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My Love Affair With Guns
It started with a rifle, an air rifle firing little metal pellets. My mother told me she'd been a champion, one of the few girls to shoot air rifle and it seemed the most incongruous thing in my head to associate my mother, the origin of my life with a tool of destruction. In my young mind I didn't differentiate between target shooting and deadly shooting, guns killed people in the movies.
My next was a Browning 9mm. The instructor had a moustache that looked like it was pencilled on. He named the parts of the pistol off for me like it was a nursery rhyme and loaded the clip in a sing-song voice, enunciating the various rules such as a gun is always loaded and never point a gun at anything you are not willing to destroy. He reminded me of every Monty Python sketch that was ever made involving British army officers. Later he let me fire off some .45s from his antique revolver.
Then came the concealed carry Glock 26 and the devastating MP5K. The Glock was a pop-gun, barely fitting into my hand, my fingers wrapping around the grip almost twice. The 5K was a machinepistol by definition and would burp out long streams of fire dangerously close to my steadying left hand on the foregrip. The awesome firepower of the 5K was in stark contrast to the proximity and accuracy required from the pistol.
Further accuracy was on order with my first rifle, another H&K, this time the G3SG1. Bipod legs extended and set to single shot only I lay on a blanket and watched swirls of dust curl from the barrel tip after each shot. Adjusting the scope one click left, one click up and firing again before taking apples down to the end of the range and splitting them just as I'd seen in a Tracey Chapman video on MTV.
My latest affair was with a Glock 20, firing 10mm for the first time. The casings seemed no bigger than usual but somehow the power being delivered through my arms was all the more intoxicating. After 50 rounds and a dozen dead paper terrorists I cadged a cigarette and sat smoking it with shaking fingers, high on the adrenaline rush. My final cut-out had a piercing shot outside of the concentric circles, smashing through the outline's throat, silencing him forevermore, the 9's and X's didn't matter after that shot.
Oct. 5.2005