Customer Service
Cedar City and the Cedar Valley from Right Hand Canyon Road on Cedar Mountain.
Yesterday, I walked into a store here in Southern Utah carrying a .38 Special Smith & Wesson revolver, and no one looked at me twice. Having lived for 25 years in Los Angeles, just carrying a gun into a store seems somehow wrong. Here, it's commonplace. The Utah Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms, and it is legal to go anywhere in the state with a sidearm strapped to your hip.
I hadn't come to rob the place. I'd come looking for a speedloader, a device that loads six bullets into the revolver at once, significantly speeding the process of reloading (hence its name). I approached the man behind the sport counter and asked him for help. I couldn't find the model number of the pistol, so I didn't know which speed loader I needed. He didn't know, either. "Let's ask Pat," he said.
He called, and Pat came from the back room. She was a grandmotherly-looking woman in the neighborhood of sixty, pleasantly plump and jovial. "Let's have a look at it," she said. She flipped the cylinder out with a practiced motion, sighted down the barrel, and announced that the gun, which was originally my grandfather's, was in very nice shape. She also souldn't find a model number. She looked in the book, picked a speedloader, and went and got it. She opened it up and made sure it fit the revolver. Then she opened a box of ammo and put six bullets in it to see if they fit right. They fell out the first two times she tried, but the third time she was able to make the thing work. "Don't tell anyone I did this," she whispered.
I took the speed loader (minus bullets) from her and went to buy a shirt. Later, as the cashier began ringing up my items, Pat came running over. "Don't check that man out," she called. The cashier looked confused. So did I.
Pat explained that she'd found a better model of speedloader (for the same price). We went back to the sport counter and she demonstrated. Sure enough, the bullets didn't fall out this time. "You wouldn't have been happy with the other one," she said. Then she rang up my purchases and I left the store, pistol in hand.
I'm sure my city friends are shaking their heads as they read this, wondering which is stranger: walking into a store with a pistol and nobody noticing, or someone chasing you down to make sure you've got a product you'll be happy with.
I grew up in a small town. After all my years in the city, I'd almost forgotten what it's like to live in a place where both guns and people are respected.
Excellent article - also common occurance in Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho and parts of Nevada.
Kids who grow up respecting guns and having them available seldom consider guns a status symbol.
Reply to this