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In reply to the discussion: Patton Oswalt: What gun owners think they look like... [View all]The Magistrate
(95,247 posts)You have some stiff competition, however. I have encountered a number of people it would be fair to describe as mythomanes. A person who follows claims of descent from Hungarian nobility with tales of having risen from the ranks to command a platoon in Viet Nam by the age of eighteen, a person who claims to have been on the women's Olympic weightlifting team but could not compete that year because she blew out a knee going for a record dead-lift, and tells how she and her friends, when a man came into their bar, would castrate him with a length of heavy fishing line --- such people can be quite entertaining, so long, anyway, as they are not asking to be lent money, or presenting themselves as people who can be relied on to come through in something serious. One of the tells is a flooding cascade of increasingly irrelevant detail when even mild skepticism is expressed towards something which seems not quite on kilter in the tale. I have already pointed out the element in your tale, in its earliest compressed version, which does not seem quite right to me, and note that, in this much more detailed version, that point is not addressed, though we are introduced to specific makes of automobile and motorcycle, specific types of guns, bevies of loose women high on cocaine, and sundry other items with a fascinating glitter to them. But it is not the bling that is the thing, it is the telling detail, the detail that makes the reader see it through your eyes, makes the reader feel a presence come up off the page, an immediacy that leaves no room for doubt. Your account, sadly, lacks this. Nothing in it compels belief, nothing in it stands out, nothing in it would be beyond the reach of a person willing to construct a pastiche out of various true crime and competent popular fiction accounts of the milieu you set it in. It is worth noting, too, that the nearest thing to a checkable item you offer is a book by someone else, and you acknowledge that its author, who evidently has looked into the matter, sufficiently for his account of it to be convincing to a publisher, does not seem to think you have anything worth hearing to say on the subject. At such a distance from the matter as I am, I see no particular reason to doubt that author, and to instead believe you.
It also seems worth mention, again in the spirit of helpful advice only, that you rose to engage in evident high dudgeon that a stranger might think your interest in fire-arms could be seen as not completely healthy. The only thing you have been consistently detailed concerning, from first to last, is the specific types of fire-arms you have wielded and owned, their makes and models, even their relative rarity and collector's value. Not the best way to convince someone your interest in guns is not a bit obsessive: a better tack would be something on the lines of '...and yeah, I got a couple of guns out here, so what?'