The weapons contingent of W2 invited me to go shooting with them recently. I think my Front Page reference to "dangerous games" concerned them, so Pete wrote a piece on safety and Bob Schmidt, his firearm mentor and occassional consultant on Black Powder passed on an invitation to show me the range of handguns, teach me to fire them, and ask me to write about the experience.
I had never before touched a loaded handgun. I had shot .22 rifles in summer camp. I wasn't bad. I played with a co2 bb pistol, shooting soda cans on the beach. I was terrible. I thought it was the pistol's fault, but my friend was very fast and accurate with it, so my excuse failed me. That was about 15 years ago, pre-puberty.
I read detective- and spy novels as an adolescent and played an espionage role-playing game for which my friends and I memorized the specs and stats on weapons few of us had seen and fewer touched.
When I was 13, the prison guards my mother worked with let me hold and wonder at their unloaded revolvers. When I was 14, I offended an 18-year-old's honor in a summer school computer class and was threatened with death and showed the "Saturday Night Special" he had snuck into the building to kill me with. I didn't apologize, but I did hide in the escalator system of the high-rise NYC school building. I made sure not to get cornered or caught alone the rest of that summer. Until one evening I walked into an armed robbery in a McDonald's and had a snub-nosed somekindofscarygun pointed at my gut. Based on interviews I did after the robbery, I know that I was also in the illegal presence of a sawed-off shotgun and a .38 revolver. The summer school kids had scared me, but nothing like the fear I felt that night at the end of the barrel.
When I lived for a while on a Kibbutz in Israel, a soldier friend of mine, an officer, showed me his hand gun. I don't remember much about it. There were so many guns on the Kibbutz -- avocado pickers packing on hip holsters, teenagers with rifles raiding the communal kitchen, small women with Uzis over their shoulders or on the dinner table in the baby house -- that I almost stopped noticing them. Still I never touched them.
Last Sunday, almost seven years after the last handgun I'd seen, I spent five hours at the Rivanna Rifle Club in Virginia, learning to fire a range of weapons.
Before I go into detail, let me make sure to thank Bob Schmidt for his patience, his calm, his safety, his sobriety, his excellence as an instructor. I will be forever grateful to have had such a safety-oriented and thorough first experience. Let me strongly recommend against ever letting someone casually introduce you to firearms. If your teacher's presence and practice doesn't inspire complete confidence, walk away. Just politely decline or make your excuses and leave. Among the many impressions left from my afternoon on the range, is a strongly increased fear of guns. Especially the noisy end. Thank All that I never heard or saw or felt a handgun fire in that McDonald's.
Pete Thorsen and I drove our pickups to the rifle club by 1:25pm. (I felt I had to arrive in my truck.) Club rules said we couldn't start shooting until 1:30 when local church services ended.
Bob and his wife arrived soon after. Bob drove his 4x4 down to the table he wanted to use on the rifle range. I walked. As I approached, I noticed that Bob had gone back and forth several times from his car to the table, each time carrying a large case or bag.
While Bob went back to check something at the gate, his wife took out her "car gun", unloaded it and placed it on the table. Her car gun is a very small .22 semi-automatic. I asked her to show me how to know that it was empty and how much it cost. I know that it's rude to ask a host how much her possessions cost, but I seem to have forgotten that rule of etiquette my entire time at the rifle club -- fortunately nobody called me on it and I can report to you that a safe short range handgun can cost under US$200.
Bob returned from the gate and started to unpack his arsenal.
That day I shot a 22-caliber, double-action pistol, very much the look and size of the cowboy capguns I'd played with in childhood. I fired a futuristic looking Ruger .22 with an electronic site -- fire at the little red light you see on the target. I fired .38 special loads in a .357 magnum, full magnum loads in the .357 magnum, a Browning 9mm (my favorite!), a .45 semi-automatic, and both .45 loads and full magnum loads in the famous .44 magnum, the huge handgun that "Dirty Harry" carries, the same monster pistol that Robert De Niro buys in an NYC hotel room in the movie Taxi Driver -- in fact, the case in which Bob carried about a dozen handguns looked in shape, size, color and content just like the carry case the illegal gun dealer uses in the same movie.
That was the lesson Bob gave me. I also got to shoot Pete's .45 single-action (a real old-time Cowboy gun) and a 20-gauge shotgun.
I expected shooting to be much more brutish than it was. The very idea of holding a controlled explosion -- handling a tool expressly designed to kill someone -- had made the idea of shooting both appealing and sometimes sickening.
Shooting is explosively loud and the guns are ugly to a newcomer's eye. In the movies, Clint Eastwood might point the magnum at a truck and watch it blow up. Bob Schmidt assures me that Hollywood makes guns look easier and harder than they are, more and less deadly and destructive than they are, and the heroes handle their firearms with a casual contempt that would get them kicked off the range at the rifle club where I learned to shoot.
I learned the meaning of things I've heard for years, but never understood. Squeeze -- Don't Pull. What does that mean? Isn't a trigger designed to be pulled? Isn't "Pull The Trigger" the standard phrase? Now I can tell you from the perspective of a complete novice what some of these things mean.
Apparently, one is supposed to use the first joint of one's index finger and evenly draw back at a steady rate.
Let the hammer take you by surprise. The firing pin triggers the explosion that propels the bullet out the barrel. If you are firing properly, you should not be able to predict this event, or you'll reflexively compensate for the kick and recoil of the shot, throwing off your aim.
Breath. This one's real basic, but I assure you I stopped breathing a few times while shooting. Breath evenly, inhale, half-exhale, fire (but don't predict the pin).
I now need to re-read Zen & the Art of Archery -- the book whose title was paraphrased and later made famous by Michael Persig in Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintanance. Much that you may have heard or read about Zen practice seems to apply to pistols.
By the time I had worked up to the .44 magnum (and it was very smart of Bob to progress me from a couple of the smallest loads to the largest), I had developed a calm and a bit of a confidence and a sense that target shooting was a delicate sport ...
Then I misfired. I had developed a rhythm: cock, aim, shoot; cock, aim, shoot. I began to ignore (unconsciously) one of the first rules that Bob had told me: don't put your finger anywhere near the trigger until you are aiming and preparing to fire.
As I brought the gun down, midway between cock and aim, my finger touched the trigger -- and I fired a magnum load above the target. Believe me, the sound of a .44 magnum is not something you want to have take you by surprise. I pulled all my fingers away from the trigger and aimed the barrel toward the sky and said "I didn't mean to do that." My heart squeezed itself a little smaller in my chest. Apparently Bob saw something in my face and put a calming hand on my right shoulder. "You were aiming down range. You were following the important safety rules. You are scared, but everything is all right ..." I feel quite lucky and grateful that Bob didn't immediately end the lesson and eject me from the rifle club.
Bob let me continue to shoot, let me try different guns again. Not surprisingly, I was my most accurate with the electronic scope. More surpringly, I was almost as accurate with the .44 magnum.
The magnum is a long, large gun. It makes the loudest noise I've heard since I was in Israel, listening to fighter jets fly overhead all day -- and I haven't even heard the magnum without hearing protection.
I aimed with a two-handed grip, squeezed the trigger and felt my hands fly apart. Again and again, like I was clapping in slow motion. But somehow these huge bullets were grouping themselves toward the center of the target. That tension -- that juxtaposition of accuracy and control against the complete inability to keep my hands together after the gun fired, the total lack of any sense of control -- is one of the strangest, one of the most exhilirating, most frightening, somehow mysterious experiences of my life.
After I was done with the magnum, I couldn't seem to hit with anything else. My arm was exhausted and the little red dot shook uncontrollably as I tried to move down to one of the smaller guns again.
Almost four hours shooting.
Then Bob demonstrated the impact difference between the smallest and largest guns I'd fired. A .22 puts a hole in a block of ice about two or three inches across (that's a slug less than a quarter-inch making a hole about ten times its size). Then -- Man oh MAN -- you should have seen that ice BLOW UP, blow out, blow back and forth and all directions when the .44 hit it! Then a second or two of water and ice raining down.
Guns are very scary. Big guns are especially scary. But as scared as I was and am of firearms, I have to say that they are exciting. I just bought myself a .22 target pistol to start practicing with, a Browning Buck Mark 22.
I'm not sure what kind of world I'm entering. The assumed politics of the shooting
range are not my own, though they're
not
I'll report back to you on future developments, maybe including some reflections on the psychology and politics of firearms. I'm still an outsider to this world, and it's clear to me that I understood very little of it.