LAST MONDAY, at a time when I’m normally enjoying a cup of coffee at my desk, I found myself shivering in the cold rain in Manassas, Virginia, inches away from a gun-wielding teenager, staring down the barrel of a shotgun. But don’t get your hopes up. This wasn’t the mugging of a foolish editor, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The shotgun was a beautiful Italian-made thing (a Perazzi, for you cognoscenti, probably worth more than my car). The teenager was Olympic-hopeful Amanda Dorman, a deadeye trap-shooter who had flown in from Colorado for the day. And I was staring down the barrel of her gun because she was giving me some Zen-like pointers (“Don’t aim”) on how to wing clay pigeons. (I aimed and I missed, after which Amanda took over and gave new meaning to the word smithereens.)
From there it was off to the small-arms range, where I put in some quality time with other, equally expert instructors, who showed me how to safely aim and fire Glocks and Berettas and Colts and a small cannon called a Thompson Contender (you hard-core types can e-mail me for a complete list with model numbers). The marksmanship of the coaches was dazzling. Almost as impressive was the shameless way they exaggerated my abilities. They were as charming and unctuous as my reporter colleagues can be when they butter up a source. (“This can’t really be your first time shooting a pistol. . . . All those targets you knocked down? . . . That’s really impressive.”)
Journalists don’t have Walter Mitty fantasies, they have George Plimpton fantasies. Getting to spend a day at the range with thousands of rounds of free ammunition at hand, in the company of some of the top-ranking shooters in America, fulfilled one of mine. So I don’t want to hurt the feelings of the good folks at the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which hosted this event to allow a few media types to dip a toe into the “gun culture.” I enjoyed their company and wish them well. But guys, you may want to think about diverting some of your outreach budget to St. Jude medals. Because explaining the “gun culture” to journalists who don’t get it is likely to require the intervention of the patron saint of lost causes.
I don’t think I was really the target demographic for this event. Where I grew up, I didn’t know anyone who didn’t own a gun. The very idea of a gun culture would have been as preposterous to us in southern Indiana as the idea of a water culture would be to a fish. Then I moved to Washington, where for years I didn’t know anyone who did own a gun, and where I soon discovered that the supposed “culture” of my boyhood is believed to spawn psychopaths and serial killers.
Now it’s true that there are people who are fascinated by guns, in the same way that there are people who are, say, fascinated by California wines or home theater systems. And in that limited sense, it’s certainly fair to say that there is such a thing as a “gun culture.” But that’s not why the term is so often deployed these days. Rather, it’s used by people who are hysterically hostile to guns, for the purpose of painting their fellow citizens who are not hysterical as dangerous and depraved.
What do I mean by hysterical? Well, ask yourself this. How many times in the last week and a half have you read or heard that the D.C. sniper received an “expert” marksmanship badge in the army? This is an exceedingly underwhelming detail on his résumé. Millions of veterans, including me, have that same badge. It means you have a pulse, paid attention to the drill sergeant at the firing range, and did what you were told. Everybody who’s not washed out of boot camp gets some kind of marksmanship badge. It’s the military equivalent of the Lake Wobegon effect. Yet many of the more breathless reports on John Muhammad’s marksmanship badge made it sound as if it were a shocking lapse of judgment on the part of the U.S. military that he, like all recruits, had been instructed in how to handle a rifle. Imagine that: a military culture that teaches men to shoot.
So this is what the defenders of the gun culture are up against: a hysteria culture that’s pretty much written them out of polite society. It’s deeply unfair, of course. The shooting sports have their distinctive pleasures, as all my instructors last week eloquently attested. The firearms themselves are precision instruments, some of great beauty and impressive craftsmanship. A gun in the end is a tool like any other. What matters morally is the use to which it is put. And it’s not as if guns are uniquely perilous instruments.
As six journalists and instructors stood shoulder to shoulder firing rounds into cardboard targets last week, the NPR guy pulled out his tape recorder. One of the expert gunmen backed up. Pointing at the microphone, he said, “Now there is a deadly weapon.”
–Richard Starr
