Shooting for Insight on Guns

The lobby walls at the L.A. Gun Club are bedecked with targets shot and autographed by celebrities. All of the club’s employees carry guns in holsters as they work. They give student discounts.

The place is open until 11 p.m. My friend Steve joked that it gives a man enough time to “get home from work, get mad at your wife and come down to pop off a few shots.”

Last weekend, Steve invited my roommate, Kevin, and me to go to the club’s firing range. My only opinion about guns was that they were too easily obtained by idiots and the bloodthirsty.

However, I also have no problem with my next-door neighbor owning a Glock, because he does and he’s a good guy. So I thought that actually shooting a gun might develop my feelings one way or the other.

At the club, Kevin and Steve began perusing smallish weapons -- 9 millimeters and .38s, all for rent. I was drawn to the revolvers. They seemed both classy and tasteless, made as much for gratuitous flash as lethality. They carry fewer rounds but make a bigger show of them. I chose the one with the most ridiculous name -- a Colt Anaconda, which turned out to be a .44 Magnum, 3.7 pounds, almost 14 inches long with bullets about the size of AA batteries. It’s a gun designed for hunting body-armored caribou.

I could certainly fire more accurately with a little peashooter like the one Kevin’s looking at, I thought. Look at me with this one, I can barely hold it steady. This will end in catastrophic ricochet.

Then again, I rationalized, why squander the opportunity to ride the scariest roller coaster?

I bought 100 rounds.

Steve made sure we all got human-shaped targets with the internal organs clearly labeled -- heart, liver, medulla oblongata. A part of me laughed; a smaller part gagged.

Getting into the firing range entails walking through a closet-size room that I guessed was a “safety zone.” I suppose it’s where all of those heat-packing employees trap you if you go zany in the range and attempt to storm the lobby with guns blazing.

The shooting booth was no batting cage. I’ve known people who said they could never fire a gun because the power would overwhelm them -- not the power of the recoil, the power of pain and injury and death.

The distinct sound of a gun is something I associate with subdued panic when I hear it coming from west of Vermont Avenue. And now that sound was about to issue from my hands, directed at whatever or whomever I chose that target to represent. Something cold, evil, reptilian. Christopher Walken.

My hands became a little weak as I loaded. Will my wrists snap under the kick? Could I bear to shoot Walken, if only in effigy? I was taken by a mixture of fear and excitement. Of course, when one is in a shooting range, one calls fear “caution.” I spent 30 seconds adopting what I thought would be a good stance, and fired.

Right then the fun began. A five-pointed muzzle flash, a jolt that made my jowls rattle and a brand new hole in the target’s lung. No real damage, just a tear in paper.

We challenged each other to contests -- high-score rapid fire, high-score one-handed, most hits to the spleen. We’d trade off weapons and trade back. Safety rules quickly turned into habit. Everything became pure fantasy, no more dangerous than playing “Duck Hunt” on the old Nintendo.

But rather than helping me form a solid opinion on the interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, the trip only added another element of confusion. I learned that guns are frightening to look at, listen to, touch and smell. They made me scare myself. Hold one and you can’t help but briefly imagine yourself using it to kill somebody.

But for that part of your brain that knows that the target is only paper and isn’t concerned with morbid implications, they’re the perfect rush.