Gun Questions at Walmart

We hit up the Walmart the other day for some shopping. My son was going camping and while we had many of the supplies, he needed some bug repellant and a flashlight that he could lose without having to face my frown of disappointment.

That means we had to go to sporting goods, which is not an area of the store we frequent. I don’t know what your area Walmart is like, but the ones around here now lock up about a third of the store, so buying stuff is a pain in the ass.

They have a counter in sporting goods and it is where they make keys and sell fishing licenses and stuff like that. We were standing next to the counter waiting for the clerk to finish helping the person in front of us so that she could open the case with the flashlights for us.

Behind the counter is an array of guns. I heard my son’s intake of breath and look over and his eyes were wide and he shakily asked me if those are real.

It broke my heart that my teenager is so frightened of guns that he could not even read the damn packages. I told him no. They were air rifles and over on the side were some paint guns. His only comment was that they looked real. This particular Walmart does not sell real guns, though many do. We finished as quickly as we could and got out of that store.

The Walmart store in El Paso was shot up. In the aftermath, several other Walmarts had people with guns. Shit, lost in much of the hubbub over El Paso was the damn shooting at another Walmart less than a week before.

If you are a place where mass shootings are taking place, why the hell are you contributing to the problem?

I know Walmart tends to cater more towards a conservative demographic as evidenced by the bewildering amount of camouflage items for sale there. Those confuse me also, given that you don’t see many people in camo around here. Okay, the military guys, but those are uniforms. They didn’t go out and buy them as a fashion statement.

I know in the past Walmart has refused to carry some music, magazines, toys, and books in order to placate the religious right.

I notice they still carry a large selection of condoms and sex lubes. I bet you don’t have to show your marriage certificate to buy those.

Walmart, like the people they cater to, is selectively religious. They are sure their messiah would be there with his unexplainable (for a first-century middle-eastern man) white face holding his automatic rifle as he shepherds those brown children into cages and worships at the altar of trump’s tiny orange body parts.

It was not that long ago that the most uncomfortable questions my kid would ask were about sex. Those were only uncomfortable for me because I grew up with a repressed Catholic mother who would not discuss anything that was in any way related to “doing it.”

Now I have to answer questions about why a company would be so fucked up as to sell weapons that could be used to mow down their own customers.

I just wanted to get my kid some camping supplies. I didn’t want to scare him and I didn’t want to have to admit that I have no idea why the hell a company or anyone else would sell guns in this country. With the number of innocent people slaughtered, including a goddamn classroom of first graders, it is immoral.

As we were walking away, I once again wished I had gone to Target instead. It’s further away, but they don’t lock their inventory up so I have to feel like a goddamn criminal and they don’t sell guns.