Why I love America but am glad I don't live there

So I'm standing in line at Fry's Electronics assistance desk, and there's this old guy with white hair in a hawaiian shirt in front of me, and he's asking the assistant to chase up some RAM. While the assistant is looking through the computer, catalogs etc, the old guy starts chatting to the assistant and me.

"That's the problem with computers, you can't have just one. Computers are like guns, you can't have just one." says the old man in an easy midwest drawl.

The sales assistant and I smile. The old man continues.

"I used to have 67 guns." The sales assistant and I look at each other, then at the old man. "I see the look on your faces I used to collect them, you see, and people would always give me that look when I told them. I'd tell 'em I've been collecting guns since I was  twelve, so it's really not that many, how many am I supposed to have?"

Slightly relieved, the sales assistant and I give a little laugh, and the old man gets a sad look on his face. "I don't have them any more, too old and slow, someone's liable to shoot me with one of 'em. Course the other way guns are like computers is you can't just have the gun or the computer, you've got to have all the bits and pieces to go with 'em. I had 70,000 rounds of ammunition, coz of course every gun you buy has to have a thousand rounds of ammunition to go with it. Oh, except my Ak-47, I had like 5000 rounds of ammunition for that. Remember in the 1980's when you could buy armor piercing rounds, and incendiary rounds and all that?"

I was four in 1980, and I bet the sales assistant was younger than that, but we both smiled and nodded.

"Well I had all of those, as soon as a new round came out I would go buy a thousand of 'em. I have a buddy that used to be a Navy Seal. He helped me setup this rig in the ceiling so when I was in bed if I pulled a cable a bunch of fishing hooks on nylon string would drop down from the ceiling. So then if someone's coming at me they'd get all tangled up. Give me time to get 'em with my shotgun. My wife said to me 'What, you gonna get in a gun fight with somebody?' and I said 'I hope not, but I'm gonna defend myself if I have to!'"

And then in a rehearsed manner that you know has been told in a thousand bars since he was a very young man, "I have a distant relative called John Wesley Hardin, killed 44 people, killed one of them for snoring. There's got to be some of his blood pumping through these veins. They say he killed one man for wearing too loud a shirt. Can you imagine that? I would have been killed by him on many a night back in my disco days!"

Then with a quick salute he walks off, leaving me with an image of an old man in a disco shirt firing a shotgun at a guy that's tangled up in fish hooks and nylon string with an old lady screaming at him from the bed......