These days, owning a rifle is not just about shooting. (Of course, owning a yacht is not just about sailing, either.) Ask any American who owns a rifle how he spends most of his time vis-a-vis his firearm and he will answer (if he answers truthfully and looks you in the eye and does not flinch), "shopping."

Pragmatism has often been called the only truly homespun American philosophy. Now Pragmatism goes by a more familiar name: retail.

Let me say it clearly. Your basic, hard working, patriotic American loves gadgets above everything else. If there is an American Religion, that Religion is Gadgetry. And your basic, hard working, patriotic American rifleman loves gadgets more than anybody.

Now a rifle is not a gadget. A rifle is a tool. But surrounding that rifle is a staggering array of what can only be called gadgets. It's not always easy to know what a gadget is. For example, consider pens. A pen is a tool for writing. But some pens are gadgets, a writing tool with attitude.

Take my friend Launders. Launders owns a pen store. For many people the idea of a store that sells only pens is a stretch. I was one of those people a few years ago, before I became a born-again gadgeteer. One day I asked myself a question. My friend Jim had a birthday coming up. I knew he likes pens. He always used one of those $ .89 roller ball pens. I wondered, "Wouldn't Jim like a really good roller ball pen?" I didn't know it at the time, but when you start thinking about a "really good" anything, you have taken a step on the path of Gadgetry.

I am in the neighborhood, so I stop in at Launders' store. "What's the very best roller ball pen?" I ask him.

After a pause during which he reassures himself this is not a trick question, he answers, "Why, it's the White Mountain." (This is not the real name of this pen. My lawyer says not to tell you the real name.) You see one of these pens, from time to time, peering out of somebody's pocket. It's got a little white patch on top, I guess to remind you of a snow-covered mountain, or something.

"How much pain?" I ask Launders.

"Well," he says, "you can get a really nice one for around $200. But they have a cheap one that's about $150."

$150 for a pen! I would sooner take a politician to lunch than pay $150 for a pen.

"I'll think about it," I say.

After a few days of careful consideration, I realize that there is probably one fundamental difference between a White Mountain pen for $150 and your basic $ .89 roller ball. When your $ .89 roller ball runs out of ink, you throw it away. You don't do this with your $150 White Mountain. You get a new ink cartridge. Aha!

So I stop in to see Launders. "How much are the ink cartridges for your White Mountain pens?" I ask, smug with my newfound knowledge.

"$4.50", says Launders, with a straight face.

"Score!" I think to myself. "Now we're getting someplace."

"And do you have other holders that will fit the $4.50 White Mountain cartridges?" I ask, humbly, hoping that Launders might overlook the point.

"Well, yes . . .." he says. "We've got some for about $20."

No Neanderthal hunter returning home with a mastodon haunch could have been as happy as I am at that moment. The outside of the White Mountain pen doesn't matter! What counts is the ink cartridge. THIS is the secret of its great success, surely. I leave the store with my new pen set, elated at the thought that I now own the functional equivalent of the $150 White Mountain pen for which I have paid $24.45! With careful thought and canny bargaining, I have scored a great victory, saving myself $125.55. I have also put one over on Launders.

At home I try my new pen. It writes OK. Nothing great, I notice. After four days, it stops writing.

I go back to talk to Launders. "I bought this White Mountain ink cartridge from you, and it only wrote for four days," I say.

"Yup," he says, "That's what everybody tells me."

When I first started thinking about buying a gun, my wife thought I had gone crazy. She accused me of being a survivalist. She inquired scornfully if I was now listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio. None of these things being true, I had to ask myself, "What pernicious, dark motives did I have for my awakening interest in GUNS?" I considered all the usual suspects.

Growing up in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania, hunting was a way of life for everyone, but not my father. Repudiating his Swiss heritage, he forsook firearms for fly rods. Busy for days during trout season in the icy mountain streams around our home, he returned with the tiniest of fish, never more than three. Most often, he returned with nothing at all.

He was considerably more passionate about his other great sporting adventure, blueberry picking. He was more successful at this, after a picking spree bringing back gallons of fresh blueberries.

To hear him tell the tale, blueberry picking was much more of an adventure than trout fishing ever could be. The reason was the bears.

In those Pocono Mountain meadows, bears and blueberries naturally came together every autumn. The blueberry bushes were the size of cottages. More than once, my father, picking his way around the side of a bush, encountered a bear, coming the other way. The bear always ran, and so did my father.

But surely the fact that my father was a fly fisherman and a berry picker when every other adult male in town was a hunter could not have influenced me in the least. For some reason, when I started to think about buying a rifle, it put me in a certain kind of mood. It was the kind of mood you get into that leads to buying binoculars.

I know this is sounding very irrational. But for some reason, when I started to think I was at last going to buy a rifle, I just had to buy some binoculars first. And not just some $89 binoculars either. The binoculars that seized me by the throat were German, and they looked it. They were large. They were armored. Using them in even modest light you could count the hairs on the back of a fly at 300 meters. And what they cost would easily serve as a down payment on a fair-size yacht. They were the binoculars that God would use, if He were giving His Omnivision a rest.

But, I was counting on my Secret Weapon. My SW was eBay, the Internet auction site. I had stumbled upon eBay in my early days of Gadgeteering. If Gadgetry is my religion, eBay is my Sacred Source. The power in eBay had embraced me and given me the Ten Commandments of Acquiring:

I. Thou shalt pay no more than 50% of the retail price.

II. Thou shalt only bid on what thou hast researched.

III. Thou shalt buy from a seller with 98% or greater positive ratings.

IV. Thou shalt wait humbly and snipe thy winning bid in the last flutter of the angel's wing.

V. Thou shalt time thy transactions by the Atomic Clock.

VI. Thou shalt wait for only slightly less than eternity if that is what eBay commands to give thee the product thou most desireth.

VII. Thou shalt only pay by credit card.

VIII. Thou shalt pay really, really fast and so be ordained a Great e-Bayer.

IX. Thou shalt praise the seller who is just, but the unjust seller thou shalt smite with negativity.

X. Thou shalt hold no other site before eBay, unless thou art buying firearms.

The Sacred Buying Power which eBay had bestowed upon me had never failed me. My collection of plastic flat ware, believed to be the largest in California--eBay. My wife's dog's pajamas--eBay. The ten gallon drum of sunscreen which will keep my pallid carcass from frying to a crisp in perpetuity--eBay. My confidence knew no bounds! Anything was possible!

The only thing was, everybody seemed to want those damn German binoculars! For months and months, I couldn't have gotten them except by violating the First Commandment of Acquiring, and that I would not do.

Then came the national tragedy. The universe slipped a few cogs. Months went by, and I was starting to want to get up in the morning, when I noticed that SOMEONE SOMEWHERE was offering the damn German binoculars, and no one was bidding on them! Ten days went by; the auction was winding down, no bids. Holy cow! I decided to take a closer look . . ..

OH MY GOD! THE SELLER IS IN INDONESIA! THE GUY IS PROBABLY AN AL QAEDA AGENT! HE ISN'T REALLY OFFERING TO SELL THOSE DGBs! I WOULD THINK I WAS BUYING BINOCULARS, AND HE WOULD MAIL ME A BOMB! I WAS DOOMED!

Now, gentle reader, comes the difficult part of this tale. You have probably built up a great deal of affection, even quiet admiration, for this writer. Obviously he is witty, with a keen philosophical mind, yet extraordinarily practical and down to earth. But here I must tell you that, in this moment of Religious Crisis, I was motivated by greed. Greed, greed, greed. Greed and nothing but greed. Greedy greed. The greediest greedy greed. I WANTED those damn German binoculars. And when I fall into such a Religious Fervor, I let NOTHING get in my way.

So I bid 'em and I bought 'em. Those damn German binoculars. I won't even tell you how much I paid. Let's just say that if you ever acquired a Dakota Longbow in .338 Lapua Magnum for the price of a tank of gas in your pickup, you would be in the same ball park, ratio-wise. But I knew my doom was sealed.

Then something truly terrifying happened. The guy I bought the damn German binoculars from emailed me on the same day I won 'em to tell me, 1) he was really, really happy I had bought his binocs (yeah, right. I knew why that was!); 2) he was upgrading the shipping, at no extra cost, from surface mail (three to five weeks) to FedEx (three days). I knew that meant that in three days I would be dead. Luckily I had thoughtfully arranged to have them shipped to my work, rather than my home. At least my widow would have a house to live in.

It was a Monday when I received the fateful email. That Thursday a package from Indonesia arrived at my work. Three days! I can't even get a letter to someone across town in three days. And yet the package, which I hoped was the German binoculars (but which I knew to be a bomb), had arrived in three days.

It was all happening too fast. The world was collapsing around me! Matters became much worse when the post woman dropped off the package, which was clearly marked "Indonesia" in several places, and which was wrapped in cheap paper, with suspicious bulges all around. She proceeded to alarm the hell out of everybody by commenting, "Hey! Y'all got a package from INDONESIA! And it looks mighty funny!"

I opened that package very, very carefully. Inside was a brand new set of German binoculars, which my covetousness had caused me to risk my life and the lives of my co-workers to obtain! Lord have Mercy. Glory Hallelujah and all the rest of it. I was glad to be alive.

The adventure buying the binoculars had taught me a hard-earned lesson. What if the Indonesian guy really had been an Al Qaeda agent? It was clearer than ever that I needed that rifle.

Besides, now that I had gotten the binoculars, as ordained by the God of Gadgetry, I had to get the rifle. It was all part of the Plan.

By then, I had thought enough about firearms, read enough, talked to enough people, to realize that a fine rifle is a treasure. For one thing, a fine rifle is as near to perfect as it is possible for a machine to be. A fine rifle embraces all the principles of physics, up to and including quantum mechanics. Within a fine rifle, the moment of firing unleashes devastating explosions that are refined by the most sophisticated design science into a simple vector of the greatest force and precision. This is like seeing Dame Margot Fontayn knock out Mohammed Ali. To own a firearm is to enter a mythic realm.

But first I needed to find my FFL. Now for me, looking for an FFL was like Dante searching for Virgil, or Odysseus waiting for Hermes, or like Lewis and Clark needing to find Sacagawea. For my wife, it meant that I was going to be associating with red neck pinheads. Guys who, when they take their dogs for a walk, pee on the same tree. Instead, I found Dave.

Dave was an FFL out of love and devotion. Love of fine rifles, and devotion to all shooting sports. When Dave's best friend and personal FFL moved to Arkansas to make machine guns (!), Dave had stepped into the breach. Dave became my guide, teacher and friend. Willing to answer each and every question from a newbie musketeer. And about as far from a redneck pinhead as one could get.

Dave was a glassblower, his province custom made scientific glassware. The meticulous care and concern it took to be a first-rate glassblower carried over into his love of rifles (or maybe it was vice-versa). Dave always spoke as slowly and carefully as he worked. For example, he never used contractions in his speech. Dave never said, "I'd rather . . .." He always said, "I would rather . . .." It gave a kind of elegance and old-fashioned courtliness to his spoken words.

Dave had thought for many years about the philosophy and psychology of firearms. Musing one day on his favorite subject, he said to me, "A fine rifle is the yacht of the poor man."

"I'm not sure I follow you there, Dave," I said.

He got a far away look in his eyes, like he was looking into a distance I could never see, trying to find the right words to bring me a Big Truth. "Most of us cannot afford a yacht. Is not that true?" he asked.

"Most of us wouldn't want a yacht," I replied.

"That is probably true," he said, "but I am trying to make a point here. The point is that the same kind of freedom and adventure your rich man might find with his yacht, your poor man often finds with a well made rifle. As well as independence of spirit, self-reliance, responsibility. Like the Swiss, we have a long and honored tradition in the United States of fine riflemen and fine rifle women. As Thomas Jefferson said, "A rifle is the tooth of Liberty." Or maybe he said "the teeth of Liberty."

"Abraham Lincoln," I said.

"I beg your pardon?" Dave said.

"I think it was Abraham Lincoln who said, "A rifle is the tooth, or teeth, of Liberty," I said.

"Very well, then," Dave said. "It was Abraham Lincoln, or maybe George Washington, or some other big kahuna who said it, or maybe I just made it up now, but it is a valid point, is it not?"

"Yes Dave," I said, "it is a valid point."

I understand that some owners of fine rifles give their rifles names, ((and even, note the double parentheses, sleep with their fine rifles)) but of course I am not the former and certainly not the latter. Even though I do live in California.

Now I am the owner of (notice I did not say "companion of") two fine rifles. I am still getting to know them. They are as different as two fine rifles can be. My M14 (Armscorp of Baltimore) is like a purebred Morgan horse--beautiful, spirited, and able to do whatever any rifle can do with a high degree of competence.

My Remington Model 700 in .300 Winchester Magnum is like an Arabian, high strung, elegant, highly specialized for traveling long distances. I am still learning to use them for the task they have been bred to do for hundreds of years--shooting. But that's, that is, another story.