A Teacher Goes to the Shooting Range
I was invited to a shooting range, and I said yes.
My brother-in-law asked. He keeps people safe, literally; he’s a security systems expert and a fixer. If you’re missing a cable, if anything is broken, Todd can help. Once, when I lost my wedding ring in a river, he found it. So when he calmly suggested that we go to the shooting range for target practice, I did not immediately refuse.
We were in Olympia, Washington, a city slightly more liberal than the Park Slope Food Coop. I was visiting from Brooklyn, with my husband and two sons.
I come from a demographic America has forgotten exists: gun-owning liberals. My parents grew up rural and armed in Montana. Born in the Depression, they faced real dangers which could be solved with a gun. When my stepfather was 12, he shot a cougar that was eyeing the family dog. If he’d let a cougar kill their best hunting dog, he would’ve faced his father’s physical wrath. He and my mother hunted to feed their children. The year I was 11, they each shot a deer, plus an elk with a bow and arrow. It was better than food stamps, which we were on at times, but I have not recovered my taste for venison.
I grew up aware that the guns were kept locked in one closet and the ammo in another. Safety procedures mattered, because they could be life-and-death decisions; as a result, my parents were strict about rules.
In 1978, I left Western Washington for college in New York City, where I’ve lived ever since. I spent six years at Columbia, getting two degrees. I’ve always felt more at home in the city, able to make sense of the risks I perceived: muggings and chain-snatchings and getting yelled at by the deli guy for taking too long deciding between a bagel and a bialy.
When Todd invited us to the shooting range, I was conflicted. As the only family member who’d moved away, I wanted my two sons to be connected to my original family. But this invitation pitted my desire to belong against my ferocious mother-need to keep my sons safe and close. I feared the danger of guns and also the risk, however unlikely, that my sons might abandon me and our urban world to become western gun-owners.
Then Todd told me he’d already spoken to my sons, and they wanted to go.
I was crystal clear about one thing: they weren’t going without me. They were sixteen and twenty-four years old at the time, so I wasn’t going to forbid them. Trying to forbid them would open the risk of fissure. So I said yes and my husband agreed to go, too.
Todd made us all watch a safety video, which suggested a well-regulated environment. I watched it three times, memorizing the rules. Then we headed up a narrow mountain road to the outdoor shooting range.
We put on earmuffs and goggles. My brother-in-law took out a .22 and a 410. But I couldn’t pay attention to his calm explanations. I was paralyzed by anxiety. This range was nothing like the video. It was just a huge outdoor space, an old gravel quarry with no barriers, lanes, signs.
There were several groups of shooters scattered around, including a bunch of college-age kids shooting assault rifles, sometimes from a braced standing position, other times lying on the ground. A beautiful young woman was a crack shot, pausing each time to take laughing selfies.
The noise was constant and deafening.
There was a teenager next to us. He struggled with his rifle, waving it toward our group as he reloaded, but his father, chatting with another off-duty cop, didn’t notice.
My husband yelled, “I don’t think anyone here watched that video.”
Another family group arrived, including a blond woman with a four-month-old baby strapped to her chest. The baby wore turquoise earmuffs.
I took my turns shooting. I tried to keep my eyes on my sons while constantly scanning the other gun-holders to avert a catastrophe. But no amount of vigilance could control the dozens of people handling powerful weapons without adequate safety procedures.
Driving home, my sister, who once shot a deer, said, “Geez, I never need to do that again!” And we all agreed, loudly chiming in about the unregulated insanity of that scene.
Not long after, I was in my office in Brooklyn. Several people complained about encountering new people over the holidays in North Carolina or Long Island.
“They talked about hunting,” one woman said, her voice laden with horror. Yet carrying dogs around in purses is now considered normal. We’re so far from necessity that our positions about guns seem to be simply identity markers across a vast divide, based on little actual experience. I took my sons to the shooting range so they would know something about where we come from, the history and culture of a family who crossed America in the early decades of the Twentieth Century, so they could parse more wisely than the reductive collective chatter what the rural-urban divide means to them.
The collective dangers we face now have been building for decades — the opioid crisis, the undermining of our democracy through gerrymandering and corruption, the corporatization of our food supply resulting in an obesity epidemic — and cannot be faced down with a gun. These abstract problems are difficult to comprehend. Our primitive selves prefer a single enemy, one we can point a finger — or a weapon — at.
In spite of the complexity of our current world, my gun-owning family is clear and united about a few things: No one needs an assault rifle. Reasonable people have always understood that gun-owning requires clear, enforced regulations. And the NRA does not represent the views of responsible citizens.
