Guns are loud.
That’s probably the first thing I learned when I took my first firearms training course this summer. They’re also surprisingly difficult to control; it’s nearly impossible to fire even the smallest rifle accurately from a distance. Of course, that wasn’t a problem for the homeschooled, 8-year-old girl shooting next to me. Her shirt had an image of a Revolutionary War-era minuteman accompanied by slogans about marksmanship and its essential ties to American heritage. And as I walked downrange to examine my targets, I noticed her disturbingly accurate groupings.
Growing up middle class in the intensely liberal Maryland side of the Washington, D.C. suburbs, guns weren’t seen as an unalienable right or a part of a long tradition of taming the wilderness. Guns were for criminals and crazy people. Anybody mildly informed about local affairs saw this as blatantly obvious: D.C.’s gun violence numbers weren’t great, and Baltimore, a 45-minute drive away, was even worse.
It seems disingenuous of me to say this — my hometown of Bethesda was recently ranked the top-earning town in America — but these attitudes were also backed up by personal experience. There were the Beltway sniper attacks in 2002, when John Allen Muhammad and his teenage accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, killed nine people and injured three with a high-powered rifle. Five of the shootings took place in my school district — four of them in a little under three hours. As the news filled with reports of more shootings, the county kept schools under lockdown for a harrowing three weeks, tightening security even further once the killers threatened area children. Then there was high school, where a fellow student ended up in the hospital after accidentally shooting himself. A little more than a year later, three more students were shot by gang members while riding public transit; one of them later died of his injuries.
That being said, I always found guns fascinating, in the perverse, immature way that adolescent boys inevitably find loud, potentially harmful things fascinating. I attended a math/science magnet high school with a peer group full of immature adolescent nerds, so I found plenty of opportunities to indulge these passions for the dumb and dangerous. Most of these exploits involved substances from the chemistry lab and a lighter: one time, we soaked tennis balls in a liquid alkane, lit them on fire and played catch, hoping the alkane would burn out before the ball hit us in the hands or face. Another time, we made a makeshift smoke bomb using potassium nitrate from a science project. We’re lucky none of us were hurt, expelled or arrested.
So it was with a mild sense of childish excitement that I found myself making the three-hour trek to Philadelphia this summer to visit one of those high-school friends, a pre-med student balancing a summer research position at the University of Pennsylvania with MCAT preparation. It might have been the stress. Or it might have been the boredom that inevitably ensues from being stuck on a college campus after all the students have left. Whatever it was, he found himself making an extreme kind of Internet impulse purchase: a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle, the civilian version of what most of our troops carry in Afghanistan. He told me about his purchase over GChat one day and asked if I wanted to learn how to shoot it with him.
You bet I did.
And that’s how I found myself at an outdoor shooting range an hour west of downtown Philadelphia with a loaner rifle in my hands and cheap pieces of foam stuffed in my ears, looking downrange through a pair of protective glasses on loan courtesy of the UPenn hospital. Many of the people around me were from even farther west of the city, the types of small-town residents that then-Sen. Barack Obama accused of deflecting lack of economic opportunity by bitterly “clinging to their guns and religion” in 2008. Many on the far-left agreed with Obama’s assertion, just as many on the far-right agree with Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s comments on the “47 percent.”
But Obama’s comments, and their belittling implications about intelligence, are a little off the mark. It’s hard to argue with the idea that these people cling to their guns — they do, with obvious pride. But the general idea that these people were dumb and aggressively ignorant couldn’t be more wrong.
Accurate target shooting takes an abundant level of skill and intelligence; there’s a long list of complicated factors you have to keep in mind — a list that extends beyond the point-and-shoot braggadocio embraced by the media. Sight picture: keep the sights aimed just under the bulls-eye. Natural point of aim: angling your body just so to avoid muscle strain and keep your shots on target. Trigger squeeze: squeeze gently, but deliberately, and ease up after you’ve fired so your sights stay on target. That’s before you factor in sling holds, which can cut off circulation, but vastly improve accuracy.
For a soft city kid shooting a rifle outdoors for the first time, I wasn’t too shabby. With a .22, my shots were good for a 159 on the Army Qualification Test (AQT), making me a “marksman” by military standards. On the other hand, my scores on my friend’s much larger AR-15 are something I’d rather not discuss. Over the course of the weekend, I gained a great deal of respect for target shooters and their way of life: their love for their craft, their dedication to safety and their respect for the destructive power of their weapons.
That’s not to say that the culture shock ever really wore off. We’ve been over how liberal my hometown is, and I’ve split the first almost-20 years of my life between there and Ann Arbor. Trading driveways filled with “Obama for America” logos for a parking lot filled with “Super Conservative” and “Screw the IRS” bumper stickers was jarring in and of itself. The lengthy, Tea Party-esque intro speech by the range captain, a retired Marine, was also, by my mildly elitist standards, highly xenophobic and came dangerously close to threatening the president. And of course, there was the 8-year-old and her older brother, both of whom had been shooting rifles when my parents wouldn’t even buy me toy guns. The ease and comfort with which they cleaned their targets was surreal.
Maybe one day I’ll understand where these people are coming from — the importance they place upon their weapons and their constant vigilance against whatever perceived threat, be it foreign or domestic, rational or absurd.
But now, I understand their passion, even if I still cringe at their politics. That’s the beautiful thing about America; they have as much of a right to advocate for their hallowed traditions as we do for gun control and universal healthcare. In the meantime, I’ve got a new hobby.
David Tao is a Business junior and a senior arts editor for The Michigan Daily.