Dog and Gun Story, or "Why the Jehovah's Witnesses Haven't Been By Recently"

(This story is almost 40 years old, so I think any applicable statutes of limitations have long since passed.)

This is no shit:

My family had a German Shepard. He never bit anyone, but he seemed to be well aware that he had a fearsome image and he made the most of it. He'd lunge at the screen doors and after breaking through the screens of the lower half of the doors in the summer and breaking the glass of two doors in the fall, my dad had the lower parts done in plexiglas and left them in all the time.

I had begged and pleaded and finally, for a birthday, I got a CO2 pistol that looked like a revolver. It looked something like this, but not quite:


It held six .177 pellets. I also got a pellet trap. I bought a holster for it (cheap-ass black leather) and I set the trap up in the basement. I would practice drawing and shooting, which I had to do very carefully, as it was explained to me that firing pellets randomly around the basement would be Really Bad Form.

At the time, we had three dogs besides the German Shepard. The dogs were supposed to stay in the kitchen/family room area, there were swinging doors that generally kept them in. (We later had one 30lb mutt who figured out that if instead of jumping on the door, she leaned against it, she could get out, but that's another story.) Because of the expense of kenneling four dogs, one of us usually stayed home if the family was going somewhere that we couldn't take the dogs.

So there it was, late morning on Saturday. I was home alone and in the basement, shooting my revolver, when the doorbell rang repeatedly. That caused a cacophony of barking and I could hear the noises as the dogs tried to get through the kitchen door. Then I heard that one of them had made it and that it was the German Shepard. The doorbell rang again, so I dropped the revolver into its holster and went upstairs to see who the hell it was.

(At the time, that area was what now would be an "exurb". We lived at the end of a longish driveway and because of trees and hedges, the house wasn't visible from the road. So whoever came down the driveway intended to and we didn't get many random visitors.)

The German Shepard was at the front door and he wanted to get through the door. I opened the inner door to see four Jehovah's Witnesses (two couples) standing there. As the screen was in the top half of the storm door, I didn't have to open it to ask what they wanted.

One guy started into his spiel as the other three folks smiled gamely. As the sales pitch got underway, the German Shepard lunged at the bottom half of the storm door, bounced off the plexiglas, and then scrabbled at the plexiglas with his front claws, all the while barking and snarling and carrying on as though he hadn't been fed in a week and the top choice on his menu was prime Liver of JWs'. I nodded politely as the pitchman talked and I watched their eyes; they kept glancing at the dog and seemed to be trying to reassure themselves that the door would hold him, for I wasn't making any attempt to restrain the dog. The dog was having the time of his life, putting on a show. He was barking and snarling and the more he saw them reacting to his lunging and carrying on, the more effort he put into it.

Then one of them noticed the holstered revolver at my waist. Soon more had, and their eyes were going from the dog to the gun and back again. It wasn't long after that when one of the others interrupted the pitchman and said "thanks for your time we can see you're really busy buh-bye" and they left in a hurry.

When I shut the front door and took the dog back to the kitchen, I could tell that he was very pleased with himself. I told him he was a good boy and gave him a milk-bone.

And that's why the Jehovah's Witnesses didn't come around again for a very long time.

UPDATE: 2/22/08- I am shutting off comments to this blog entry. I was trying to write a humorous piece; what I have been attracting are people who have an axe to grind with regard to the Jehovah's Witnesses. If you feel the need to do that, click on "create blog" in the upper right corner and start your own blog.