I remember the first time I touched a gun.
I was somewhere around 10 years old, probably younger. I was in the basement of my father’s house – my parents divorced when I was an infant. Dad had a revolver, and if my memory serves me, he shot it at a target against the wall there, which seems odd, but I have this vague memory of deafening noise from the retort. Maybe it’s hallucinatory, I don’t know, really.
What I do know is that holding that revolver was searing. I can see it still in my child’s eyes, feel the weight and smell the oil. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could have the strength to wield it, let alone shoot like Dirty Harry, whose movies mesmerized me at the time.
I know that Dad had an old side-by-side shotgun in the house that was some sort of heirloom; I believe my brother Fred has it now, or maybe my sister Suzanne.
But that’s it. Those two flash memories, and then… nothing.
I didn’t shoot in school. If any of my friends shot, I didn’t know about it. And no one I knew hunted. No one. In fact, I did not meet another hunter until college; he was a Mohawk named Jather from upstate New York.
This is not so odd as it seems. Growing up in Westfield, New Jersey, in the 1970s and 1980s, you didn’t see a lot of hunters anywhere. New Jersey in general isn’t the most huntingest state you’ll ever find, and it might be the least, along with maybe Rhode Island.
Sure, in other parts of the state people hunted, and still do. Just not in my neighborhood, or among my circle of friends and acquaintances. So guns as tools for hunting never came up in conversation, or really on TV or in the movies, with the notable exception of the movie “The Deer Hunter,” which, well, wasn’t really about deer hunting.
I went to college at Stony Brook, on Long Island, which didn’t really help much. Just like Jersey, there were some hunters here and there, but other than a few of my cross country teammates, I knew no one who shot, and never picked up a gun.
And yet, I never was scared of guns the way many of my urban friends and colleagues are. Yes, I was and am well aware that pistols, especially the infamous Saturday Night Special, are for killing people, as Skynyrd sings about. I’d been a police reporter and had seen some grisly results of gun violence.
Guns just… existed. Neither here nor there. As a political reporter, guns were one of the Three G’s I did everything in my power to avoid covering – God, Guns and Gays. Three topics you will almost never change someone’s opinion on.
The one gun topic I do remember forming an opinion on was a Virginia bill that would have restricted businesses from preventing gun owners carrying in their shop. Given that “check your guns at the door” was good enough for the Wild West, I reckoned it was good enough for the Old Dominion.
And then, in a flash, I became a gun-owning hunter.
It all happened so fast. I was living in Minnesota in the early 2000s, and my best friend at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, where I worked as an investigative reporter, was Chris Niskanen, the paper’s outdoor writer. We’d been fishing a lot, and when hunting season came along, he offered to take me.
Niskie had been buttering me up by giving me mallards and pheasants and some venison – as a former restaurant chef I already loved cooking with such exotic (at the time) meats. So I said yes.
We drove to South Dakota in search of pheasants. Niskie handed me his Citori over-under shotgun, showed me quickly how to load it, and tossed up some empty milk jugs. I missed a bunch before I hit one, and off we went. Needless to say, I did not hit a pheasant on that trip.
It doesn’t seem like the first time I shot a gun, but maybe it was. I can’t remember any time before that. Pretty ignominious, I’d say, but at least no one got hurt.
After that, I bought a Browning .22, the kind with the cool magazine in the stock, where you load it Old West style. I bought it to hunt squirrels. I had this notion in my head that I wanted to get good at hunting rabbits and squirrels before I hunted big game. Best I can explain is that small game hunting seemed less, well, scary. Killing a deer is a far heavier thing, psychically, than killing a squirrel. Why that is is the topic of another essay.
So I went to the local gun range in St. Paul and practiced. And practiced. And practiced. As it happened, I was a natural. When I mentioned this to my mom, she told me she too was a crack shot, on her school rifle team in the late 1940s. What?! This was the first time I’d ever heard that mom had shot a gun, and I was 32 years old at the time. Crazy how that sort of thing works…
Shotgunning was harder. I had to learn about cast and drop and lead and all these things that seemed less intuitive. But I am a good shotgunner now, years later. I could be better, but I get by.
With all of this practice, I grew to enjoy shooting for what it was: A game of skill. Do it right, and you hit your target. There is something inherently satisfying about that, much in the same way it is when you play a video game, only this skill is real.
During all this, there was a strange peer pressure at work whenever I was around people who shot or hunted. Everyone seemed to know more about guns than I did, and, weirdly, I felt I needed to fit in with this crowd, else they smell me out as a poseur. It’s the same feeling I used to have as a car owner, back when a great many men worked on their own cars. Of course I knew what positraction was! Yes, I am totally familiar with the ballistics of the 6.5 Creedmoor rifle!
I don’t normally care whether I fit in with a group of people or not. My entire life has been a series of zigs when other people zag. So why did I feel this need in this situation to bluff? Maybe because the only “manly” thing I ever really learned as a kid was how to fish -- and it was as much mom teaching me as it was my stepfather Frank.
So I spun up some story about me shooting on my high school rifle team. Westfield did not have a rifle team. Maybe I subconsciously based it on my mom’s experience, I don’t know. But the lie deflected probing and gave me enough cover until I actually did know something about guns. Fake it ‘til you make it, right?
I still can’t tell you much about guns other than how I use them. I don’t read books about guns, although I did read several on shooting – that was a skill I needed to learn. I don’t fetishize them the way some other people do, and am not terribly interested in the intricacies of caliber or muzzle velocity.
Nonetheless, I’ve grown attached to my guns. Not all of them, to be sure. That Browning .22 is long gone. But I still shoot the first shotgun I ever bought, a Franchi Veloce, a 20 gauge over-under. I bought it for $800 on consignment at a St. Paul gun shop. Since then I’ve shot only one other shotgun, a Beretta A400. My over-under’s name is Tinker Bell.
My deer rifle, until recently, was the Dodge Dart of rifles, the unremarkable, utterly reliable Remington 700, in .270 caliber. It had a left-handed bolt, which is hard to find. I used that gun for everything from pigs to elk… until I dropped it on a deer hunt and cracked the stock in half. I bought a new stock, which looked great, but the gun never shot right again. I only recently bought a new rifle, a Sako .270 carbine with a left-handed Mauser bolt action.
The fact is, you do develop relationships to tools you use a lot, whether they’re guns or cellphones or cars or kitchen knives. The tool in question becomes an extension of you. You know its faults, its advantages, its foibles. It is the inanimate made animate by your presence.
I’ve tried to shoot other shotguns besides Tinker Bell and the A400, but I always felt more comfortable with her than even with my autoloader. So I’ve become very good at killing things with Tinker Bell.
And that really brings me to where I stand on guns. Guns are sophisticated tools for killing something. Period. Can they be used for something else, like, say, competition trap shooting or target shooting? Sure, but that’s not why we have guns.
You might make an argument that I don’t need guns to hunt, to kill the animals I use to feed myself and those I love. And you’d be right, technically speaking. Lots of hunters have forsaken the gun. But they do so, almost without exception, because they’ve mastered hunting with a gun, and seek a stiffer challenge. Or, they want to hunt longer; bow seasons are far longer than gun seasons in most states.
I do not hunt with a bow. To me, gun hunting is the cleanest method of killing the game I seek to eat. Proper rifle or shotgun shooting results in a quick, clean death, which is what we owe the animal in question. Can this happen with a bow? Yes, but it is so much harder that only a fraction of bow hunters achieves this. A real archer must shoot almost daily, practice all sorts of positions and situations. And even then, that archer is far more likely to wound and lose an animal than a skilled rifleman or shotgunner. It is a simple fact. A bow is a less lethal weapon than a firearm.
Do rifle hunters lose animals? Yes. But a decent gun hunter won’t lose many, if any. At the risk of jinxing myself, I have only lost one big game animal in 22 years of big game hunting. And while I am a good and careful shot, I know a great many who are better than I am.
Keep in mind I respect good bowhunters a lot. It is a difficult skill to master. But it’s one I haven’t yet had the desire to learn.
I own three guns. Tinker Bell, the A400 and a Sako 85 deer rifle. I never enter gun raffles. I have no desire to own a pistol. I see no reason to own any other guns, until the time comes when I do. There is a bolt-action slug-shooting shotgun I rather like, and if I lived in Eastern states where you must use a slug gun to hunt deer during firearm season, I’d own one. But I’m good for now.
This, you should know, is a relatively rare thing in the hunting world. I have a great many friends who never fail to enter the gun raffles, or who are always chasing the latest and greatest shotgun or rifle. I have a tough time understanding this. In the kitchen, I basically use two knives: A chef’s knife and a paring knife. Why on God’s green acre would I want or need to have, say, a dozen chef’s knives? To me, that looks like mania, or an inability to get comfortable with your One True Knife.
Now don’t get me wrong, I deeply understand the frustrating process of learning which knife or gun really suits you best. It can take time, with lots of false starts. But you will find it, and when you do, what’s the point in owning all those other guns?
I hear you: “But I like guns!” Sure, go for it, have fun then. I have no desire to tell people how to live their lives, and I especially have no desire to dictate what gun ownership should look like for others. But for me, a gun is merely a tool. An important one, like my chef’s knife, but still a tool, to be used, taken care of, enjoyed and maybe, just maybe, handed down someday.
I learned to shoot in my teens. My dad set up bottles and cans on an old foundation set into a hill. First a 22 rifle, then an old Mauser…. It was fun, but as I hit my mid twenties, I became anti gun and signed every petition I could. In my 50’s, after being stalked for a few years, and no help from courts or law enforcement, I turned to an old friend, a Vietnam Vet. He taught me to shoot again, everything from a 22 semi automatic to a Python, to various long guns. Along the way, I discovered the wonderful camaraderie of people who shoot. They weren’t nuts, or dangerous. Many became friends. I got to learn on and shoot some incredible guns. I still don’t hunt, but I’m comfortable w guns again, and I marvel at them and the people who have been responsible for teaching me ❤️
Thanks for the thoughtful reveal. 👍👍