grenadier
07-06-2002, 01:44 AM
In my hometown there is a chain department store called Rose's which used to sell a wide selection of surplus firearms during hunting season for us local hunters on a budget. I used to swing by there all the time just to see what they had from week to week. All in all it was a pretty cool little place to shop, until it happened: they stopped selling guns of any kind and closed out their sporting goods department. I asked the mgt. about this and their reply was that they were under new mgt. and that this was company policy now. I promptly informed them that I would no longer be doing business with them and bid them good day. About 6 months later, I found out the truth of the matter, and it really made me see red. I met this guy with a bad limp at the pool tables of a local bar, and asked him what was the matter. He told me he'd been shot in the leg, so I asked him about the incident, just out of curiosity. It seems he and a friend had purchased an Indian #2A enfield in .308 and went to try it out in his back yard. For some reason that he couldn't explain, they were "just playin' around" with the weapon and his friend discharged it into his lower leg at point blank range, blasting a big chunk of muscle tissue into oblivion. My take on this was that the both of them were simply too stupid to be allowed to own a weapon of any kind, but the lawyer that they hired had a different idea. They set about suing Rose's for negligence(?!), and Century Arms for selling defective products(??!!), eventually settling out of court for a tidy sum. So, this was why Rose's stopped selling guns. Hooray for the legal system. I tried to explain what this kind of thing would result in for the gun owning public at large, but the money spoke a lot louder than I did, notwithstanding the fact that I frequently had to explain the meanings of a great many words to the moron, which gave me very little hope that I was actually getting through to him in the first place. My second reaction was simply an overwhelming desire to kick this guy in the nuts, but I figured he'd probably sue me, so I just walked out. So this is what kind of a country we have become...