Interesting Walmart Encounter

Or, alternately titled, "One Of the Joys of Living In A Red State..."
Yesterday when I was at Walmart I saw a guy shopping. He had on a t-shirt. Guess what that t-shirt had on the back of it? A pistol. And not just any pistol, but a Springfield Armory Professional Model 1911. Straight from the Springfield Custom Shop, made entirely in the United States, it's at the very top of the Springfield pistol line -- and that's reflected in the pistol's $2,500 price tag. And you know me. I had to pipe up.
"You know, I'd love to have one of those Springfield Professional Model 1911s, but those things are EXPENSIVE."
He turned around and it was off to the races. We stood there and talked guns for a good 10 minutes or so. He competed in IPSC at the Orange Gun Club, loaded his own ammo for the.40 and .45 and was a big 1911 guy, of course; he said he got his first 1911 at the tender age of 12 but that he also liked the HK pistols. We talked about everything gunnies talk about, including all the hooey published in the gun rags. That particular topic came up as we were discussing the Taurus 1911 and I told him I'd heard nothing but good things about it both in the gun rags AND on the Internet gun boards.
"Yeah, places like that, they don't hold anything back," he said, speaking of the boards. I told him about my almost getting one of those Taurus 1911s but barely missing out on it, as it was gone just a couple of days after I decided to put it on layaway at Shooters Supply.
But I thought that was pretty cool. I've never before been one to just talk to complete strangers out of the blue, and it's not so often someone makes it so obvious he's a fellow gunny. It made me think of an instance of someone asking on (I think it was) the High Road, what he should say to someone he thought might have been a fellow gunny -- in Massachusetts. The guy was afraid of being ostracized if the guy wasn't a gun person because of the political climate in Massachusetts. I'm sure it'd be a lot less likely that I'd run into a guy at Walmart with a Springfield Armory t-shirt -- and the same could probably said for Springfield Armory's home state of Illinois, too. It's good to live in Texas. I bet it'd be just as good in Kentucky, though.
;-)