I like shooting.
It’s fun, and, in the best possible way in that it’s challenging as well. Not having grown up in a gun house, I found out that I was naturally pretty good at shooting through the Boy Scouts. Skeet shooting was pretty easy and target shooting quickly became so.
I always really liked target shooting over skeet. Shotguns were too loud and dumb and inaccurate. Target rifles were stealthy and temperamental and smart. You needed patience. You needed control. Even after earning my rifle merit badge I would spend hours in our backyard with my little pellet gun, laying in the prone position and slowly squeezing off rounds into a target 25yds away. I saved the best ones…the ones with 5 shots within a quarter-sized area and always tried to better my score.
As I got older, my Dad would take me to the shooting range every once and a while. We’d rent Glocks and 45’s and spend an hour shooting at man-shaped targets. It’s funny that how odd that was never occurred to me…to be clearly training how to shoot a guy. Maximum damage in the chest where there’s the biggest area and most possibility for damage. Headshots are impressive but not tactically advantageous.
In recent years, a lot of people, with a lot of guns, that are short on sanity, have killed a lot of people. There are the philosophical arguments as to whether these people would still kill people regardless of if guns were around to help them. Would they go on a massive wooden club spree? Would they bludgeon people with frying pans if AR-15’s weren’t available? And that argument is used to (usually) attempt to prove that guns don’t kill people, people do. I don’t want to get in a debate on this, but there’s one thing for sure: if people kill people or guns do, guns sure make it a whole hell of a lot easier.
I stopped by a large magazine rack over the weekend. The kind that has every US magazine you could think of plus several imported from around the globe. I was looking for guitar magazines, and was having a very difficult time of it, and eventually found two buried behind some non-related teen magazines. What I had no trouble finding, however, were the 10 gun magazines, all at eye level, front and center. The one with the the “defense for housewives” article that features a triple-barreled semi-automatic tactical shotgun. For the little lady who just needs to feel a little safer.
I like shooting. But I don’t like it enough not to give it up completely.
More on the AR-15