Guns
All of my life, I have been around guns. My grandfather had them, my father had them, and my brother had them. For a time, I myself had them as well, but during the course of the last ten years or so, I have found that I have less drive and time for shooting. I sure as hell don’t have a place to store them around here, and even if I did, I wouldn’t. My neighborhood isn’t the best place on the planet to be storing guns. All of this piece-by-piece losing of my old friends alarms me sometimes. Usually during election years when handguns, rifles, and shotguns are featured on the nightly news about twenty times a minute. To get to the point, I miss my rifles and my pistol. I want to get back to using them on a semi-regular basis.
What this means is that I am probably going to have to go and find a place to shoot them. I know of a couple very nice firing ranges around here and I have used them a few times with friends over the years. In my past, if I wanted to go shooting, I would just pack up the weapons I felt like shooting and then drive out to the family farm. I can’t do that anymore. So it is back to the ranges.
The range I am checking out is about forty miles outside the city limits and its membership includes the usual run-of-the-mill firearms owners you would expect to see out in the country. You have your redneck guys who drive up in their tricked out 4x4s. You have your cautious businessmen types who usually have an overpriced handgun of some German design. You have your grandpa types who drag their grandsons and granddaughters out against their parent’s wishes. And finally, you have the militia types who arrive at the range in cammo outfits (green or black) and fire off their AR-15 rifles at bulls eye targets instead of the human ones.
There are a few other types but they usually don’t show up in numbers great enough to warrant their own category. I don’t know which group I belong to either, I guess I am a mix of the grandpa and the redneck groups…except I haven’t hauled my kids out to a range yet. Their mother doesn’t think that they are old enough yet, but I am sure they are. I owned my own rifle at age six and at that time, I knew how to take it (mostly) apart and clean it besides being able to hit a dime at fifty feet with it. I loved that rifle (a little pump action Winchester .22) but I lost it when my parent’s house was burglarized back in the 1980s. If I could ever find that model of rifle again, I would purchase it as it was the best little rifle in the world to teach a young kid about the joys and responsibilities of shooting.
In that last paragraph, I said the word “responsibilities” and you probably glossed over it rather quickly. Most people do. Yes, in the United States, we are born with the Right to own a firearm, but when your average guy on the street hears that term, he doesn’t equate that right to a set of responsibilities. Bear with me because I am being general here, but I have to emphasize that most American people are given this right at birth and they never use it. Most Americans are scared of firearms. I don’t want to get into any arguments about this; there are plenty of other places to do that. However, I do want to say this: I am scared that Americans are scared of firearms! The only knowledge Americans seem to gain pertaining to firearms comes from watching 24-hour news. And the news seems to only paint a horribly twisted image of what it means to own, care for, and enjoy a firearm.
I guess what I am trying to say is that it is in my power to show my children that what they are being told is wrong. It is also in my power to show my children that shooting is a sport; a relaxing activity that will also give you self-confidence and train your mind to concentrate on a goal. Finally, and this part is the part that most media and police officers don’t want you to know, I can teach them how to protect themselves.
That whole “protect themselves” thing probably struck a chord of dissonance with you. I am not a crazy, gun toting whacko that is hold up in a compound somewhere; don’t think that for a second. I am the average guy who was taught from a young age that guns are tools (for protection or for sport), not something that kills people. But you also said police don’t want you to know that you can use a gun to protect yourself, you might say. Yes, this is very true. Over the course of my years, I have worked with lots of police officers. For the most part, they are a great bunch, but they are also just like the vast majority of Americans in that they grow nervous when they see a firearm. Due to job related incidents (violent crime, which has nothing to do with owning a firearm), I don’t blame them, but they tend to take their nervousness a bit too far when it concerns a normal, law-abiding citizen.
Where I live, the state of Ohio, it is legal to carry a firearm as long as it is open and not concealed. In fact, you can get a license that allows you to carry a firearm concealed as well! Why would you need to carry around a gun all hidden in your clothes? Don’t we have police officers to protect us?
Guys, guys, police officers are humans too. Their job is to protect and serve, but how many times have you witnessed a violent crime when a police officer is present? Few if any ever get committed right when Johnny Law is standing right there. Also, the events of the Virginia Tech shootings, the looting inspired by Hurricane Ike, and the many hundreds of thousands of crimes that go unstopped year in and year out should be evidence enough that police officers are not going to be around all the time…especially if you really need them.
So yeah, the police don’t want you to carry guns. They are probably right in that most of the idiots that want to carry or conceal carry shouldn’t be allowed to have a butter knife much less a gun. So I have to give the law officers a point on this, but I am not willing to concede the whole match in their favor just because (like many fun activities) a few morons decided to ruin it for everybody.
I am not going to sit my children down and tell them that guns are wrong just because there was six gun related homicides in the bad part of town last night either. What I am going to do is go to my dad’s house, find one of my lighter caliber rifles, pay a range membership fee, and take my kids there to show them that there is nothing to fear from a firearm if it is taken as a responsibility rather than as a right.
What this means is that we probably won’t even fire the rifle on the first day. Since the rifle has been languishing in my dad’s attic for the last ten years, it is going to need a cleaning. After the cleaning, when we get to the range, I am going to have to show them how to fire the thing and how to aim it. Aiming a rifle is a pretty easy thing to do. In the case of the rifle I will be teaching my kids on all you need to do is “put the apple on the post” as my dad used to say. What this entails is lining up the bulls eye of the target to the site at the front of the gun and putting that front site inside the “crown” of the back site near your eye. Pie.
As far as aiming a gun, that is pretty simple. It is a rudiment of firing an old .22 rifle that most kids a century before, who lived in rural areas took for granted. Now making that rudiment work is the hard part. You have to coordinate that “apple on the post” aiming with your breathing and you have to learn how to relax while you are lining things up. That part isn’t so simple. That is the part that takes practice and dedication. It is also the part that makes rifle marksmanship so fun. It is concentrating on a single thing to achieve an end goal. When you achieve that goal…that’s where the fun begins.
How often do you find a responsibility also a fun activity? Not very often in this day and age. The kids will probably want to go home at this point though because they will be scared of all the other guys shooting and the loud abrupt noises that pistols and rifles make. It can be a bit overwhelming at first, but with the proper earplugs it shouldn’t be a damaging experience, just an exhilarating one. I’m not going to let them go home though. I still have to teach them about firearm safety. Since I had them at home with me when I actually cleaned the rifle and I showed them the mechanisms, they are going to have an idea of how the rifle works. Now comes the part where I show them how all those parts come together and how to be safe around them.
First things first, never point a gun at anybody. Second off, keep the muzzle pointed down range. Next, always have the safety on. I am sure they can learn these three simple rules very easily; they aren’t rocket science, and I will then tackle the other, finer points of safety as they come up. Most of those rules deal with range policy and range etiquette, so they will have them listed on signs posted all over the range.
Depending on just how boring I am when I explain this stuff to my kids or how entertaining will determine how much actual range time they get. I will be watching them closely and I am pretty sure they will take everything very seriously.
Maybe we actually will have time to fire off a few rounds.
