does that thing shoot four bullets at once??" elicitation. For the record, it doesn't, and if it did, it wouldn't be a very reliable nor accurate piece. It's not very sexy after the explanation, but if I had the $795 necessary to acquire it, rest assured I would make up one hell of a good story to go with it.

Oh, and yes, I did take off my black polish this morning. Not for long - I'm in between first and second coats as I type, in fact - but I just couldn't bring myself to disrespect the Nation's Gun Show with half-chipped 'Black Ceramic' fingernails. What would Big Dan at the Ammo Shack have thought when he clearly put in the effort to bring his A game with the "Huntin' Terrorists is my hobby" suspenders?

This is my second favorite picture. As hard as both C and R tried to convince me these were not "creepy ex-boyfriend stalker guides" but training manuals for bail bondsmen and repo-men, I found them all too conveniently located next to the only table of geek catnip (i.e. novelty Star Trek and Marvel Comics' weapons).

A way to bring the beauty of machine guns into the boardroom or to your couch for the Sunday morning talk shows. I have the "classics" mug (given to me by R as a gift) and even though I can't prove it with metrics, I know for a fact getting to look at an original, drawn-to-scale Izhevsk Mechanical Works-manufactured AK47 first thing in the morning has made me a more productive, more intuitive analyst.

And finally, my only purchase of the day: a Glock 19 lapel pin. Since I can't afford and can't legally have in the District a real version of my dream pistol quite yet, I thought I might as well get the accessory equivalent thereof.

As I told a friend of mine whose texted response to my pin purchase was, "Did you get a real Glock to go with it?":

"Darling, if I had $950 to blow on an accessory, it would go toward my YSL Tribute Pump fund, not another gun."

Qiutian jian, gun show!