ast week I discovered I'm a pretty good shot. Our friend came down for the weekend for a wedding, and his stay with us coincided with his birthday. So as a gift I took him down to the shooting range for a basic pistol lesson, something we've been talking about casually for a little while. I had never held a gun before.
After some basic instruction we stepped into the range. I had to wear ear and eye protection, and the room was dark and carpeted, with a booth on each lane. All these factors gave it a feeling of surreal sensory deprivation, and suddenly it felt like I was all alone - just me, my breath, and a deadly weapon.
It turns out that one technique for learning accurate shooting is to apply pressure to the trigger slowly, so that when the hammer falls, it's a surprise. In this way you don't anticipate the recoil, so your aim is true. This worked much better for me than the alternative, because with my nervousness and arms shaking from the effort of holding a heavy (deadly) object so steady at my furthest reach, I don't think I could have steadied myself for a recoil if I tried.
The other thing that surprised me is how quickly one gets used to the idea of deadly force. Hand-to-hand combat is so much more emotional and personal. But after a while, using a gun becomes a task like any other, like chopping vegetables or something. It was easy to forget what the paper target represented, and in a real life situation, my preoccupation with firing each bullet through the hole the previous one made would be entirely unnecessary. Indeed, much more damage has been made with a thoughtless trigger pull in a general direction.
All in all, I like guns. In the past my gentle self would shudder at the very thought, but the questions of violence and self-defense have become more intriguing to me over the years, and my old sweeping assumptions have been stirred up for re-examination. When I think about the battles of the Prophets, I wonder if there ever is a time when one person must kill another, and the answer isn't so black and white. And it also doesn't hurt to know I'm pretty handy with a .357 revolver.