June 6

PROFESSOR MEETS GUN - PART TWO

By UD

“The next station is... Be — THES — da.”

Ah, ‘thesda, UD’s stomping grounds. Her childhood home, her blue state roost.

As her metro car slips down the darkly lit tunnel under ‘thesda, images of UD’s ‘thesdan life “churn down the optic sluice” (to paraphrase James Merrill’s Santorini). Her eyes conjure pictures of her privileged ... upbringing isn’t quite it, since her loving, marshmallowy parents, in synergy with the ’sixties, stood aside and let willful UD do whatever. “The child’s a perfect heathen!” says Marilla of Anne in Green Gables. UD was a perfect heathen.

Her parents, on the other hand, were cultured, placid. Bookish. Her mother read ancient history, gardened, and raised spaniels. At his NIH lab, her father studied the chemistry of immune response. He played piano in the evening, and on weekends drove to our house on the Chesapeake Bay and steamed crabs.

“Attention crew: You have one minute to alert personnel. Otherwise, the third rail at White Flint metro is hot and energized.”

UD’s at Farragut West, on the orange line toward the Vienna station, where she’ll get a cab to the NRA.

———————————————————————————————
During her youth, the political divide in UD’s ‘thesdan town was between bleeding heart liberals and communists. When Mr. H., a few doors down, died, he was eulogized in Izvestia.

Neighborhood mothers walked the streets with copies of Off Our Backs! under their elbows and PEACE necklaces on their chests. Boycotting went on 24/7. People were Unitarian, Quaker, Copacetic.

Back then UD actually did stand holding hands and singing Kumbaya. Also Hey Jude. At the long-gone Biograph Theater in Georgetown, she sat on a sticky floor and watched Yellow Submarine. Her boyfriend massaged her feet after a long march on the Pentagon.

“This is the Vienna station.”
———————————————————————————
Five mile cab ride in heavy midday traffic along half-completed townhouse developments. Typical hot DC summer day, but pleasant.

The National Rifle Association’s headquarters is made up of two large silver-windowed corporate towers, one of which houses a museum. I’m in the other one. At the reception desk I’m given directions to the shooting range, where Sylvia, who runs things, awaits me.

You walk down various flights of steps and then across a dark underground parking lot to get to the range. People outside the range smoke and carry black gun cases. They’re mainly men, with close-cropped hair.

At the range, I say hello to Sylvia, who points me to a lounge where I can watch shooters. Two guys with brooms shuffle about the range sweeping up spent shells (is that correct? spent shells?) the way people at salons sweep up hair.

There’s this one guy with a big who the hell knows what, and when he shoots it, it makes big sparky fireworks against the dark blue screen at the end of the room, behind the targets.

You staple-gun your target to what looks like a cork board, then key information onto a pad, at which point the target recedes some distance. Some pistols make a little flame at their tip — comic book style — when you shoot them.

A few people sit and shoot. Most stand and wrap their hands strongly around their guns. Mainly men, but definitely some women up there too, blast away.

I ask two guys who’ve finished shooting and are hanging out in the lounge what the fireworks gun was.

“Maybe AR-15 Carbine, steel core ammo, ma’am. That backdrop’s also a sheet of metal so you’ve got two pieces of steel hitting each other. We were shooting copper jacket lead bullets, ma’am. They don’t do that.”

UD hates it when people call her ma’am. It makes her feel old. She thought: “Man, if I had a gun...”

“Is the fireworks gun more destructive than the others I’m seeing?”

“No ma’am. Destructiveness is caliber and type of bullet.”

This will do for Part Two. I’ll write about the museum and other stuff in a bit.

Comments

Learning about guns and shooting.

There appears to be somewhat of a theme in which women who are neutral or adverse to firearms are still willing to at least try to educate themselves about the (to them) bizarre “gun culture” that grips such a large portion of Americans — admittedly mostly suburban and rural white males.

Your exploration reminds me specifically of two women I have written about before — cultural anthropologist Abigail Kohn, and PBS’s “Human Guniea Pig” Emily Yoffe.

Ms. Kohn wrote of her initial experience with the “gun culture” in a 2001 piece in Reason magazine, “Their Aim is True": “We began by studying the right-wing militia movement of the early 1990s. Our first foray into the subject would have been comical if it hadn’t been so naive. Our initial attempt to meet local militia members took us to a shooting range in the Bay Area, where we assumed local militia meetings would be held. We went on a Tuesday night, fully expecting the range to be seething with radical political activity. Why else would people congregate at a shooting range, if not to meet other like-minded, potentially dangerous right-wing gun nuts? It never occurred to us that they might be there for the simple enjoyment of target shooting.”

I wonder, were you thinking similar thoughts? Out of her research came the book Shooters: Myths and Realities of America’s Gun Cultures. Note the plural — cultureS. In a review of her book a colleague is quoted: “she was performing a “social service by researching ’such disgusting people.’” Another said that unless Kohn acknowledged the “inherent pathology” of gun enthusiasm, she was “disrespecting victims of gun violence.”

Is this how UD’s husband feels?

When Ms. Yoffe, also a resident of D.C., announced that for her next “Human Guinea Pig” piece she was going to learn to shoot, “So anathema are guns among my friends that when one learned I was doing this piece, he opened his wallet, silently pulled out an NRA membership card, then (after I recovered from the sight) asked me not to spread it around lest his son be kicked out of nursery school.”

The mind boggles.

Please keep this in mind while you consider your experience. Gun owners, particularly urban ones, have been treated as social pariahs. For those of us who are suburban or rural, the stereotype has been the red-necked, pickup-driving knuckle-dragging inbred with one tooth and single-digit IQ.

Frankly, we’re tired of it. But we are glad to see more and more women enter the good gun culture — the one that promotes self-reliance, defense of self and family, and personal sovereignty.

I hope you end up among us. But if not, thank you for being open-minded enough to at least TRY.

Kevin Baker, P.E., at 8:20 pm EDT on June 6, 2008

I presume that in Chapter 3, Gulliverette picks up one of these pieces of iron and plastic with queer names like “Glock 19″ and makes holes in paper.

BSK, at 8:20 pm EDT on June 6, 2008

Spent Shells

You’re right in calling the shells ’spent.’ I bet that the firing range probably recycles the shell casings...they’re worth quite a bit of money.

As the only hunter in my entire graduate department (in a state famous for its love of deer season), I’m proud of UD’s willingness to experience the joy of shooting. (And, no. I don’t really like the NRA, but I do enjoy sitting in a deer stand on a crisp fall morning. Either I get a freezer full of venison or someone hits the poor deer with a pickup truck.)

Robert, PhD Student, at 10:05 pm EDT on June 6, 2008

Spent shells is OK. Also brass, hulls, or empties.

Hands wrapped strongly is not so OK. Firmly is the better word. When two hands are used with a pistol or revolver, the gun hand grips the gun firmly and is pushed forward, and the off hand rests on the gun hand and pulls backwards. This tends to steady the barrel for the shot and then controls recoil.

Oh, and if you are interested in the culture, the use of “ma’am” is an honorific, not a comment on age. It most definitely is not a reason for shooting someone who uses it.

Ashley Higgins, at 6:10 am EDT on June 7, 2008

“Spent Shells” is perfectly correct

Technically, they’re not shells, they’re casings or cartridges, but that’s the word people have been using for 100 years, and in English, that’s 99 years longer than it takes to change the usage. Firearm jargon can get confusing, especially the names of the calibers, but there’s a logic to most of it.

Were you seeing sparks at the end of the barrel or downrange, at the target? Sparks at the end of the barrel are just the unburned gunpowder exiting the barrel behind the bullet. They all spit some flame (there are burning gases coming out of there!) but some show up more, some make bigger or brighter or more yellow flames. It all depends on what kind of powder is being burned, how much of it is being burned, and how long the barrel is.

Did you get a chance to see the museum? You might have enjoyed it more than the range, on your first trip. One thing I think the average hoplophobe has a hard time making sense of is the historical importance of firearms to the American shooter. I’ve got a Swiss K-31 carbine that still had the soldier’s name written on a slip of paper under the buttplate when I bought it—he was a medical corpsman in 1939. My dad’s got an M1 Garand and a Mauser K98 hanging on the same wall—the rifles that were carried by opposing sides in WWII Europe. Imagine what those rifles could tell if they could talk.

Don Gwinn, at 6:10 am EDT on June 7, 2008

Peaceful Society

He expressed his belief that it’s very hard to have a peaceful society when guns are significantly outside the possession of the state. There is no known way to have a peaceful society at all. And there likely will not be in the foreseeable future. The question is how to minimize the effects of violence on good people. Respecting the right of good people to protect themselves from street criminals and governments, is not as dangerous as it might seem.

For example, how about if we give a machine gun to every young man in the country? You might imagine dodging showers of bullets and death everywhere. But in Switzerland they do send machine guns home with every young man, and their country has a murder rate of about half the US rate.

Or how about if we let any adult without a criminal record just walk into a gunstore, put his money down, and walk out with a gun in his pocket which he can carry around town concealed, without even a permit? You might worry that if you make somebody mad they might loose their temper, pull out their gun, and blow you away. But in Vermont concealed carry without a permit has been legal for decades, while their state murder rate is among the lowest in the country. And legalizing concealed carry in states with large high crime cities didn’t cause problems either. It just gave women and elderly people an even chance against criminals.

Even if guns could be made to magically vanish from this earth, there is no way we could stop evil people from arming themselves with knives and other deadly weapons. Don’t think of guns as evil devices, because evil people will always get weapons of some kind. Think of guns as tools you can use to fulfill your DUTY TO PROTECT YOUR LOVED ONES AND OTHERS before police arrive. Think of guns as a way to empower yourself in the face of violence. Think of your guns as a symbol of love and protection for your family and other good people. Then you will understand the gun culture.

Defense, at 8:40 am EDT on June 7, 2008

Ma’am

Ashley: On Ma’am as an honorific rather than a comment on age — I know, I know. I should have explained that although I know it’s a non-age-specific honorific, I still FEEL (being hypersensitive about it and all) I’m being seen as a granny when it’s used.

And I had in mind only a warning shot. Maybe not even that. Maybe just showing him the gun in a certain way.

UD, at 2:55 pm EDT on June 7, 2008

I applaud you’re decision to go and see for yourself.

Really, we ‘gun-nuts’ aren’t actually crazy. It’s a challenging sport and hobby like many others. Of course, they are other aspects to it as well, i.e. the 2nd Amendment, personal responsibility, etc.

Mike, at 4:25 pm EDT on June 7, 2008

Further on “ma’am”

UD, I think you will find that as you spend more time amongst gun owners and shooters, you will hear far more “ma’ams” and “sirs", directed not at you, but at nearly everyone around you. It has been my experience that gun owners tend to be more cheerful, polite, courteous, and respectful of people in general than non-shooters. Like any large group, there are bad examples in the mix, but by and large, we’re pretty easy-going folks. “Ma’am” is not a ding on your age, as pointed out earlier, but a sign of respect, when someone doesn’t know what else to call you. Even if they DO know what your name is, you might well find yourself being “ma’am"ed on a regular basis.

For those of us who choose to carry weapons in our daily lives, the conscious effort to be the bigger man and know how to walk away from it is even more important. I’d highly recommend reading And I Carry Concealed... — it’s a brief but fascinating insight into one gun owners mentality, and one with which I whole-heartedly agree. As a gun owner and one who chooses to carry, you cannot let people know you have that gun until you need to use it. Demonstration of the possession of a firearm can be a crime, known as “brandishing” or “menacing” depending on jurisdiction. In other words, if you’re willing to show that you have a gun, you need to be on the verge of using it, with a “reasonable fear for your safety.” Someone calling you ma’am doesn’t count. :-)

I’ll also leave you with a quote from Robert Heinlein:"An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.”

ZerCool, at 3:35 pm EDT on June 8, 2008

Brandishing

“And I had in mind only a warning shot. Maybe not even that. Maybe just showing him the gun in a certain way.”

Firing a “warning shot” (there is no such thing; thank you, Hollywood) would, at the very least, be reckless handling of a firearm in Virginia, which is a Class 1 misdemeanor.

Showing a gun in a threatening or menacing way (which is what I’m taking you to mean by saying “in a certain way) would be brandishing, which, in Virginia is a Class 1 misdemeanor.

A Class 1 misdemeanor is punishable by up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine. Unless you are “engaged in excusable or justifiable self-defense.” Being called ma’am doesn’t cut it, sorry. That’s gun owners for you — polite and showing respect for a woman.

Bill, at 3:15 pm EDT on June 9, 2008

Steel Core Ammo

Noone is allowed to shoot steel core ammo at NRA HQ Range as it would damage the state of the art and expensive cascading-water backstop.

My AR15 in 5.56 mm/.223 caliber makes a nice little spark using copper-jacketed bullets. My AK103 in 7.62x39 mm (a slightly modernized version of the original AK47 in the same caliber) makes a bigger spark on the backstop with it bigger but slower bullet.

NRA HQ Range is one of the best and safest places to shoot, the eagle-eyed ROs (Range Officers) are top notch and don’t allow poor gun handling to occur for more than a moment.

Will Myers, at 3:50 pm EDT on June 10, 2008