With that in mind, we signed up to take a class in gun use and safety. The idea was that, after about 12 hours of instruction, we would be qualified to get a concealed carry permit for a gun. We’ve never cared about owning, much less carrying, a gun but somehow Paul convinced me this would be a good idea, especially since we were doing it with friends. Over a Friday evening and a Saturday, we spent about 10 hours in a classroom learning about 2 hours worth of interesting stuff. I think the state of Ohio sets the rules for all the material you have to go over and over, sort of like Driver’s Training. We did learn about the parts of a gun, and we practiced drawing a gun from a holster. We didn’t learn cool stuff like how to twirl the gun before re-holstering it – maybe they thought we already had that down pat.
The final step in passing the course was actually firing a gun on a shooting range. That was the real adventure! We drove out to an abandoned farmhouse where a shooting range was set up in a back field. Paul never tires of telling people what a natural I was at shooting and what a “tight pattern” of bullets I put into the target that day.
Here’s what he fails to tell people. It was a muddy, cold, damp day – the kind of day where the cold penetrates right through to your bones and stays there until it can be rooted out by a long, steamy shower, several hot toddies and 5 or 6 layers of fleece. They had targets set up which were the life-sized outlines of menacing intruders. The instructor told us we had to get an acceptable number of shots in the center of our target’s chest to pass the course. That was the only path out of the cold and damp, back home to the showers, toddies and fleece.
We each lined up across from a target, and then the instructor passed out guns and had us inspect and count our ammunition. He worked with us individually, explaining how our particular gun worked and where the bullets went. The next step was actually loading the gun. By that time, my fingers were pretty cold and stiff. I picked up my little cardboard box of bullets; but, because I had failed to close the lid completely after the inspection, the box spilled all over the ground. (I grew up in a family where the refrigerator was one big booby trap because neither kids nor adults ever put the lids tightly back on anything. It still goes on today, and it drives the in-laws nuts.) Luckily no one saw me so I quickly scooped up the bullets, mud, grass and all, and jammed them back into my box.
The gun they gave me to use wasn’t like the cowboy six-shooters I grew up with where you just popped play bullets into a rotating chamber. With this gun, you loaded the bullets into a long skinny tray. The tray was on a very tight spring so it was hard to pull out and hard to hold out long enough to fill it with bullets. I’ve never had a lot of strength in my hands. What little hand power I do have is reserved for important stuff like uncorking wine bottles, stirring chocolate chips into really thick cookie dough and getting the cellophane off of candy boxes. With what can only be described as a superhuman effort, I kept the tray open long enough to load that gun.
Once loaded, my mission was clear. I wanted every shot to hit the center of the target so that I could pass the course without having to load more bullets into the damn gun. I shot to kill and didn’t waste time by putting bullets where they wouldn’t count for anything. It might surprise gun aficionados to learn bullets coated with mud and grass are just as accurate as clean ones. I’m not sure if it was beginner’s luck or the power of positive thinking, but I had the best shot pattern in the class and was back in the car in record time. And, simultaneously, I became a legend in my own time. Bingo!
P.S. I passed the class but decided against getting a concealed carry permit and a gun. No point in pressing my luck.
P.P.S. The gunslinger at the top of the page is retired and living in Florida. The sharpshooter in the middle checks his gun at the door when he visits the honky tonks in Nashville while the marksman at the bottom of the page has been spotted bagging pigeons in Brooklyn's Prospect Park
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Wonder where this blog's title came from? Click below
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wy85eA-DV8
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