8,456!
David felt his respiratory system ice over in that moment; it just solidified into something heavy with cold and death, immovable and gargantuan, something not him.
He flicked away from the page to refresh it, and when it came back, the e-mail count was up to 8,761.
He looked around, convinced that everyone in the office was staring at him but would make no eye contact, as if his colleagues were turning away exactly as his eyes rose to meet theirs.
That many e-mails could mean but one thing: the Big Mistake.
He glanced at the displayed topic lines of the e-mails in the column that ran the length of the screen.
ASSHOLE
Times commie
ignoramus
Should have called NRA
Fool
what about seven-day waiting period for YOU!
Can’t tell Winchester from Rem
Not a PSR, clown
DUH
And on and on it went.
He picked one that seemed less incendiary than the others, its topic line reading “Visual vocabulary insufficient.” At least this guy might understand punctuation and capitalization.
Dear Mr. Banjax,
I suppose by now you have been notified you ran a four-column photograph on the front of your newspaper claiming that you had a picture of a crooked FBI agent firing an FN PSR at the FN range in 2006, when what he is actually holding is a Remington VTR 700, a model not introduced until late 2008. You must also realize that the photograph completely invalidates the premise of your story and your investigation, reveals itself to be a fraud, and suggests that the integrity of the Times has been tarnished beyond recovery. All in all, a smashing performance. Congratulations! You couldn’t have done more harm to your cause if you actually TRIED to harm your cause.
This represents a distressing tendency on the part of Mainstream Media. You all are so opinionated on gun matters, gun policies, gun politics, yet you lack even the most fundamental gun knowledge to buttress your implicit claims of expertise. Quite the opposite, you oh so frequently expose your woeful ignorance and laughable grasp of reality. But even by that standard, this morning’s blooper is quite spectacular.
You represent the media assumption that a gun is just a gun. Any gun is any other gun and therefore you of the enlightened, educated ironic classes needn’t trouble yourself with actual facts about it. The facts don’t matter, only something you’re sure you see, called “the truth.” But if there are no facts, there is no truth. It’s a pattern we see repeated over and over again. Someone once defined a newspaper gun story as “something with a mistake in it.”
You idiot. You were incapable of looking at one rifle and distinguishing its differences from another rifle. It’s not rocket science, chum. Thus you publish a picture misidentified that literally millions of people-not all redneck neanderthals listenin’ to CW n’ drinkin’ moonshine in trailer parks, neither, Snuffy-will see through in a second.
The FN PSR is a refined version of the Winchester Model 70 and still bears the hallmarks of that VERY FAMOUS weapon. The most obvious of these is the trigger guard; the Winchester designers of the early 30s who created that piece of metallic (later alloy) genius had a sense of streamline and grace and they managed to come up with a classic interpretation of the oval. That Winchester oval is part of the visual vocabulary of our times, and any hunter recognizes it instantaneously; it carries with it a trace of art moderne, reflecting the fashions of the period of its creation, and, serendipitously or not, it was so slick and eye-appealing and perfectly scaled and brilliantly machined and blued that even now, over 70 years later, its inheritors in South Carolina can’t bear to part with it. That is why all the new FN rifles bear approximations of it, and any rifle claiming to be FN bolt action would feature such an emblem. The rifle you identify as an FN SPR does not.
It contains another equally vivid symbol of an American classic. Remington had a different, though just as distinctive, interpretation of the trigger guard. They knew that their rifle, the Model 700, had to have an immediately apparent visual signature that marked its difference from their main competition, the 70 (do you get the 70/700 dynamic?). They were coming into the market 30-odd years later (1962) and at that time, the Model 70 was the baseline, but they saw an opening because they knew that Winchester was planning an upgrade that would ease manufacture but coarsen the product. So they had to deliver something distinctive. Their trigger guard has a kind of bow to it, an expansive exaggeration that takes it out of the oval, opens it up, out, and downward (some say the function is to allow a gloved finger easier access to the trigger), but again with a harmony and grace that is instantly recognizable to anyone who knows even the slightest thing about firearms.
Evidently, you and your confreres at the
I could go on to various differences in the nuance of stock and bolt design. I could point out that the scope on the rifle is a Leupold 9X and unlikely to possess the refinement for the kind of shooting (less than MOA at 300 yards) the picture and the story attribute to Mr. Memphis and the “PSR.”
But you get the point: all in all, pathetic, ignorant, transparent. Quite ugly. You think we’re so stupid, while you’re the one who’s stupid. You should be ashamed.
Sincerely,
Neanderthal P. Country-Music Redneck
3d Trailer on Right
Passel O’ Toads, NC
aka
Lawrence M. Fisher, MD, PhD
Director of Oncology
Methodist Hospital
Kansas City, MO
Banjax realized he had been had. He had been faked and ruined and he’d walked right into it.
“David?”
It was the bureau chief’s secretary.
“David, Mel would like to see you.”
“Well, I-”
“David, right away,” she said in a voice that communicated the secret meaning
44
Swagger lay in darkness, too focused to sleep. He was curled on the cot, facing the wall under a thin blanket, aware of the TV camera in the corner of the dark room, its red eye signaling its activity. He waited for time to pass, for his torturers to select a guard, then bed down for the night.
His wrists were bound together by the tough plastic of the flex-cuff, impervious to most blades; it took a pair of clippers and a great deal of force to cut through them. Thus, by the configuration of wrist on wrist, his fingers were closely intertwined. With the fingers of his right hand, he went to his index finger, left hand, and began to carefully peel the Band-aid around the base of the finger-“Cut ourselves wanking, have we now?” It was a process made more arduous by its taking place behind him, in the dark, and inside out, with the left to the right and the right to the left, with numb, swollen fingers. But by picking at the edge of the Band-aid, he got it loosened, and by stretching, sliding, manipulating with great focus and energy, he got the Band-aid removed from the base of the finger. There, buried in scab from the skin-cutting tightness with which it had been wound about the finger, a few inches of hard cutting wire used in certain surgical applications rested, coiled tightly. He got the coil off the finger, ran it through his hands to open it and clean off the dried blood, then-again straining at the awkward angles, the stretch of joint, the numbness in his fingertips-he looped the cutting wire over the plastic of the flex-cuff, caught an end in thumb and forefinger of each hand, and began to saw.
It was not easy. He felt the sweat rising, slicking his body in the dark little chamber, and he tried to lie quietly, as a man asleep might lie. Meanwhile, the wire would not bite into the plastic and kept slipping. It would snake out of one hand and was tense with inbred circularity, having been wrapped around his finger for such a long time. He focused everything he had on the ordeal, trying to get his fingers to obey, trying to get the cutting wire to bite into the plastic, trying to hold it taut, trying to keep his whole body still for whoever was watching the television monitor, and it seemed for the longest, the most frustrating time not to be happening, it was not happening
And then it happened. Why then and not a minute earlier or a minute later he’d never know. Somehow he scored enough into the flex-cuff for the wire to catch and bite, found some leverage in his hands (though they cramped as if being crushed in vices) and, emboldened by his tiny taste of success, began to saw away. On that surge of energy, he got the flex-cuffs cut in less than twenty minutes.
The trick then was not to give in to the temptation to throw out and stretch his cramped arms, to flex and satisfy his tightened fingers, to rub his raw wrists. He lay still, breathing, waiting.
Time passed.
No one rushed in, beat him senseless, and clapped the iron manacles about his limbs.
He squirmed, turned, and still keeping his hands, though now free, behind his back, twisted downward and got the wire looped over the flex-cuffs about his ankles. With free hands, he had better leverage this time and was able to wrap the wire about his fingers instead of pinching it between them; he was done in five minutes.
He flicked his ankles, and each shoelace in his left hiking boot presented itself to him, as if specially weighted. It was weighted; from each he withdrew a two-inch-
