The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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The South End Gun Club meets every 3rd Thursday of the month, rain, shine, Hell or High Water. They have a short meeting, discuss New Bizness, welcome the new recruits (mostly women these days), then move right on out to the Range. Drinking used to be allowed, but after the incident with Fast Draw Davy, the club reluctantly voted to make abstinence a requirement. Probably a wise decision.

Davy was always, drunk or dead sober, a hothead. He could shoot the eyes off the Obama photo the Club loved to use for a target at 50 yards with everything from his Glock to a favorite semi-auto to a full auto. Some of the boyz had mixed feelings about this. No, not the President as target — they were almost universally hostile to a Muslim as Commander-in-Chief — but whether Davy should brandish his AR-15 at the Range, considering it was illegal to own a weapon of mass mayhem. But Davy had helped half the membership in conversion techniques and they felt somewhat reluctant to take a stand against a gun they themselves now owned … or coveted. Davy was damn proud of that machine and its undisputed firepower. He meant to show it off every chance he got.

The Range has a long and checkered history of late night firefights and high decibel debates, and the new arrivals to the adjoining properties, once pastures or woods, but now expensive McMansions whose professional owners liked their peace and quiet, didn’t much cotton to all these NRA zealots with their high caliber hi-jinx. As always, one man’s rights are another’s pain in the ass, but … welcome to the land of the free, home of the bravado.

When the sheriff’s deputies had come out on successive Thursday night meedings responding to the neighbors’ complaints that there was automatic weapon fire, Davy, being Davy, had become belligerent. He could quote the 4th Amendment backwards and forwards and by god, no tin star punk kid was going to tell him what gun he could or couldn’t own. Maybe the fact that he was holding his prized rifle in one hand a beer in the other set off alarm bells in Deppity Richards playbook, but fifteen minutes later every available cop on the island was parked with blue lights strobing at the Club’s back lawn next to the shooting range and they were moving in, shotguns up and safeties off, and for a few moments it looked like an O.K. Corral showdown. Everybody but Davy put their armaments on the ground — obviously this was out of hand.

Davy, though…. Davy seemed to be considering his options. Seriously considering them. Which, if you’re an officer of the law and you’ve asked an armed man once, in a not polite way, to drop his weapon, you are expecting an immediate acquiescence, not a fidgety wild-eyed hesitation. When Davy set his beer can down, the Gun Club stepped backwards almost as one crowd. The cops brought down their riot guns and holy moly, what seemed almost comical a minute ago, wasn’t at all funny right now.

Billy Wasserman, the current president of the Club, said, ‘Jesus Christ, Dave …” about the time Deputy Richards repeated his demand the gun be put down NOW!

Well, Davy did. The officers handcuffed him, put his AR-15 in a squad car trunk and that night’s practice on the Range turned into a late night conference where alcohol was banned from all future meetings. As well as illegal firearms…. Davy got his gun confiscated along with a steep fine and two years of probation. He got himself another semi-automatic, converted it, but he never tries to bring it to the Club. Just like the rest. Laws might be made to be broken, but not flaunted. Even on the wild South End.

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