I really like the movie Snatch, in which Vinnie Jones carries a large hand gun, which he describes as quite the opposite of the replica blank firing pistols which his would-be assailants are pointing at him.
His is the Desert Eagle 50 caliber. A hand gun that can blow a cow’s head clean off. That can stop dead the hammering piston of a fire truck‘s Detroit diesel from ten paces. That would surely give you a bit of a sore wrist if you actually shot it at someone.
Before I had seen the movie, I had taken it upon myself while working in Chicago, to feel the power of the beast. To hold the gorilla in my hand, and to fire some melon sized lead at a piece of innocent paper. I had carped my diem when a colleague had left me with a rental car after leaving Hooters drunk (as an English person, the notion of Hooters amused me at the time – now there’s one in Nottingham) to while some time before getting to the O’Hariest of Hairies.
I happened upon a firing range, and walked up to the counter. I surveyed the array of firearms before me, swaying slightly from the pitchers of college kid delivered beer, and said in true kid in a candy shop certainty,
“I want that one.”
Some small discussion later, I was walking to the range, with the advice of the shop keeper ringing in my ears. Of course I was familiar with firing guns, I had declared, now if you could just show me the safety catch…
I went to my stall amidst the pitter patter of tiny bullets, and loosed a few Cuban missiles at the target with a hefty ker-blam from the Eagle. Louder than the other guns on the range, I realized that I was drawing attention.
Shooters (and presumably they had shot guns before) peered around the lane walls to see what the calamity was all about. The inebriate foreigner was neither taking names or kicking ass, but was certainly hitting the target 10 feet in front of him while summoning the essence of thunder storm claps to herald in the spinning slugs. They stopped to talk to me. I grinned. I was that guy with the biggest gun, and it felt good.
The shopkeeper’s advice, in case you wondered was simply this: “don’t limp wrist it.”
Something to live your life by.