Love and Hydrogen [antikvár]

THE GUN LOBBY y old friend Chick sells guns out of a hamper he keeps in his basement. He sells them at gun fairs and uses the money to buy more guns that he sells at other gun fairs. It's a living, he says. I give him some mild grief about the hamper and he puts up with it, like a little rain on a nice day. The hamper's got straw flowers on it and a little wicker clasp. He could have phased it out by now, certainly, and it hasn't been close to big enough since what he calls The Early Years, but he keeps it in service. He says, "My reasons cluster in the What Do You Care? category," As in, when you ask, that's what you're told. His attachment to the hamper feels to me like nostalgia. But Chick is a puzzle, and I may be wrong. Chick says that a sentence about selling whatever you want to whoever you want is in the Bill of Rights and never gets talked about. He says that in our history books, every paragraph and a half, someone's reaching for a gun. He gets no arguments from me. I grew up on all those snub-nosed pioneer kids sitting around on their little woven rugs, learning their long division with coal on the backs of shovels while they listened to stories about Daniel Boone's Old Bess, Bess Boone's Little Danny, Betsy Ross's Philadelphia derringer, or Carrie Nation's m km