52 with a Bullet

I read the local paper every day and can count on finding at least one incidence of gun violence in each issue. Usually there are multiple shootings in my city and the surrounding communities.

I didn’t grow up with guns as part of my everyday experience. We weren’t hunters or target shooters. There were two antique rifles hanging on the wall in my parents’ bedroom, but they seemed more like décor than instruments of death.

Guns lived in my imagination as things of power and terror. I saw them wielded by cops and criminals in movies and TV shows. I never saw them in real life, on the streets of the mostly white suburb I grew up in. School shootings were not the common occurrence then that they have become.

Even when I lived alone in an unsavory neighborhood of Akron and went to gigs as a singing telegram character (read: stripper), I never felt the need of a gun for the euphemism of protection. I always thought of condoms as a much more immediate source of protection than a firearm might be.

And so I arrived at my 52nd birthday having never learned to shoot a gun — indeed, having never held an actual bona fide gun in my hand.

My first surprise was how heavy handguns are. When actors wave them around onscreen, the impression is that they weigh almost nothing. In fact, they feel quite substantial — about as weighty as their inherent lethality.

My second surprise was the complexity of calibers and other specifics. The friend teaching me about guns was in the Marines and worked as a military weapons instructor after his service, so he enjoyed getting into all the complex details of mechanics and engineering. He outlined the difference between a pistol and a revolver, overwhelmed me with a litany of jargon and repeated the first two commandments of safety: Always assume a gun is loaded, and always keep it pointed in a safe direction.

The actual shooting range was unsurprising. The low one-story cement block building stood beside a gravel parking lot amid a sweeping expanse of undeveloped land several miles away from the usual signs of civilization. Inside, a Korean man with a huge smile and thick accent awaited us behind a wooden counter above which six or seven handguns that could be rented hung on pegboard. A television droned quietly in a cozy lounge area bedecked with mounted deer heads above worn sofas. I could see through thick plexiglass windows the backs of a couple of men shooting, though the sound of their shots was muffled.

We chose a paper target, donned ear protection and followed the Korean man into the shooting range. Ten stalls separated by flimsy pressed wood boards looked out onto a graded cement expanse, the floor of which was littered with small hunks of metal. A low bench gave us a place to set the ammo and firearms my friend brought with us. Everything was painted gray.

First up was a .22 pistol with an attractive gray and black design on the handle. My friend showed me how to make sure there was no bullet in the chamber, how to put a clip of bullets into it, which little button advanced a bullet into the chamber and where the safety switch was.

He clipped the paper target into ordinary binder clips and whizzed it 20 feet away from us on a rail that looked like part of a garage door opener. He explained how to use the sights to line up the barrel with the target, how to position my hands to lessen the kickback.

Then I fired 10 times, sending all the ammo from the clip in the general direction of the target.

Every shot evinced an involuntary “fuck” from my mouth.

We worked our way up from the relatively light .22 pistol to a much weightier revolver, graduating from smaller caliber bullets to the infamous .357s I still associate with the Dirty Harry film franchise of the 1970s.

That gun spit out a small but fiery explosion with every shot. As hard as I tried, I could not keep my eyes open when I squeezed the trigger.

I did not feel euphoria or a sense of strength. I did not feel exhilarated or empowered. I did not feel any safer than I had before shooting a gun.

I felt an electric shock of fear every time I pulled the trigger, and I jumped involuntarily every single time anyone got off a shot. My friend kept telling me to stop jumping. I concentrated on trying to stay still unsuccessfully.

Every instinct in my body screamed at me to leave this place. The smell of gunpowder, the thunder of each shot, the unbeautiful environment — everything about it triggered my flight instincts.

As an exercise, my friend loaded two magazines with six bullets each. His directive was to load one clip, do a two series of two shots to the chest and one to the head of the target, then reload and repeat.

“If you’re trying to stop someone coming at you,” he said, “a shot in the chest might not do it.”

I completed the exercise without breaking down into tears, though I had to really concentrate. The humanoid silhouette on the paper target was suddenly an attacker.

After a half hour or so, I was done. My legs felt too weak to hold me up any longer.

Did I enjoy learning to shoot a gun? Not really, but I’m glad I had the opportunity, especially in the company of someone who understands deeply the potential for tragedy and the ways to avoid it. He helped a pair of young men shooting in the lane next to ours who had a gun that kept jamming. They were using the wrong size bullets, he determined. Later he told me that continuing with the wrong bullets could have caused the gun to catch fire or explode in the guy’s hand. Jesus.

I’ve tried a lot of new things this past year: fencing, ballroom dancing, horseback riding. No matter how challenging it’s been, each activity has helped me build confidence, balance, strength and inroads of new knowledge.

Learning to shoot a gun has altered my perception of firearms to some extent. They are no longer the fantasies of film but solid pieces of reality. And perhaps if I ever have to defend myself with one, I might not freak out and fail. But I still don’t want one in my house. And I still don’t really get the way they’re fetishized by so many people.

I thought I’d have some kind of epiphany at the shooting range, a blossoming of inner power, a bolt of exhilaration. But I left feeling shaken, overwhelmed and much older than when I started.