Encyclopaedia of Tiny Facts

Both the name of an Austrian weapons manufacturer and its most famous product: polymer-framed, semi-automatic 9 mm handguns popular with the FBI, CIA – and my Uncle Roy; my uncle Roy lives in south Florida, though he also has homes in New York City, Cat Cay, and the Cayman Islands; several months ago, I visited my cousin’s farm in Florida – where he has goats, chickens, cattle, horses, and emus; we played with several wild boar piglets (orphaned after my cousin and uncle found the mother boar burrowing through crops – and unloaded their firearms into her); I wanted to play with the baby animals; my uncle brought a truckload of guns and set up various targets on hay bales; he had no interest in the furry babies; eventually, I walked over to my uncle – who was firing away at a target; I asked, “Is that a Glock?”; Uncle Roy replied, “Yeah. With a laser sight”; “Huh…it’s made of plastic, right?”; “Mostly. They used to say you could get it through airports without it being detected. Standard issue for the CIA”; “Huh”; then my uncle laid the Glock into my hand and asked, “You know what kind of gun assassins use?”; “No,” I answered; “.22,” said Uncle Roy; this was surprising to me, as all my childhood gun experiences involved BB and pellet guns, though some kids I knew used .22 rifles to hunt small animals with their fathers; the .22 cartridge was small (not much larger than a pellet); “A .22?” I asked. “They don’t pack much punch, do they?”;  he replied, “Back of the head. Two shots. With a silencer, nobody even knows what happened. You could be in and out of a hotel room like a ghost”; then my Uncle Roy smiled, took out a pack of Juicy Fruit, slid two pieces of gum into his mouth, and instructed me to shoot at the target; while my uncle watched, I fired all seventeen bullets (“Sixteen in the clip and one in the hole,” said the immortal Warren G) at the target; we walked over to the target and saw that I hit the black-outlined bad guy – a grand total of three times (and they were flesh wounds – I completely missed the vitals); I never claimed to be a good shot, and besides: I felt self-conscious and judged; I imagined my Uncle Roy using his Glock to kill a mother boar (this was, in fact, the gun he’d used on her two days earlier); he’s an excellent shot, and seems to have no qualms murdering a mother; I wonder if CIA agents – or assassins – ever use their Glocks and/or .22’s to kill wild boar mothers; I doubt it; I was rather troubled by this orphan business and thought about adopting one of the boar piglets; my uncle dissuaded me, though, saying: “It’ll grow to be 200 pounds. And then it’ll kill you”; I left the orphaned wild boar piglets in Florida; my Uncle Roy swore he’d take care of them and even name one of the piglets “Glock” (after the method by which he dispatched the piglet’s mother); perhaps unsurprisingly, my Uncle Roy has trouble sleeping at night.

~ by tinyfacts on May 20, 2010.

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Tags: .22, 9 mm, assassin, Austrian, Cat Cay, Cayman Islands, CIA, cow, emu, farm, FBI, Florida, Glock, goat, gun, handgun, horse, Juicy Fruit, New York City, piglets, pistol, uncle, Warren G, weapons, wild boar