Cutlery, Guns & Knives, Oh My!

I don’t know where you come down on the whole “Gun” thing, but in my hood you can hear, at any time of the day or night, weapons being fired. Some people come home and turn on the news, or have a drink to unwind, or… fire off a few rounds of ammo from their semi-automatic as a capper to the day. I may have felt safer in the CD (Central District – a rough part of the city, for those who aren’t street wise). Speaking of, I’m not sure I’ve found the local equivalent of street wise yet, which I guess would be road wise, as I keep wondering where all those bullets are ending up.
My former neighbor is a tugboat captain. He’s got a pretty nice collection of guns, a few of which I’ve fired. A WWII German Walther pistol, his 12 gauge shotgun, and a black powder long rifle which is a subculture all its own. As a neighborly gesture, or enticement to buy some guns of my own (I’m not sure which it was), a few years ago he suggested we go down to the Gun and Knife show at the logging showgrounds about a mile down the road. But let me digress here slightly.
The sketchy hand painted road signs alerting motorists that the Gun & Knife show had returned start showing up a few days before the weekend event. At first they seemed kind of hostile and all kinds of visions came to mind. Camouflaged Rambonians emerging from the fir trees looking to upgrade, with an automatic rifle in one hand and giant serrated blade in the other. Grizzly Adams, deer hunters, survivalists – I didn’t have a clue, but envisioned this traveling road show of weaponry as quite possibly the dark underbelly of the NRA they would rather us non gun toting folk didn’t know about.
When the signs showed up again this year, something had changed. No longer the Gun and Knife Show, it was now the Gun and Cutlery Show. Pardon me… cutlery? Were they thinking they would attract the Mrs. Rambos of the world? I would like to have been a fly on the wall in the brainstorming session that suggested targeting (yuk, yuk) a what, more cultured, feminine, gay(!?) demographic. “Get real and think White”, as Jack Nickelson says in As Good As It Gets. Apparently those in command felt a kinship with that sentiment. Knife is back, and I say it’s a good thing.
Grammatically it’s all wrong to begin with. Gun and Knife show could suggest there is one gun and one knife at the show. But Guns and Knives Show is awkward. You throw cutlery into the mix and now you’ve got singular and plural crashing into one another and really, it’s just a mess.
OK, I’ve drawn this out too long as it is. We paid our five bucks and entered into a world I had no prior knowledge of – a reoccurring theme for me since moving to the country. Tables lined the walls with more tables in the middle of the room, all covered in guns and gun paraphernalia. Lots and lots of guns. Oh yes, and a few pieces of cutlery.