Mystery of Guns

A couple of days ago I shot a gun for the first time in my life.  In fact, I shot four different kinds of guns.  I went to visit friends who live in a state that has comparatively lax gun laws.  They live in a fairly rural area of the state where lots of people own guns and hunt.  I had never showed interest in his collection before, but for some reason when the conversation got around to hunting, I decided that I wanted to see his guns and try them out.  I felt that it was an experience that I had to have under my belt, living in a country where there is at least one firearm per person.

My friend is proud of his gun collection.  He has about two dozen rifles, shotguns, semiautomatic handguns, and even a flintlock musket, all neatly displayed in two mahogany gun closets.   He meticulously explained the operation and purpose of each type of firearm and the various sizes of ammunition.  He opened drawers at the bottom of the cabinet and showed me over two hundred boxes of bullets. 

I told him that I was a gun virgin, that I had never shot a gun in my entire life.  I think he was amazed.  He had been brought up with guns and was hunting with his father by the age of ten. He asked me if I wanted to try it out.

I explained to him that I thought that all guns should be outlawed.  He responded with the usual pro-gun arguments, but neither of us contended with much vehemence.  In the face of his two filled gun cabinets and all the filled gun cabinets throughout this vast country, my position seemed very naïve.  I knew that it was time that I acknowledged certain facts of life.  It was time to end my maidenhood.

So we took two long guns and two pistols and a couple of boxes of ammo from the gun closet, climbed into my friend’s truck, and went off to his father-in-law’s property, where my friend insisted it was safe to shoot.  His wife, my wife, and our dog followed in my car to witness this curious phenomenon of a 59 year old city boy firing his first gun.  We drove to his father-in-law’s property, where there was a field adjacent to a steep forest.  We set up facing the forest, which was about fifty yards away, and my friend explained that we would shoot harmlessly into the trees.

He loaded the 22 mm rifle and took the first shot, which was frighteningly loud.  Then he reloaded and handed me the rifle.  I rested the butt against my shoulder and pointed into the trees, anticipating a huge kickback.  I carefully lined up the sight, pressed the trigger, and fired.  Again the loud bang, this time like a firecracker going off by my ear, accompanied by the simultaneous, but surprisingly weak recoil against my shoulder.  It was quite a thrill, but it was hard to believe that I had just shot an instrument of potentially fatal force.  It felt more like a toy than a deadly weapon.  I turned with a smile toward my wife, who was holding on tight to the dog’s leash, and my friend’s wife, who was snapping photographs of me to document the momentous occasion.  Later on they said that I looked like a little boy who just completed his first bicycle ride.

The second firearm was a double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun, or turkey gun, as my friend called it.  The shotgun shell is huge compared with a bullet because it contains little lead balls, or shot, that spread out after the shell is fired.  Apparently that makes it good for hunting birds.  My friend put a single shell into the barrel and then tried to click it shut, but it wouldn’t close.  He tried several times and almost gave up, but then he pressed a tiny pin down with his finger and it finally snapped shut.  He had no idea why the pin stuck, but he handed me the shotgun and said it was okay to shoot.   I was a little skeptical, wondering if it would explode in my face, but I took his word that it was safe to shoot and fired the gun.

The recoil was enormous, just as Newton’s third law of motion predicts.  The explosive action of the heavy cartridge propelling forward caused an equal and opposite reaction that jolted my shoulder back with almost painful force.  All I could think of was a turkey’s beautiful plumage being ripped to shreds and little lead balls embedded in the Thanksgiving meal.

The third gun was a silver semi-automatic pistol.  They’re called semi-automatic because bullets are loaded into the chamber automatically after each shot so you can shoot multiple bullets in succession by pressing the trigger each time.  It was fairly light and small, only five inches long, and easy, perhaps too easy, to hold in your hand and wave around.  In fact, that’s what I mistakenly did.  

After being handed the gun, I raised it up immediately in the direction of my wife.  Everyone  screamed out at once. “Don’t do that!”  My friend calmly explained that I had broken the first rule of gun safety, which is not to point the gun at anyone.  He should have explained that to me before putting it in my hand.  I apologized and turned towards the trees, this time with the gun pointed down at the ground.  Then I raised it again, aimed, and boom, boom, boom, fired off three shots in succession. The kickback was not great, but each time I shot, I involuntarily lowered the barrel so that the last shot skimmed off the grass at the end of the field.  I realized that it requires a strong, steady hand to shoot accurately in succession, especially with a light handgun.

The last gun I fired was a .357 magnum revolver.  It was longer and heavier than the semi-automatic, and more reminiscent of the pistols carried by the gunslingers in the Old West.  My friend’s eyes seemed to light up as he told me about this gun. 

“This is a stopper,” he said.  “It can take down a bear.  If you fire it at night, a huge flash of light comes out of the muzzle.” 

“Okay, I’ll remember that the next time I hunt bear at night.” 

“Hold it with two hands.  It has a strong kick,” he advised.

He loaded six bullets in the revolving chamber and snapped it shut.  Then he shot three times.  The explosions were almost deafening and I could see his hands recoiling each time.  Then he handed me the gun.  I fired once and was astonished by the powerful kickback.  This was obviously a very deadly weapon.  I fired it again, trying to imagine the incredible force of the bullet tearing through a torso.  The third, and last time, I fired it with one hand to feel the full impact of the recoil.  Then I handed the gun back to my friend, pointed down, of course, and thanked him for the initiation. 

“I didn’t realized how powerful they are,” I said, which summed up only part of my feelings.  What I didn’t say to him was that after firing his guns, I was even more convinced that they should all be outlawed.

I thought about the husband temporarily deranged after discovering his wife’s disloyalty, or the enraged kid after being insulted, bullied or humiliated, or the lonely and depressed guy rejected by his girlfriend and looking for a quick way out of his misery.  I thought about how many guns there are out there, how easy it is to get one, and how easy they are to use when overwhelmed by rage or depression.  I recalled having three students of mine die by gun fire, two of them accidentally.  I know that hunters consider hunting a constitutional right and that there are many good people who need personal protection against bad people, but over thirty thousand people a year are killed by guns, the majority of them being suicides. 

I’m glad I finally got to shoot a gun.  My anti-gun position is no longer just an intellectual one.  I now have felt the frightening power these weapons have.  Hopefully, I’ll never be forced to witness someone being shot.  And hopefully, when Kagan’s appointment to the Supreme Court is approved, recent decisions that have eroded the powers of local governments to control guns will be reversed.

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