"Vut happened vas foolish, Gregor. And more to ze point, it vas unnecessary! I vas not consulted before it vas done. . . . "
--Some shifty Russian from
Ronin
All right, now that I've gotten that out of my system, I'll just say that we've all got loopy relations. Mine is my aunt Denise. She's as wildly anti-gun as they come, which was a relatively minor one among a lot of reasons why her marriage to uncle John didn't work out. It wasn't all her fault, of course.
Anyway, when they were still married, uncle John was a reserve cop for awhile. He carried an old .38 revolver and kept it in the dresser when he wasn't working. He was alternating working midnights at the Pillsbury plant and doing midnight shifts with the police department in sleepy little Virden, IL. Aunt Denise hated having him gone all the time, but she loathed that gun. She nagged him day and night to get rid of it. He didn't really need a gun to do police work in such a nice little town, she said, and the gun was dangerous. She was pregnant and was sure the baby would somehow find the gun once it was born.
Anyway, one night when he was gone, she heard noise outside. To her credit, she didn't just lay there and wait for it to go away. She jumped up and got out uncle John's revolver, cocked the hammer, and jumped back into bed. Then she decided to go down the hall and call her father (who lived an hour away) and tell him how scared she was and to come get her. He, being a sensible if crusty old man, told her to hang up and call the police immediately and he'd be down as soon as he could (this at 1 a.m., mind you) which, again to her credit, she did. The cop told her to get back in bed, pull her knees up, put the gun between them and cover it with the sheet. If anybody got into her room before the police arrived, she was to fire through the sheets. This strikes me as an uncomfortable way to fire a
revolver, but that's the advice he gave. I guess it's better than "leave this to the professionals, ma'am" but in aunt Denise's case, that might have been the right call!
She just couldn't sit in that room and wonder what was going on, so she went downstairs and checked the entire house. She didn't use a light or turn any on. When she heard a knock on the back door, she answered it by throwing open the door and thrusting the revolver into the face of the startled man standing there,
with the hammer cocked and her finger on the trigger.
And that's the story of how my crazy aunt (and my cousin Rob) survived pointing a loaded and cocked revolver at a policeman in the middle of the night.
