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I knew a guy...serious gun nut, and a serious drunk. He told me that once he was dancing around the single-wide with sn AK, music blaring. He heard a loud banging on the door, and opened it a crack to see who was there. State Trooper. Dude said “Just a minute...” and closed the door, turned off the music, and stuck the rifle in a hidden corner. The cop just wanted to ask if he’d heard anything unusual outside in the last half hour. Apparently there was a disturbance at the next-door trailer....the “bad neighbors.”

Years later, he had moved into a smaller travel trailer with his mom, about a hundred miles up the coast. He was doing the drunken gun-nut thing again, with aiming and dry firing, this time with an SKS. I’ll never figure out why he loaded the rifle, but he did. He raised it, pointed it at the kitchen cabinets, and squeezed the trigger. The bullet went through the cabinet, a boxed brownie mix, a jar of peanut butter, and the outside of the trailer. His mom, a certifiable psycho under the best of circumstances, slowly and calmly came out of the back bedroom. She gave him the look of death, and took the rifle. He passed out on the couch, and when he woke up, all of his guns were in storage. He followed up on the errant bullet. It had gone through the front door of a neighboring trailer. He said “They’re Mexicans. They’re probably used to it.”