I got a taste of this blindness just last Saturday. My wife and I were attempting to discuss Wisconsin's pending licensed carry with the manager of a store where we shop, and it wasn't until we walked away from it that I saw how we were talking at cross purposes. She had no inkling that the people who would get carry permits are not the people who carry guns illegally.

Suman (the Kolkata Libertarian) brings a twinkle to my eye, with his understanding of the human psyche in dealing with fear of guns combined with the overpowering urge to shoot one at a target.

Some of you know that I am one of the main organizers of regularly scheduled submachine gun matches at a nearby gravel pit where we have built earth berms. My "hook", for dealing with people who might otherwise question ownership and use of these now-expensive firearms, is to just entice them into coming out to one of our events.

There, under guidance of a trained range officer (I am one of them), we get them to pick up and get the feel of a machine gun, load up some live ammunition, and experience the deeply-seated psychological satisfaction that comes from shooting one of these at steel, paper or frangible targets and seeing go down, fill with holes, or dissolve in fragments.

"Thompson Submachine Gun" has an almost magic connotation. Few living people have ever seen one outside of Hollywood epics. Even fewer have ever fired one on full automatic. Likewise for the German MP-40 machine pistol of World War II, MAC 11/9, S&W76, Sten, Uzi, Swedish K and a number of other fine automatic weapons. With us on that gunrange, you can actually try your skill (not luck) competing with one, one a well-designed match that emphasizes control, speed, accuracy, target acquisition, ammunition rationing and other skills.

After one match a couple of years ago, one of our regulars set up an old US Army light (air-cooled) belt-fed machine gun, which shoots .306 heavy rifle ammunition rather than the comparatively low-velocity stuff we shoot in submachine guns. Each of us had an opportunity to lay prone behind this old beauty, traverse it to cover targets way down at the far end of the range, and fire off part of a belt of the heavy stuff. I got to shoot these from time to time in the 31st (Dixie) Division back in 1953 when I was a 19-year old reservist called to active duty. (Hot damn, I felt like I had been reborn!)

Last season, someone brought out a (Russian?) RPD machine rifle with similarly heavy ammunition for after-match fun. We took turns demolishing an empty aluminum beer barrel down at the far end. (Hardly recognizable when we got done. At the trash yard where I got rid of it, the yard man asked what the hell we had done to make all those holes. I just wordlessly smiled at him.)

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

I still have to learn to shoot first. Lionel's going to teach me when he gets here. :)

Triticale,

I didn't know you were a Wisconsin gun owner until I read your post. Among other functions, I'm the NRA-ILA election volunteer coordinator for the Wisconsin 2nd congressional district down here in the south central part of the state.

I spent two days last week at the state capitol, visiting offices of Wisconsin state senate Democrats who had supported Dave Zien's Personal Protection Act in the voting rounds before Governor Doyle's veto. To my satisfaction, we got five of the six of them to vote for override last Thursday. I expect to help do something similar this week.

My political passions are the United States Constitution and the right of law-abiding Americans to keep and bear arms -- among other purposes, for personal protection. As both an organized gun owner and a Republican, I will be perfectly happy to use Doyle's veto -- and their support of it -- as a reason to help pull more liberal Democrats out of the state legislature, if they continue to deny our rights self-defense in this state.

But I will also admit there are more many Democrats who side with us on this question, in and outside the legislature. What I have never clearly understood is why so many other Democrats and liberals are opposed to citizen gun rights. Part of the current American cultural wars, I suppose.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

I am an atrocious shot, so no firearms for me. If you want a firearm of your very own, I hope you find one that suits you.

I do have one request to ask of every gun owner how reads this comment. Practice with the damn thing. A gun does no good if you can't hit the target. Practice, or get some large dogs.

Hell, get some large dogs anyway. Large, protective dogs.

Alan Kellogg,

Bet you would do fine at seven yards. That's gunfight range, and it's still fun to make holes in paper from that far away.

Yours,
Wince

On the other hand, you can fight fire with fire. Instead of trying to make them less afraid of guns, you could make them MORE afraid of the lack of guns. I think many people tend to have an "it won't happen to me" mentality about crime. Nothing like a conversational story about what happened when a stupid-burgler broke in on my brother to get people thinking. He's alive because he was armed. Sometimes people just can't help themselves and blurt out "he should have called 911" to which the correct response is that, doing the best they can if all went well, it would take an officer 8 minutes to reach him. In case they don't make the leap, a string of questions like "Man! ... Can you imagine what could have happened if he was defenseless ... What would you have done?" will really drive the point home. I don't think of it as terrorizing friends, but rather helping them prepare for terror. Being prepared is a good thing :)

Man, Arnold, that sounds like fun! What a way to let out the stress of the workweek.

Do you ever watch the show "Mail Call" on the History Channel? Basically, the host (Lee Emory) gets asked questions by viewers about various militarty technology, and whenever the questions deal with firearms, he always gives a personal demo using watermelons as the targets!

I'm with Alan, although I'm probably a better shot.

If you want a gun, get one. But practice.

Don't load a gun until you want to use it. If you want to have a loaded gun on your nightstand so you can quickly defend yourself from a midnight prowler, then fine. Just unload the gun before you leave the house (unless of course you have a carry permit and want your loaded weapon with you).

If you're not using or carrying the weapon, you should be storing it in some fashion.

And if you can't take that advice I've written above from me, then take it from the NRA. My feeling is that if people used their weapons better when they weren't using them, the anti-gun debate would have a lot less traction.

Mike,

Out in the boonies of far western Dane County WI where my wife and I have maintained our exurban hacienda for 28 years, there never has been any cable TV service. And we've always been too preoccupied with other pursuits (politics, gardening, reading, guns, raising four kids, etc) to think about getting a satellite dish. Then along came the internet and we didn't really need informational TV anymore in any case.

So no, Mike, I've never had a chance to watch the History Channel except at night motel during road trips, when Stefi and I were too tired to watch it for long.

(What a limp excuse, right? But it's all true. Like everything else I write about.)

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

We're supposed to take panty-waisted liberals out to the gun range? Woohoo!!!

Who we gonne kill...errr...educate first?

He's really onto something there. Even the most dyed in the wool lefty columnist in Boulder, CO had her eyes opened by a similar experience (she accepted the invitation to learn to shoot from that anti-Drug War sherrif in rural CO). It is perhaps the only method that works to pierce the misconceptions of the pro-gun control camp. One nanny-statist at a time...gawd it's gonna take a while!

re: hitting the target

I've always enjoyed the saying "Gun control means hitting the target."

Heh.