An old man once told me that he had lived to see the death of romance in gun culture. Paul was one of many men of the same name with whom I shot during my formative years as a competition shooter and hobbyist. He had the same rough mannerism I imagined Hemingway had in his day: a surety of his actions and a deep sense of the world and its nature.
Unlike many I spent time listening to, he was, in fact, an academic. How ever, he’d given up trying to make sense of things and fell into nostalgia during the 16 years I knew him. His wisdom was something I took for granted in my youth, and I didn’t know what he meant when he said that the “elegance” of American gun culture died with the .44 Special.
A TRAGEDY BY ANY MEASURE
Now, as you know, the .44 Special is not dead at all. As a kid, I literally believed that it was no longer made, and everyone was somehow sad about it being gone. But, of course, I’d missed the point of what Paul had said. What he meant was that something in the culture had died and not that the chambering had been discontinued.
