Gun Fun

I've never really had a particular problem with guns, having had very little direct experience of them. I grew up on a farm in England, and being a farm there were rifles knocking around. I used to pick up the spent cartridges when I found them, as I did from time to time, and that was so far as it went.

When one of our neighbours was released from prison and took to terrorising the neighbourhood, my wife's ex-husband lent us a twelve-gauge pump action shotgun which we kept in the closet without any real plan of using it. We bought a box of cartridges from Walmart and felt immediately and significantly less concerned with the unpredictable actions of our dumbfuck neighbour without even having loaded the thing. Whatever shit he might pull next, we told ourselves, we have a gun and he doesn't. Being a pump action shotgun, pumping the forestock to make that familiar click-clack sound is cinematic and slightly terrifying, so we figured it would be enough to send our neighbour heading for the hills next time the voices in his head sent him around to pick a fight with our front door. As it turned out, simply yelling get off my fucking lawn was apparently enough to do the trick. We haven't had a peep out of him since, and that was about a month ago.

Texas law reputedly takes a sympathetic view when it comes to shooting intruders who have entered your home, and I had - perhaps optimistically - assumed it would simply be a case of waiting for our neighbour to resume his paranoid schizophrenic war on us, at which juncture we could defend ourselves to the full extent of our capabilities and the problem would be resolved to the satisfaction of all concerned. I suppose I should be glad that it didn't come to that, although I'd nevertheless been considering gun ownership for a while, having ceased to trust America's political system to safeguard my family from spontaneous visits by semi-organised groups of extreme right-wing shitheads who don't trust people who read books or who vote for someone they don't like. I've seen them on the television with their Tiki torches so I know that they already exist, and we spent four years under an administration which couldn't quite bring itself to condemn their general type.

Unfortunately, not everyone seems to see it as I do, and editors in particular seem inclined to point out the error of my ways. I write things which occasionally require the attention of an editor, and the most recent one got quite sniffy when I summarised a couple of points from the previous paragraph on social media. Violence begats violence, he opined, albeit not in those actual words, and only an imbecile would have a gun in their home. I pointed out that, having grown up in England, I was reasonably intimate with the general concept of not having a gun in one's home, and indeed with the desirability of the same on the grounds of a society without gun ownership being one wherein people have difficulty shooting each other. He explained again, simply repeating his argument having apparently assumed that I hadn't understood on the grounds that I hadn't simply replied, yes, you're right. Guns are bad. I know that now.

The previous editor had taken more or less the same position, presuming to understand my situation better than I did and even providing links to various articles published by the Guardian to show me just how wrong I'd been. I wouldn't have minded but I wasn't even particularly defending gun-ownership, rather suggesting that the lazy focus on the same as the cause of everything bad that's ever happened might, in certain instances, contribute to whatever the problem may be by diverting attention away from deeper underlying causes; but whoever you are, wherever you are, there will always be someone who genuinely believes they understand your situation better than you do because they've read a book about it or they went to a better school. That's the class system for you.

It would be nice to live in a world without guns, but unfortunately we don't. Maybe one day we'll get that genii back in its bottle, but for the moment there's not much point getting sniffy about it; and for what it may be worth, the argument about how we need our guns in case the American government ever becomes a dictatorship doesn't cut any ice with me either, given the last four years played out without so much as a fucking custard pie targetted at anyone who might have deserved it.

So when Margot invited my wife and myself out to her farm in Medina County so that we could shoot guns, it struck me as something worth doing. I'd fired an air rifle once or twice, but not an actual firearm and it seemed like a good idea to get in some practice. Medina County is some way from San Antonio so it took the best part of an hour to get there. We'd been there before, one new year's eve, and I recall being astonished at the night sky - possibly more stars than I'd ever seen.

Margot is one of the two women I've met who could probably be described as rootin'-tootin' without it being an insult. She invited us in, introduced us to her kid, her husband, her dogs, and Oreo, her enormous pet bunny who may be coming to live with us at some point because she has trouble coping with all of the critters.

She picked out a couple of guns from the safe, filled a hold-all with boxes of ammunition, and then we drove out in her jeep, heading for where she usually engages in target practice. The farm, to my eyes, was distinguished mainly by longhorn cattle of all shapes and sizes - although mostly huge - lazing around the water hole near the house. Otherwise it was scrubby trees on flat but uneven ground for as far as the eye could see - nothing like Sweet Knowle Farm where I grew up, and not even like anything from the western movies I'd watched as a kid.

We drove slowly, the jeep tipping and bucking, Margot telling us about life on the farm over a soundtrack of the sort of grunting metal I've never quite recognised as music. Eventually we came to a halt.

Margot pinned a paper target to a tree and talked us through the process of loading up a clip with bullets, cocking the firearm, all the safety procedures, and all the stuff we've seen in cop shows. I'd spent most of the previous hours anticipating something which deafened me while knocking me off my feet and leaving a massive bruise on my shoulder, so the reality of actually firing guns turned out to be thankfully - and I suppose worryingly - much easier than I'd anticipated. My earplugs were sufficient to reduce the noise to something innocuous, and Margot showed us how to hold guns in the proper way - us being Bess and myself.

Our first gun was a rifle, possibly a Remington - unless that's just who made the bullets. It was small, fairly light, and felt much like an air rifle in my hands. Bullets were loaded into the firing chamber and spent casings subsequently expelled by pulling back and then up on a lever assemblage just as Clint Eastwood would have done, and which felt hugely satisfying. I could almost sense a droopy mustache forming on my face as I shot the thing. The kickback was significant but nothing like so bad as I'd anticipated, and I seemed to be pretty good at hitting the target for some reason.

Next was the 380 automatic, a small, stubby handgun which looked worryingly insubstantial but proved to be just the right weight to keep it from sitting in one's palm like a water pistol. Everything about it was smooth and well-oiled, and I at last understood what is meant by the term automatic. The rifle had required that I cock the gun each time I was about to fire so as to load a bullet into the chamber; which is only necessary once with an automatic, following which one may shoot off the entire clip of seven bullets. Again, the noise wasn't too bad, and the kickback only seemed like it would be a problem when firing off the entire clip in quick succession. The gun required that I support my gripping hand with another cradled beneath - like you see in the cop shows - so as to improve aim and prevent the firearm flying back and hitting me in the face. Unfortunately though, my aim was shite, meaning I would be wise to get in more practice before attempting to - just randomly and off the top of my head - settle an argument with a disagreeable personage by shooting him in the kneecaps.

Finally, we loaded up the twelve gauge, the one borrowed from Byron. It seemed like it would be effective - in some imaginary worst case scenario - but was frankly a pain in the arse to use with all of the complicated cocking and shucking to be undertaken in a specific order. So that was good to know, I guess.

After about half an hour, Bess and I felt we'd got as much as we were likely to get from the exercise so we packed up and came home. For me, it had been strange shooting at a target with a potentially lethal firearm, but nothing like so strange as I'd expected it to be, and it seemed to come naturally on some level; at least, all those rap records suddenly made a lot more sense. Surprisingly, I didn't feel like a different person. I didn't feel the need to listen to Ted Nugent and my views on gun nuts remains more or less unchanged.

For better or worse, I'm now able to do something I may not have been able to do a month ago, so that's good.