We’re Haunted by the Liminal Space That is the Walmart Gun Counter

One of the interesting things about the internet that it gives you the ability to choose your own culture. Want to hang out with older people who complain about most of the same stuff all the time? Facebook’s the place. Want to get edgy and randomly argue with Nazis? Head over to X/Twitter (or whatever Elon’s calling it when you read this). If you want to be protected from dealing with viewpoints with which you disagree, Bluesky is your destination.

Even within social media networks (which algorithmically feed you what you want to see), you can find people who share your common interests.

We all share the same internet, but my kids are always coming up with different stuff that their age group is talking about. Yes, I’m technically old by teenager standards — I recently hit the big four zero — but I’m constantly finding out that I’m more out of touch than I thought. Things like the horrors of “the backrooms,” Mystery Flesh Pit National Park, and “liminal spaces,” along with the possibility of being trapped there forever, really do live in young minds.

I recently came across a social media post that perfectly captures something gun people can probably relate to even more: the vaguely disturbing feeling many of us get from the Walmart gun and knife counter…or in many places, the former gun and knife counter.

Like “the backrooms,” these are abandoned or semi-abandoned spaces that contain a completely different kind of horror.

A reasonable man might assume this normal-looking sporting goods counter would be the place to buy a hunting license and a box of .308 on a Sunday afternoon.

However, no such thing will ever happen. No one works here. The store is empty of people and you have an uneasy feeling.… pic.twitter.com/PEGwCNa3rH

— Kevin Gaughen 🇺🇸 (@gaughen) October 13, 2024

Here’s the full text that accompanies the image in the tweet above . . .

A reasonable man might assume this normal-looking sporting goods counter would be the place to buy a hunting license and a box of .308 on a Sunday afternoon.

However, no such thing will ever happen. No one works here. The store is empty of people and you have an uneasy feeling.

You see, sandwiched between the toys and the automotive departments in your local podunk Walmart there is a dimensional rift, an invisible gap in reality, which you passed through unwittingly.

You are now in a non-place. A void containing only the mirrored reflection of something familiar. A forgotten, oxbow lake of spacetime.

Oblivious to your existential nightmare, you stand there at the counter waiting.

You will never get your license or your ammo. You will never go home. You will wait here, alone, under buzzing fluorescent lights and ceiling speakers excreting muzak, for all eternity.

Except, you don’t know this and you never will.

How long have you been here, you wonder. Hard to say. You don’t remember arriving.

Perhaps you’ve never been anywhere else.

Can one literally be forever stuck at a dead Walmart gun counter, endlessly awaiting a chance to buy some ammo? Probably not. But there’s a part of us that’s forever stuck there. It was once a place (especially in smaller towns, but not in the smallest) where you’d find anything you needed for target shooting, hunting, personal defense, and much more. That has slipped away, however, and has been removed from the public world to varying degrees. Some counters now only sell rifle ammo. Others seem to sell nothing at all now.

There’s often a glimmer of a hope that it’s coming back. That we dirty gun people might once again be allowed to transact business in polite society. At my local store, the sporting goods guy continually claims that the return of pistol ammo for sale at the Walmart gun counter is just around the corner. But that never quite happens.

Somewhere in the back of our minds or souls, that place is still open. The fact that those counters sit there empty and unmanned today conflicts with that. With all of the good memories and the seemingly endless war against us, our hobbies and our culture, the empty Walmart counter is a lot more than just a counter. It’s a symbol and a monument to a lot more than that.