Time to perform the fall ritual of cleaning guns

 

Our tight little hidden home in the woods is very small, just half a room or so, and always a little dirty – grimy dirty and not just disheveled. Everything is especially dusty this year, maybe from the drought or wildfires up wind.

Inside there’s not much airflow, though; only the front door and the stove flue. The windows do not operate. So, the smoke from the frying bacon and steam from the rice and sizzle of the steaks; the wood ash, and dog dust, it all rises and lingers and settles.

In the fall it is a very important ritual for me to take the guns down from the wall and clean them. Not expertly, but functionally and superficially. They get dusty and dirty on the wall. I wipe them down, clean the bores with rods or snakes, disassemble them to their major components, and lube and oil everything. The cheaper pieces – the barrels of my 12-gauge slug, the new inexpensive Remington M7, the new Savage varmint .22 – are corrupted by the moisture in the cabin – wet days in the summer, dampness in the spring and fall, drying laundry in the winter.

I am no lover of guns. My relationship to guns echoes my grandfather’s, and mirrors Shane’s (1954):

Marion Staret scolds Shane for teaching Little Joe about guns.

Shane, the gunfightin’ savior of the pioneers, levels with Marion:

“A gun is a tool, Marion. No better and no worse than the man using it.”

That clarified it for me for many years, until I started to consider whether a gun could be a corrupting tool. And until how I saw men with guns begin to consider themselves judges and juries (and executioners) of worse men and better men alike. “Good and evil both are razed by the hand of the Lord.”

My father was always a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, so I grew up with that, too. I can only assume he’s renounced the membership in recent light of the corruptness (in the broader sense of the word) of the NRA.

The wind, and the rain, have picked up, and it is darkening out the two small windows (north-facing). Our lights are an oil lamp, the gas lamp, and an LED from a 12-volt, 100-watt solar kit. There’s the harsh solvent smell of Hoppe’s gun bore cleaner and Hoppe’s lubricating oil. Neither of which will stop the rust. The lousier guns corrupt, unless I can find a dry, clean place to put them. The lousiness and corruptness are akin.