My family members have never been “gun people.” Nobody has ever owned one; it is doubtful any of us could tell you how to load one and it is highly unlikely any of us will be buying one in the future. I was always told as a boy that guns were like needles on the street or strangers, that you should never touch one and the only people who carry them are cops, bad guys and the military. You can imagine my surprise when my mother announced one Saturday this summer that she had purchased the family a Groupon for a beginner-shooting lesson at the local gun range.
This had to be the start of some kind of joke. “So the DeFalco family gets a Groupon to the gun range…” I’m not sure what the punch line would be but I was already laughing at the lead-in. A gun range? A Groupon? From my mild-mannered mother? We are city people, my parents grew up in New York and we have spent our lives in other large metropolitan cities like Toronto and Boston. Most city people can tell you that a gun in the city carries a different connotation than a gun in the country. Yet, there we were. The DeFalco family had piled into the car to go cash in our Groupon and go shooting.
I was terrible. The instructor assured me that it’s hard the first time, but after sending three bullets ricocheting off the ceiling he politely took the AK-47 out of my hand and suggested I try the pistol. I spent most of the afternoon watching my family send bullets flying through paper targets while I tried to feel proud about my abysmal accuracy. As funny as the whole production was, I was not particularly interested in the antics of my family. Instead the “regulars” fascinated me. Ordinary looking men and women who calmly entered the range, firearms in sleek looking cases, loaded and prepped their weapons professionally and didn’t think twice about sending entire clips into a target. I still tried to feel proud about my four-for-ten accuracy.
Now, I live in Massachusetts, a state with perhaps the strictest gun regulations. It is not a common thing to run into people who own guns or talk about guns and, more often than not, the whole idea is frowned upon. Here was an entirely new group, who appeared to have a real passion for what they were doing and handled it with a degree of professionalism I had never associated with gun ownership. To be fair, I was a little turned off by how easy it would be for any of these people to take me down at fifty yards, but damn it looked cool.
I later learned that we had all gone on this odd excursion as more than just a charming family activity. I think the Aurora and Newtown tragedies had struck a chord in my parents and they realized that maybe they should know at least something about these metal sticks that kept making the news. It was a curiosity bred out of anxiety. The whole exercise was a way to understand something that was completely foreign, even if nobody in the family was in a rush to do it again. And it did change my perspective. I was unnerved by how easy it was, how simple it was to simply point and shoot, but impressed by the thrill of it. I was no crack shot but to my surprise it was a lot of fun.
So what is the long-winded, long-coming moral of the story? Try new things, even if they directly contradict your beliefs? Well, sure. We do that all the time though, right? (I’m looking at all you people who have yet to fill your distribution requirements.) I went to the gun range and I am still not overly fond of guns. My political views stayed largely the same, but at least now I had the experience of being able to understand what I didn’t like about them. Before the experience, I was only using news clippings and statistics to support my beliefs. It wasn’t until I actually went shooting that I could understand what it was that I didn’t like about it. To be fair, I also learned that while I’m a terrible shot, I also felt like a badass.
So here are my words of wisdom: try even the things you hate. If you’re a communist, take an Econ class, just to make sure you still believe what you belief. If you are a feminist, get a male in your life to try to talk about the experience of being a man. Listening and experiencing new things doesn’t mean you advocate them, but at least you can understand.
