Seekonk River (courtesy The Truth About Guns)

You know you’re a gun nut when you see a dead tree by a river and wish you had an M1 Garand (GEH-rund) and a homicidal Lock Ness monster in your sights. Your turn . . .

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155 COMMENTS

  1. You know you’re a gun nut when you look at any clock or watch and see that it’s 2:23, 5:56 or 3:38….and take it as a good omen.

  2. You know you’re a gun nut when you realize you spend too much time on TTAG.

  3. You know you are a gun nut when the first time you see a Cartridge World store you think “Great! another source for ammunition”.

  5. …when you’re reading TTAG at work with a Ruger thermos pouring coffee into a coffee cup with a Walther PPK handle and a Gun Digest daily calendar staring back at you (today’s Gun of the Day: the Ruger Super Redhawk in .454 Casull/.45 Colt).

  6. You know you’re a gun nut when you know shooting into water is a high-risk endeavor.

    YouTube embed removed (screws up mobile browsers).

  8. You don’t know exactly how many firearms you own because you haven’t inventoried them lately.

    • The right monitor is for work, the left is for knowlege.
      You DO know how many rifles you have due to the cartridges on your office desk. (tried to attach a photo here).
      Your office is a mile from Tri-County gun club and you get to hear the sound of freedom all day.
      You have a boat gun, a truck gun, a house gun, a bedroom gun, a garage gun, a den gun…
      You have holsters for guns you don’t own anymore.
      when you hear “lands and grooves” in a coffee shop, you smile.
      And last, you auditioned for “Top Shot” cause those jack wagons on the show can’t hit squat.

      • +1

        My next acquisition will be a bathroom gun (stainless steel revolver) following suggestions by several helpful readers here at TTAG.

  9. You look in the back of your gun safe and find a gun you didnt remember you had and have never shot.

    • Yup! Found on in a case behind my clothes in the closet. Forgotten all about it.

    • You look in the gun safe & realize that you have not yet fired most of the guns in it.

  10. You maintain detailed inventory controls on your various ammo across calibers and have a loan program for friends who don’t go to cabelas daily like you.

    • Guilty…although I don’t have a loan program, I have bought ammo in calibers I don’t own, but family does.

    • “No sweetie, see, I’m a gun enthusiast. It’s different. Gun nuts want an AR, a Glock, a gazillion rounds and a hole to hide it in. I, on the other hand, am a collector with the goal of covering the caliber spectrum. That’s why I need 15 guns and a gun nut needs two. See how much sense that makes?

      What do you mean ‘doghouse’? He’s already sleeping in there. I don’t even think I’ll fit!”

  12. You have a “safe room” with one safe labeled pistols, one labeled rifles, one labeled shotguns, etc….

    • and ammo cabinets labeled 12 gauge, 20 gauge, 16 gauge, .410 bore, 7.62 x 54R, .223/.556, .257 Roberts, 7.7 JAP, 7.62×51/.308, 7.62×39, 9mm, .357, .44 magnum …

  14. You know you’re a gun nut when you complain about your local sheriff selling carry permits under the table at a county board of supervisors meeting, a local reporter interviews you, does a story in the paper about your documentation on this and the headline in the paper reads, I kid you not:

    Sheriff says ‘gun nut’ concealing the truth
    Being in the Posse doesn’t guarantee weapons permit

    …and you are mentioned BY NAME in the article as the “gun nut” in question.

    http://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=105426

    I win.

    🙂

    (As an aside, the reporter apologized to me the next day and said that his “commie editor” had put the title in that way…the article itself was at least mediocre.)

  15. … you are watching a movie or TV show and identify the firearms depicted for the benefit of those also in attendance, and then, when they’re not around, fact-check yourself on the imfdb.

    • You are watching a movie or tv show and every time a firearm appears on screen, all heads immediately look to you for a quick ID, round capacity, performance and reliability report, and background history of vintage weapons so they don’t have to look it up. Then you go into a 5 minute long rant explaining why Hollywood has it’s collective head up it’s rectal cavity because “REAL guns just don’t do that!”

      • This! A thousand time this! Thank good for DVR because I can pause the program and rant about the problem with the design.

        In addition, you know your a gun nut when your wife is now proud that she can ID the firearm on TV. Because she listens to you.

      • Guilty as charged.

        Also, pointing out when a 6 shot revolver is fired 9-10 times without reloading. I guess only really awesome Hollywood actors and Jason Bourne types can do that, ’cause I can only get 6 shots out of a six shot revolver without stopping to reload. I’m also curious how to cram 327 rounds into 30 round magazine.

        • I read a comment once about how Bruce Willis in Last Man Standing had “belt-fed .45’s” that’s stuck with me ever since. To this day I can’t watch even one scene of that movie without feeling compelled to count rounds between reloads. 🙂

      • My wife’s lament! We adore zombie films, however she is sick to death of me constantly analyzing performance, capacity, ect on the firearms used. I’m still of a mind that repetitive rifle shots to the pelvic region should register a ‘mobility’ kill. Also, in a land without laws or guards, the M2 Cal. .50 MG seems like a reasonable addition to any vehicle. A basic understanding of ballistics and physiology suggests that head shots aren’t necessary with such a weapon, as broken bones, spinal cord damage and wrecked muscles would incapacitate even those who do not experience pain or shock. . . wait, I think I might be a gun nut . . .

      • Your circle of people send their circle of people to you to help identify something their late uncle Harry had in a footlocker in the basement. This has happened to me more than once.

        And people know I’m the gun guy so they come to me with questions and they bring me stuff that was in a late relatives house. I’ve been given stray boxes of ammo cause they didn’t want to throw it in the trash.

        And for some reason people like to bring and show me the bayonets that their older generation brought back as souvenirs.

        • Related: last time I visited my friend’s family ranch in Ukiah to do some camping, hunting and recreational shooting with the offspring, the owner had two random intact hunting-rifle cartridges that she wanted me to dispose of. They were dropped by hunters on her land, and she didn’t have any guns chambered for that ammo.

          I smiled, nodded, accepted them with good grace… all the while thinking “WTF? Do I give people the impression that I’m an ordnance disposal expert or something?”

          This is not the first time this has happened. To be fair, it’s not like CA recycling centers publish instructions for disposing of unwanted ammo…

        • Yeah, right now I have small amounts of .45 acp ammo and some .357 magnum and I don’t have a gun for either caliber and I did not buy the ammo.

    • Check out a Brit movie called “Hot Fuzz”. It’s a great send up of the action-adventure and horror genres. The inside joke, though, is that some gun nut, or nuts, had a hoot making this movie. Every time a gun appears on the screen (about every three seconds) it’s something older, rarer, and stranger than the last. In the course of the last half hour or so I saw: an SMLE, Enfield and Webley revolvers, a brace of Spiller & Burr cap and ball revolvers, an ancient Dutch blunderbuss, a Tommy Gun, a Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver, an FN Highpower, several 1911’s, an AR-15, an AK-47, a BAR, a Colt SAA, an M-1 carbine, and I don’t know what all else. Great fun!

    • Hell yeah! I even count the number of rounds fired, I’m still trying to find one of those 24 shot revolvers.

    • I still remember the first time I attempted to watch “Shooter” with Mark Wahlberg as the sniper. For those who havent seen the movie, the opening scene is Wahlberg and his spotter covering the retreat of friendly forces.
      1. Wahlberg had a Barrett M82 and a bolt action rifle. I have no knowledge on this, but it seemed strange that he would ruck in an extra 10lbs by carrying another rifle.
      2. Wahlberg takes a shot with the Barrett and then cycles the bolt manually on a semi-auto rifle.
      …and then I cut the movie off. I have gone back and watched it since, the movie is riddled with inaccuracies.

  16. You know you are a gun nut when you see the above tree stump and wonder if its a prehistoric chronograph.

  17. You know you’re a gun nut when you open YouTube, hit “what to watch” and videos recommended for you are ALL firearms related. Guilty as charged……..

  18. …you make excel spreadsheets with guns and their parameters along with your own grading system to help you decide what gun to buy next.

  19. You have a closet shoe organizer that holds all of your different holsters and loaded mags and speedloaders of hollowpoints of different calibers

  21. … you make every vacation gun related, whether training, fun shooting, etc. And if the destination is “non permissive” bringing along gun magazines, books and trying to find fellow shooters to talk to.

  22. You see your neighbors small-of-back Glock showing, so you tell him, then wonder if that makes you a hypocrite since you were open carrying at the time.

    You worry about muzzle control at the gas pump.

    You teach your kids to drive by starting with a gun analogy.

  24. You know your a gun nut when your wife tells you she can’t start dinner until you clean the gun parts off the kitchen table and the smell of Hoppe’s #9 out of the sink. You instead tell her that you can’t be stopped in the middle of your work and offer to buy takeout instead.

  25. …you carefully scrutinize and monitor movie/TV actor’s trigger discipline, and you actually become slightly angry every time an actor charges a pistol with their digits inside the guard.

    • My favorite is all of the cops with semiautomatics pointing their guns at the BGs and then, for emphasis, cocking the hammer. AS IF!

  26. You know you’re a blademan when you see a dead tree and wish you had a chopper with you.

  27. You know you’re a gun nut when the action type on your carry gun isn’t even a standard term like “revolver” or “semi-auto”. Instead it’s “magazine fed revolver with gas-powered shell ejection”…also known as “Maurice the FrankenRuger”…

    🙂

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4XtVldNbO4

    • Good Lord – that makes a Webley-Fosberry look simple.

      OK, this one wins. That goes beyond “gun nut” to ??????

      • No. That was filmed in Tucson AZ…Marksmen II range.

        Maurice was built in a “Hackerspace” called “Xerocraft” in Tucson where I had access to an 11″ Logan Lathe from about 1950 complete with busted reverse gear and a Bridgeport-type mill.

        The sight is a relative of the Goshen Hexsite, a target-focused iron sight. It’s using a concept Tim Sheehan at Goshen hasn’t put into production yet…he let me hand-build my own prototype. Can’t talk about how it works or take a pic of the sight alignment.

  28. YOU know you are a gun nut when you go to the range and have brass (reloads) flying everywhere and every one else only shoots 1 or 2 boxes and leaves , and you pickup all the brass and ammo boxes to reload again…and get the weather reports so you can shoot in no rain….Ha. Ha. and tell the wife how important it is to test all this ammo……

  29. You know you are a gun nut when you walk around the house with your M1 Garand slung over your shoulder to test how ling before if gets heavy while telling your wife about the importance of home carry.

    You also know you are a gun nut when you fall asleep on the couch while working on your rifles.

    The wife just shakes her head and keeps walking.

      • Quite frankly Tom, the thought of you giggling like a little girl is scarey.

        And when I’m really scared I scream like a 7 year old girl. We don’t want to go there.

    • OMFG — guilty as charged on at least 50% of those points. I mean hell, I can’t even argue any of ColionNoir’s HK jibes because I’m an HK owner. (Then again, so is he.)

      That was exactly what I needed to brighten up my day.

  31. You know you’re aa gun nut when….

    …..you buy multiple copies of your favorite .45 ACP because you don’t care to waste time moving your CCW piece between your home carry holster, your fanny pack and your man-purse.

  32. When you tell your wife you don’t have money to throw her a birthday party but come home the next day with a new rifle. When she tells you she’s pregnant, find out if it’s a boy or girl, and go get a cricket and ear miffs right after the sonogram. When you buy ammunition for a gun you MIGHT be able to buy in a year or two. When you pay off a credit card, then realize you have enough of a balance to get another gun.

    • When you tell your wife you don’t have money to throw her a birthday party but come home the next day with a new rifle.

      Too many events in that category and there won’t be a wife to come home to. Just sayin’.

  33. Got another one I’m guilty of: more than half the space in your closet (where your clothes are supposed to go) is dedicated to firearms/ammo/SHTF kit.

      • Lucky dog Eric. you have so many mini guns they have their own room? How hard is it to find enough ammo to feed them?

        • If I had a minigun, I would absolutely give it its own room. Hell, I’d probably build it a (lockable) shrine in the garage workshop area.

  35. You know you’re a gun nut when your library includes three editions of “Cartridges of the World” and you need a separate 6’x3′ bookshelf for your gun books.

    Plus you own a BSA .310 Martini Cadet [insert obscure rifle/handgun of your choice], and can reload ammo for it.

    AND you are a firm believer that if you cannot decide between two guns, buy both.

    However, in these politically correct times, we prefer the acronym CEFE – Charmingly Eccentric Firearms Enthusiast.

  37. When you jump out of your seat at the Miranda Lambert concert to applaud the awesome Girls with Guns video on the Jumbotron that introduces the singer. It’s a montage of female movie characters wielding firearms through the years–very unpolitically correct.

  38. When you work for the city attorney, and every time he has a firearm law question, he yells”HEY GUN NUT!” down the hall.

    • Nice.

      Related: when you report directly to the CEO of your company, and at the executive staff meetings he occasionally makes horribly bad gun-use analogies in an attempt to be inclusive. “See, what we have is a pair of revolvers stuck in our holsters shooting at our feet, and what we need is semi-autos blazing away at the target…”

  40. You use the model numbers of guns you own as your network passwords because they are a convenient mix of letters and numbers.

  41. YKYAAGN when:
    You use your DVR to stop the movie to ID a gun and when in doubt, go to the Movie Firearms Data Base site on your IPad and use it as a guide during the rest of the movie.
    You nevever have to stop on a 92FS because even your wife can ID those.

  42. You know you’re a gun nut when your comment has been changed to a “flame deleted” when responding to matt or rsimpleton.

  43. You know you’re a gun nut when you enter 7 on your phone and its first suggestion is 7.62x54R.

  44. When you get extremely upset watching footage or seeing pictures of guns being melted down.

  45. You remember phone numbers because they have calibers in them.

    You find canisters of gun powder in your gun closet you never remember buying.

    You work shooting sports into client outtings.

    Your shooting medals sit next to your family photos at your desk at work.

    You save bullets and slugs from game you took in the field because they look cool.

    You know the range names and times of operation within 50 miles of your house and the name of the guy who works the front desk.

    You look at the catalogs and think what guns you will be buying for your kids as they get older and whether its for them or really for you.

    You are defriended by all your “gun control” relatives on facebook.

    Your local gun store has a list of firearms you are looking for and calls you when they get them in trade.

    You schedule family events around your shooting competitions.

    • “You look at the catalogs and think what guns you will be buying for your kids as they get older and whether its for them or really for you.”

      I do this all the time.

  46. …when you’re reading this thread – at work – and trying not to laugh too loud, because you can totally ‘+1’ almost every comment on the thread because we apparently all do the same shit 🙂

    Mine is:

    ….when you realize your firearm collection is worth more than your 401k

    VF77

    • +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1

      (That’s on behalf of myself and the 50 others who wanted to do the same in the last 60 seconds.)

  47. You know you’re a gun nut when that open-carry “everybody is looking at me” feeling goes away.

  48. Wife walks up and catches you staring at your open gun safe. She asks if there is a problem. You-Yes, I have no more room in my safe. She-what do we need to do about that (she is thinking YES he going to get rid of some of them)? You-I need a bigger safe. She-what are you going to with that one trade it in? You-No, just get another bigger safe. She-Why? You-To better categorize and room for more guns. She rolls her eyes and walks off mumbling something to herself. You didn’t get a direct ‘NO WAY’ so your good to go.

    Note, true story. Has happened to me,,,,,,,,,TWICE!!

    • Or you bought a safe that was too small, knowing it but figured it would be of use anyway….done that.

  49. …when you have asked jewelry makers and engravers how they can assist you in jewelry and style needs directly connected to wearing gun parts. Or your girlfriend tells you that she won’t sew ammo loops on your jeans as a fashion statement.

  50. You know you’re a gun nut when you dream about Mila Kunis wearing nothing but a gun belt, and you’re excited by the gun belt.

    • Or you get the Blue Press and the second thing you notice in the cover photo (well, maybe the third) is the S&W .351PD 22mag revolver tucked in her shorts pocket.

  51. …when you realize that you have literally spent 40+ hours researching the best red dot options for your new battle rifle …and you’re not planning on going into battle any time soon 😉

    • Related: when you find yourself in a hopeless dilemma trying to choose between a nice red-dot and a flip-to-side magnifier vs. an good quality 1-4X illuminated scope… and your significant other is getting pissy because Father’s Day is coming up and you can’t tell her what you want.

  52. When you tell your boss you can’t come to work today because the voices in your head are telling you to stay home and clean your guns.

  53. You know your a gun nut when you sit around watching tv and dry fire at all of the characters as the appear on the screen.

  54. You know you’re a gun nut when you save your restaurant receipt that totaled 30.06. and took a picture of it just because.

  55. You know you’re a gun nut when…

    You type ‘t’ into the address bar of any of your several different browsers on multiple devices (laptop, 2 phones, iPad) and after a single character it autocompletes to http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com

  56. You know you’re a gun nut when someone asks you where the 3-hole punch is and you say, “I’m not allowed to have select fire weapons ’cause the Man is always getting me down. I have a one-hole punch in my belt if you’d like to use that.”

  57. You know you’re a gun nut when…..

    ….you’re sit’n there in the peace and quiet; relax’n, thinking “I bet I could knock the crooked leg out with one shot….

  58. When your wife says you love guns more than her. Then after all the nagging about spending time with my guns. She might be right.

  59. YKYAGN when….

    1. You refuse to loan money without firearm(s) as a collateral “sale”… Standard practice for several years.

    2. One of your interview questions when hiring a new employee is “would you object or for any reason not be allowed near firearms?”… Also standard practice.

    3. You finish setting up the 150 yd. gun range on your new property BEFORE ground is broken to build the house… Done.

    4. The gun room is completely finished and secured before any other room in the new house(plumbing and electric weren’t even hooked up yet)… Done.

    5. When your relationship implodes causing your girlfriend and her son to move out your “silver lining” is swapping your gun room to the larger room her son had… in progress.

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