“I’m going to the shooting range,” I proudly announced to some of my friends at the Campus Center last week. My announcement was met with silence, three quizzical stares, and at least one look of contempt.
I guess I shouldn’t have been so shocked that my plan to shoot guns was met with hostility here at Wesleyan. There is a strong northeast liberal mentality in which guns are synonymous with crime and the NRA is on par with Afghan guerrilla training organizations.
But I was curious. So I went to the Hartford Gun Club to see what recreational shooting was all about. This experience was nothing if not novel. I had never seen a gun in my life so everything I knew about shooting I learned from Hollywood. I imagined Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Holding a pistol would immediately turn me into Ray Liota in Goodfellas. Surely, I would say things like “Get the hell outta here” in a spot-on New York Italian accent.
My inner gangster was disappointed. Walking up the tree-lined entrance of the club, I was transported into John Candy’s The Great Outdoors. The lodge was a faux log cabin, decorated with regal animal heads and plaques celebrating some of the accomplished marksmen that the club has produced. Briley, the club Labrador, was the official welcome committee.
Marshall, the club manager, gave me the grand tour of the facilities. He explained the different shooting games – skeet, trap, five-stand – and the different strategies required to hit various movements of the targets in the different games. A man shooting a round of double skeet with shocking accuracy smiled and tipped his hat at me as I walked past. I watched as two targets were launched from opposing houses simultaneously. The man calmly followed the first bird with his rifle and fired, quickly recovered and fired at the second target. In seconds, both targets were down. This practice involves strategy and patience, rather than a brutish desire to blow things up.
“We get all kinds of people here,” Marshall said. “A lot of these guys just like to shoot. We get a lot of corporate outings, and Boy Scouts as well.” Even corporate gunmen have senses of humor, I learned. The club hosts a “Cowboy Action Shoot,” where the games are played in a fake western setup. Participants put on their best western get-up and shoot in a field of fake saloons, tumbleweeds, and steers.
“It’s really a riot,” Marshall said.
We go over safety procedures and Marshall hands me a Remington 1100 rifle. It looked like one of the toy rifles I used to play with as a kid. The butt was plastic and it lacked the frightening aura that I’ve come to expect from firearms. But when I took the rifle from Marshall, it was clear that this was the real thing. It was heavy in my arms and my firing stance was strong. I loaded the shot and took aim at my first target, a clay disk lying peacefully in the grass about 15 feet in front of me. I was more worried that I would embarrass myself by not being able to hit the target, that it would just lie there in grass as a smug reminder that I was too girly or too liberal to know how to shoot properly, than I was about actually firing the thing.
I lined the disk in my sights and pulled the trigger. Several things happened in a completely disconnected fashion. My eyes closed for just a split second, and a deafening roar echoed in my ears. Small orange shards leapt in the grass in front of me. There was a dull pain in my shoulder. All of these things happened separately, slowly, completely independent of any of my action. I dropped the gun back to my side and just stared.
“You hit it! See? I knew you’d be a natural.” Sure enough, there was no more target. I felt like a kid who’d just won the gold star. I moved on to a moving target and felt a spark of pride as the flight of my first bird was disrupted and the orange pieces dispersed in several directions.
As down on guns as Wesleyan kids generally are, I think collectively we would make pretty good marksmen. Granted, shooting is slightly taboo, especially for a bunch of liberal students here in liberal Connecticut. But at Wesleyan, we like to think that we’re pretty badass, even though our geeky element strongly outweighs our wild side. We fit all this stretching and challenging in between the hours we spend studying in the library. We’re responsible badasses, and spending an afternoon shooting in a controlled environment, shooting guns at inanimate targets is pretty responsibly badass.
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