"Home on the Range"
A reflection on six weeks of pistol shooting
Trigger Warning: This is a post about…well…things with triggers. If you don’t want to read onward about guns and shooting, you should stop here.
BANG!
The noise startles me even while wearing “ear pro,” the common slang for ear protection, which everyone is required to wear upon entry past not one but two rounds of thick, partially-soundproofing doors.
The “ear pro,” the thick plastic apparatus with lush, on-ear cups is a kissing cousin to the Bose noise-cancelling headphones I use for work. Though both are used to take the edge off of loud noises, a set of Bose headphones used to mute a barking dog is a little bit different from a set of Honeywell shooting earmuffs used to prevent deafness from a gunshot. Much as my dogs at their most ferocious would like to challenge this, the truth is that a firearm is more fearsome than a weenie dog.
Before I get into the meat of this piece, I should note a few things
I am not a gun lover and I do not foresee myself ever becoming one. Even as I learn to shoot, guns scare the crap out of me.
Though this should go without saying, I feel inclined to say that I find the mass shootings incidents in the US both heartbreaking and terrifying.
I do not currently have a rigorous, well-informed perspective on “the right thing to do,” policy-wise, when to comes to firearms. This is a piece from someone who only recently learned how to load one correctly.
Regardless, I wanted to write about my recent, fledgling experiences around firearms out of three key beliefs.
If something scares you, I believe you should learn about it in hopes that exposure to it and understanding it better might mean it still scares you but the fear of it no longer has power over you.
Especially if you’re a woman, I believe you must know how to defend yourself and hope is not a strategy for survival. Jiu-jitsu and R.A.D. courses can only take you so far against someone with a clue and a desire to hurt you. I personally believe that self-defense must include some degree of proficiency with a weapon.
If something seems simple to you, I believe you should investigate it further to see whether it is as simple as it seems.
I had tried shooting two times before it stuck on the third.
The first time was in Massachusetts in 2017. I’d driven with three friends about an hour outside of the city of Boston to do a firearms safety course on the weekend of Thanksgiving. The four of us had nothing better to do with family at the time, and perhaps, if anything, shooting could be a relief from the stressors of Thanksgiving. I remember sitting in the class, learning about how to hold a pistol correctly, along with some of the legal basics of carrying and transporting a firearm. What I remember most, however, was being intrigued by the types of people in the class.
Perhaps from the kinds of news I’d read, the people I knew. or the stereotypes I’d carried up until that point in my life, I’d expected something different in that class makeup. This was about a year after Trump was elected, and to live in the Uber-liberal hub of Boston proper meant that you had a certain media-shaped narrative in your head of the kind of people fervently supported the Second Amendment—and it was not a particularly nice picture or one grounded in the full nuance of reality.
I say this to remember my surprise at how everyone in the class looked perfectly normal. It had been a small collection of ten people, at most, who I could have seen on any given day riding the MBTA. I do not know what most of them were there to do with their firearms safety certificates, but but they did not seem like they were there to eventually acquire a gun for willful violence. In hindsight, I assume these were people who wanted to hunt, people who wanted to try something new, people who wanted to learn how to use a firearm for protecting themselves or their families.
I realize now that somewhere along the line, I’d internalized a relationship between having a gun with being a bad, crazy, weird, or violent person. Some of this might have had to do with my father alluding to the two guns in his safe and my father, in his frequent moments of mania, being a bad, crazy, weird, or violent person.
That class was a lightbulb, illuminating a change of mind. For all the violence done with guns, someone having a gun did not have to be an inherently negative thing requiring severe moral judgment. People had guns who wanted them for legitimate reasons. There might have been a stereotypical “look” to a gun owner, but it didn’t represent the whole population of gun owners.
This was the first time I had truly considered these ideas. I started to wonder what else I believed that I might be wrong about.
The second time I tried shooting was in Texas in 2021. A friend of mine, Albert, had been visiting town. Originally hailing from Los Angeles, and having a very self-described “Angelino moment”, he asked the guy at the counter managing the gun rentals to “pick one that best matched [his] personality.” The guy at the counter was unamused and grumbled before our friend selected a gold pistol that looked like a prop from Austin Powers in Goldmember.
Aside from Albert’s moment of comedy at the range and the dinner we ate together afterward, I retain few memories of that day. What I remember more clearly when I think about Texas and firearms is a time during which I wish I’d had one and known a meaningful thing or two about them.
I had spent an afternoon in a coffee shop in Montrose, working on some writing. A strange, gangly guy who sat a little too close to me. He seemed a bit socially awkward, but I humored the conversation. I don’t remember what he said precisely, but it seemed overly inquisitive and set off an alarm bell.
At first, I tried to shrug off the alarm bell, to reason through the situation, check any biases, but in my heart, I felt something instinctive that told me to leave. ASAP.
But I couldn’t. Though most people speak of instincts in a threat as falling into two categories—either fight or flight—there’s one more reaction that animals have, too. Freeze.
I froze.
I recalled feeling preyed on in that very moment, but stood motionless in panic. I did not know what to do and feared that any action might escalate the situation.
I locked eyes with the manager behind the cash machine. She had been listening in, had also sensed the oddity of the situation, and strongly urged the young man to leave. Twice. We both watched him walk with a sinister slowness outside to his car, where he paused a little too long. He then looked back at the window, holding my gaze a little too long, before finally driving away.
The manager apologized to me, asked me if I was ok, and we debriefed for a moment on what seemed not quite right about the guy. She gave me a free refill of cafe de olla and a tamale on the house. I hardly tasted the food. The adrenaline remained sky-high and my heart took its sweet time going back down from my throat to my chest. I tried to return to my writing, to coax more words out of my brain and onto my laptop, but was mentally and emotionally gutted for the day.
I thanked the manager and drove home in a mute daze.
I loved that coffee shop, but I never went back to it ever again. I was too shaken up to return, too scared that this strange guy would be back for me. Despite being strong for a girl and being on a road trip to become a serious competitor in a combat sport, I knew that if that guy wanted to hurt me, he could hurt me. And I didn’t have a way to do a damned thing about it.
The third time I tried shooting was just over a month ago in Georgia.
It had been two weeks after getting scammed into a car repair in a Kroger parking lot on the morning of New Year’s Day, which I wrote about in this post, linked here and directly below.
Two weeks after the incident, the hideousness of the parking lot hack job had begun to bother me less. My embarrassment at having fallen for the scam had begun to abate, and a refund on a returned holiday purchase had recouped the financial losses associated with the “repair.” Still, there was one thing I could not shake about the situation, even as I had come to terms with its material and emotional consequences:
How it could have ended so much worse.
I wondered what I might have done if the man had followed me the machine as I made the cash withdrawal. I wondered how the situation might have gone from pernicious to dangerous if he had been carrying a gun.
In the two weeks after the scam, I had been reading The Gift of Fear and listening to podcasts with Gavin DeBecker. He shared data on how circumstances of targeting lone women, in particular, were not so uncommon and could quickly turn from unassuming to violent.
I started to play out alternative scenarios of the event on New Year’s Day, in which the scammer had gotten into my car, forced me to text my fiancé to nurture an illusion that everything was fine and I’d be home later than expected from the grocery store, and held a gun to my head, compelling me to drive to a second location. My mind went to dark places about all the horrible things that could happen upon reaching a second location.
The scammer could have fled with more than $400 of my hard earned money on New Year’s Day. With more ambitious and violent intent, the man could have walked away with my whole bank account, my body, and possibly my life.
I realize this sounds a little bit like a true crime drama, and like I am imagining and assuming the potential worst case scenario, but the key point is this: the New Year’s Day scam had shaken me out of any illusions of suburban safety and any contentment with being a victim.
I decided that day that if I had to be target, I didn’t have to be an easy one.
On a Saturday afternoon in January, my fiancé and I signed up for a Pistol 101 class at a well-reviewed range about fifteen minutes from our apartment. True to much of my experience living in the South so far, the place was incongruous with my expectations: it lay unassumingly in a strip mall that featured a Mexican restaurant, an outlet store for hair salon supplies, an ESL language center, and a ballroom dancing facility.
I walked into the store to check in for the class and saw a cherubic girl at the counter who couldn’t have been more than eight. The daughter of one of the guys on shift, she was the picture of childhood innocence—golden hair, rosy cheeks, and a pink shirt—who walked with unfazed ease alongside full cases of dangerous weapons. The sight of the young girl around the guns gave me some hope—if she could grow up and be comfortable around these machines, maybe I could too.
The girl’s dad checked us in for the class, “You’ll be with EJ,” he said. My fiancé and I looked around at the various men behind the counter wondering which one was EJ until EJ eventually found us.
“Pistol 101, 4PM?” An army veteran with the aesthetic and voice of a burlier, more bearish Morgan Freeman, EJ looked in our eyes with military precision, focusing on the pupils like bullseyes.
We nodded.
“Come with me,” he said, shepherding us into a classroom with six other people.
Everyone in class happened to be in a couple. First it made me wonder how many men did this course with women as a common date idea. Then it made me wonder how many women did this course out of begrudging appeasement or genuine desire to understand their partners’ interest in owning and shooting a gun. Gender tendencies and stereotypes aside, I wondered more broadly about what uniquely brought everyone here and whether anyone had the same reason for being here as I did.
EJ began by teaching us the key rules of firearms: to only point a firearm at something you intend to destroy; to treat every gun as if it is loaded; to know your target and what lies beyond it to only put your finger on the trigger when ready to shoot—contrary to every Hollywood movie where the hero or villain always has the finger on the trigger.
EJ then gave each of us an unloaded pistol, walked us through its anatomy, and had us practice the key skills of operating it—racking the slide, loading the magazine, aligning the sights, pulling the trigger.
Everything but aligning the sights gave me trouble.
After weakly pulling at the gunmetal a few times, I gave one big, muscled effort to the endeavor of racking the slide and nearly caught my fingers.
When it had taken me over a minute to load three fake bullets into the magazine, EJ loaded the ammunition for me to keep the class moving. The dexterity inspired awe. With a few quick pushes of the callused thumb, the faux ammo was loaded in a matter of seconds.
In an exercise for practicing the deliberateness required on the trigger pull, EJ gave each of us small eye droppers and asked us, one by one, to excrete a solitary drop of water onto the floor. When I pressed the dropper, I clumsily let out a stream.
After going through the “basics” that seemed to elude me, my fiancé volunteered to go first in doing the simulation program of a bank robbery with an active shooter. It was on a cheap projector, was completely virtual and done with a video game-style plastic gun, but the scenarios were real enough to shake me up.
While I could avoid EJ’s gaze in asking for other volunteers for the simulation, I couldn’t avoid the next hour of the course: actually going into the firing lanes to shoot.
EJ gave us ear protection and eye protection and one target each. The group of us walked in single file behind him, our military Mother Goose, to the last few lanes of the range.
Aside from not shooting myself or someone else by accident—if I had to get one thing right that day, it was wearing the ear and eye protection correctly. If I didn’t do that, I’d have gone home deaf from the gunshots or blind from a wayward casing in the eye.
Before we entered our lanes, EJ drew three lines in Sharpie on our hands for where to grip and align our support hand against our shooting hand. He positioned our hands on the gun before we took our first shots.
My palms were sweating, arms shaking in trying to align the sights toward the center of the poorly-hung target. I tried not to choke too hard on the grip of the gun, I squeezed one eye shut, hard, along with the trigger.
POP!
I twitched, worsening the recoil. The shot landed on the paper of the target, but not on the target itself. Part of this was due to my poor technique, but also due to the fact that I was so nervous that I had hung my target incorrectly: I had clipped the paper in the wrong spots, having been too startled and triggered (for lack of a better word) by every shot that was going off in the other lanes.
The only kind of range I’d ever been to in my life with any frequency was a driving range—my dad had been a golfer. It was was strange to behold the sight downrange and find, instead of a constellation of white dimpled balls on turf and grass, a slope of lead-alloy bullets collected in an ominous heap against a reinforced wall.
EJ coached us through a few rounds each for the next hour, offering tips on how to improve our technique as we squeezed the trigger and let live ammunition tear through our targets at a fifteen-meter distance down the range.
For me, this was a lost cause. I don’t think I fired more than ten bullets that day, and I felt my heart race frantically with every pull of the trigger. I tried to wait for quiet moments to shoot my shots so as to not be startled by others’ shots—but to no avail. The shots went off in jazz staccato, in sharp, improvised, unpredictable rhythm. I jumped at each explosive burst, unable to accustom myself to the noise. I struggled to catch my breath, and when I did, it was shallow.
I had not enjoyed the experience of shooting on that January afternoon.
I left Pistol 101 feeling drained and dizzy. It had been a full assault of sights and sounds that, I figured, most people did not experience with any routine unless they were avid sportsmen or active soldiers. I did not feel empowered standing in the lane with the gun in my hands. I did not enjoy the smell of gunpowder that seemed to linger in my nose for the following hours.
For most of the class, I felt foolish, clumsy, embarrassed, self-conscious—less so about how bad I was at shooting and more so at the extent of my own fear and how it affected me. Long after we’d driven home, the quiet of our apartment a welcome respite from the BOOM after BOOM-BOOM at the range, I sat on the couch in silence. I was too shaken up to cry despite having wanted to cry for the last few hours.
I thought back to my first proper jiu-jitsu class in 2017, the closest thing to a combat-adjacent hobby or practice. I remember how intoxicating that first class had been. I left with fascination, excitement, and curiosity to come back to jiu-jitsu class again.
I did not come home from that first pistol class feeling anything like I did when I went to that first jiu-jitsu class. I came home with a mortal paradox:
“This is fucking terrifying.”
and
“You have to figure this out like your life depends on it in the horrible event that it actually might.”
Though I was scared about learning to use a weapon, I was more scared about being defenseless and wishing I’d learned how to use a weapon.
As I washed the gunpowder and debris off my hands and helped my fiancé with dinner, I stared at the Sharpie marks from EJ on my hand, repositioning my left hand on my right, trying to commit the proper form to memory.
It took them most of the week for the black marks to fade.
At the end of that week, I went back.
As I finish this piece, it’s been a month and a half since that first class.
After a routine of weekly visits to the range, I still do not enjoy shooting, but am beginning to feel more at ease in the whole environment. I jump at the sound of gunfire, but only for the first ten minutes, not for the full hour of lane time. I am able to hang a target correctly. I am even able to hit a target with occasional accuracy, even if only at fifteen meters.
I can’t load a magazine with anything remotely resembling EJ’s dexterity, but I can load one on my own—slowly. I think EJ is as surprised as I am that I’ve been back with any consistency after how that first class treated me.
I am nowhere near as comfortable as the cherubic daughter behind the gun counter, but I’m a little less afraid than I was a few weeks ago. At the very least, the nature of my fear has changed: it is not a fear of not knowing how to use one, it’s the rightful fear of a weapon from knowing the damage it can do.
Closing out this piece, I think back to one of the first things I ever wrote about jiu-jitsu, the most recent thing for which I documented my experience as a real beginner.
It was a blog post that I wrote about two weeks after my first class, back when I was getting dark, galactic welts on my limbs and taking pride in my “battle scars.” I had been committed to some inner quest to cultivate a sense of calm in the storm of my life—and I had unexpectedly found it by way of and chaos of close-contact “fighting,” not minding the abundant bumps and bruises to show for it.
At the end of the blog, I wrote, “So begins the journey to quietly becoming the most lethal person I know,” a statement of hope that a day would come where I would actually become that person.
Six years later, I am not the most quietly lethal person I know, but I like to think I am more dangerous than I was back then At the very least, I am more willing to take a closer look at my fears and weaknesses in order to close my gaps, safeguard against threats, and strengthen myself in the process.
Perhaps one day I will feel “home on the range” and feel confident with a firearm in hand, knowing how to use it in a critical moment. Right now, I do not feel at home and am not in the slightest bit confident in my shooting skills. But I’m committed to continuing the practice.
I think of shooting as an opportunity to learn a valuable, life-saving skill while learning how to better manage myself in chaotic circumstances.
If I can learn to find calm and collect myself in the structured bedlam of a shooting range, maybe I can do so in other areas of my life where things feel out of control—or I feel out of control.
I startle a little less easily after each shot. I take deeper breaths with every pull of the trigger. Hitting the bullseye does not seem so impossible.
So continues the journey to quietly becoming the most lethal person I know.