At Your Leisure - Target Shooting
The sound of a 40 caliber semi-automatic handgun going off 3 feet away from me is un-nerving. I can certainly hear it, despite wearing tight noise cancelling earphones, and feel it. There’s blow back – a tiny spray of embers – invisible to the naked eye but very present on the skin of my forearms and cheek, and a sensation in my sinuses that the pressure around me has gone rapidly up and then rapidly down again. A tiny, hot, seismic wave. A cloud of those burning particles wafts around the front of the lane divider – as a haphazard shower of small brass shells bounce off the walls, ceiling and floor around me.
I’m practicing at a target shooting range in Delray Beach. The man firing the gun in the lane next to me looks to be about 75 years old. What he has left of his hair is greased back into a vague DA shape. He’s tall, rawboned, lanky, with a jack-o-lantern countenance, and is leaning way out over the line so that he’s spraying everyone to his right from his breach….. He’s wearing baggy, faded jeans and a slightly lumpy dark blue T shirt with the letters “DEA” printed in white block capitals across his back. Under the lettering are the words “Drink Every Afternoon,” by way of explanation. The life size target silhouette he’s firing at is about 8 feet away, if that, given his lean, and has the shape of an oncoming man on it. His rhythm is to spend a few minutes tinkering with his firearm, perhaps loading it, or adjusting the sites, and then unleash a volley into the heart of the target with great imprecision and gusto. It occurs to me that firing such a weapon at another living thing would, besides being very harmful, be very rude.
As a youngster of 11, I signed up for .22 caliber riflery at summer camp in Maine at least 3 times a week. It was taught in a part of the camp that was preternaturally shady, under a long, thin roof and performed while laying down on last season’s musty mattresses. The old bolt action rifles, in kid appropriate sizes, smelled of gun oil and lemon wood polish. Each camper was assigned 5 .22 long rifle bullets at a time, face downward in worn wooden blocks. It was nice shady break from bad tennis, less immersive and water-up-the-nose than waterskiing – and if one kept up at it, one could earn small brass badges from the National Rifle Association. I made it through earning my Bar 3… which took about five summers of unfocused pre-teen ambition. Over time, I put the various medals in my coffee can of keepsakes with my NY Mets lapel pins, a skateboard key, a real Brooklyn Dodgers baseball my dad gave me, and various coins of the world purchased from a coins-of-the-world gumball machine. Really, just the program for a boy of about 11…. The NRA had that figured out – with reinforcing ads running in Boys’ Life Magazine.
A Sharpshooter Bar 3 camper in Maine that summer could only hear about the more advanced courses in target pistols, fired standing, at 50 feet, that one needed to achieve “Expert”. I never knew another boy to advance that far, before summer jobs, midnight movies, the opposite sex, street corner smoking and car-lust took over. There was a counselor or two who owned their own target pistol, but no camper had ever fired it or trained on it… more of a rumor than a firearm. I’ve always been curious. Is it…. Any fun?
As an American hobby, target shooting is popular, and in the Miami Adjacent, pervasive. One has only to look out the window on I-95 to see half a dozen ranges in the drive up towards West Palm Beach, with many more clubs, courses and training facilities set back a bit, but searchable on the Internet. Relatively cheap compared to municipal golf, a .22 long rifle bullet costs just a few cents, and a range session is usually about 100-200 shots before one gets bored and loses focus. Within an hour of my home here, I can visit outdoor and indoor ranges that specialize in tactical training, personal defense, long gun training, and, more interesting to me, precision ISSF Olympic style ‘bullseye’ shooting.
Olympic competition grade pistols share very little in common with weapons made for personal defense or on duty carry. At the highest level, Olympic target pistols look like ray guns with gigantic wooden block shaped grips and are loaded one round at a time, much as we did in summer camp, by pulling back a large, spring-loaded ambidextrous slider. They are designed for one handed shooting – a throwback – perhaps to dueling? … The Italian Pardini SP is the most successful and rarified target pistol for 25-meter competition in history and differs slightly from the American made Walther GSP in its weight, geometry and trigger pull – but both cost well over $3000 US, so ‘un-obtanium’ for purposes of leisure-quests. In my brief history visiting target ranges, I’ve never seen one in person. A step down from Pardini, one finds Smith & Wesson Model 41s, the Beretta 89, the Ruger Mark IV and Browning Buckmark models. These are common ISSF style target guns seen at ranges across the US. Most agree it all comes down to the trigger feel and smoothness, as every action has an equal and opposite reaction. After your cartridge fires but before your bullet leaves the barrel, you are still influencing its flight as your weapon experiences recoil. Any lateral bias introduced to your trigger will affect the path of the bullet. The firmest grips and most neutral trigger fingers hold the barrel steady long enough for the bullet to hit the center at 50 yards. True Olympians can do that again and again …. It’s NOT easy. It’s all about breathing, slowing your heart rate and muscle control. There are pressure point drills. Snack bars. Special shirts. It’s a perishable skill. If you neglect it, it atrophies quickly.
It’s a cloudless Monday morning when I arrive at my local range in Pompano Beach, Florida and unpack my small kit bag out of the trunk of my Subaru. Gun World of South Florida is nestled in the corner of a friendly retail building that shares a mall with a Shermin Williams paint outlet, a sporting goods store called Gear Hero and a music store advertising after school lesson packages. I find an easy parking space, and back in. A few spaces over, there’s a tall, lean looking man unloading long gun cases and metal ammo cans from a double cab pickup truck. He has a sleave of tattoos on his left arm that include various insignias and skulls. He is wearing fashionably faded jeans, a tight black microfiber shirt and wrap-around sunglasses. His fashion telegraphs tactical. Perhaps ex-service, perhaps active-duty law enforcement. With my white linen shirt, golf shorts and lava bead bracelet, I’m pretty sure that my own fashion choices telegraph hippy to him. He might be right.
Entering the range, I’m presented with a showroom full of things that look like machine guns… mostly because many of them are machine gun adjacent. Semi-automatic rifles are basically a spring and a twist from being able to fire as fully automatic rifles. And there’s a ton of them. Like that scene in the Matrix. ‘Guns… lots of them…”. There’s also a rental wall for newbies where I start this leisure-quest, if only because I don’t possess a firearm of my own and yelling ‘bang’ at the target seems ineffective. You can rent anything from a .177 cal air gun to a .454 Casull short barrel revolver here, which I’m told is handy for grizzly bears. A cheerful man named Matt helps me select the LEAST lethal thing they have; a Ruger .22 target pistol, a box of 100 cartridges, some targets that don’t look like people and a rental set of hearing protection headphones.
Entering the double doors – I’m reminded to ‘put on my ears’ by range warden Sweeney. Ear protection. Solid. Entering a concrete walled room where many people are firing guns will put the hairs on the back of your neck up, no matter how many times you do it.
The front desk has assigned me a ‘lane’ of my own and a handful of NRA targets for 25 feet. The entire kit is issued to me in a small cleaning bucket with plastic handle – the same kind one might use for a bathroom brush. Laying the bits and pieces out in front of me, I manage to eject a magazine without dropping it… and fumble a handful of the tiny .22 long rifle cartridges into it one at a time. Pushing the magazine into the weathered rental Ruger, I’m comforted by an audible click. I carefully pull back the bolt, check the safety, line up the sights, and fire...
The first modern Olympic target shooting occurred in 1896 Athens with 39 competitors from seven nations. The very first events included LIVE pigeons…. Which must have been a bit grizzly for the audience attending. Once they had washed that up, pistol dueling was demonstrated as part of the concurrent Franco-British Exhibition in 1908, using the Olympic fencing arena in front of invited guests. The competition involved two competitors firing at each other with dueling pistols loaded with wax bullets and wearing protective equipment for the torso, face, and hands. Later incarnations of Olympic shooting replaced the unfortunate live foul with clay pigeons, and the program grew to a maximum of 17 events by 2000-2004, including 10m air pistol/rifle, 50m rifle, 25m rapid-fire pistol and shotgun (trap/skeet).
For purposes of our leisure-quest, we are interested in 15 and 25-yard rapid-fire pistol shooting – mostly because that’s what they have around here at a convenient outdoor club called the Hollywood Rifle and Pistol Club, on weekends. (yes, there are shirts, and yes, I bought one). USA Shooting, the ISSF governing body for the United States, holds national level ISSF-style championships, Olympic trials, Junior Olympic and Paralympic competitions throughout the year. Similarly, and more common, the NRA also sponsors pistol matches in similar disciplines to USA Shooting at 25 and 50 yards. As you might expect from the NRA, the American competitions are less structured, more forgiving of tinkery modifications, and surprise… encourage competitors to enter ‘Three Gun’ style competitions where they will need more guns, more ammo, etc.
I’m a long way from competing with anyone. My first attempts at the range were full of the exact rookie mistakes everyone makes. I missed the targets completely. My “red-dot” sight, a sort of projected sighting laser gizmo, came loose and I had to buy a special kind of Loctite and funny looking screwdriver. I accidently fired my weapon into the range wall… (just once). I got hungry and wandered off. But eventually, after several visits, and purchasing my own Ruger .22 in attractive stainless steel, I started to get the hang of it. A little. It’s about breathing, steady hands, pressure points on the grip, slowing your heartrate etc. I’m still a two-handed shooter (novice level for ISSF) but I’ve discovered it’s 70% support hand, 30% trigger hand pressure. That’s surprising, but it’s true. There are lots of videos. You’re pulling the gun BACK into your trigger hand with your support hand by bracing your left index finger against the front of trigger guard and leaning INTO the back of your grip with your right hand simultaneously. Your sights are going to move, and if you slowly exhale and watch it, your sights move in a pattern that you can predict. In this way, you can see your own heartrate. The game is to slow your breathing and heartrate enough to squeeze the trigger when your sights are where you want them to be. In between the heartbeats. Also, avoid shooting into the wall.
I’ve had to step up my weight regimen, particularly paying attention to trapezius, rotator cuffs, triceps. Eventually, I received a couple of encouraging compliments from the old timers, some of whom are shooting for “keeps”, that I’m starting to not suck as badly as they thought I might from the look of me. I’ve learned to field strip and clean my target pistol without losing tiny bits of it under my workbench. As a side benefit to all this, I’ve exercised my vision enough to stop wearing my progressive glasses… because your eyes are a muscle, and this does strengthen them. I still need readers, but my distance vision, which was already sharp, has become more nuanced and sharper. I’m less sensitive to loud noises. This might be advancing deafness, but it might be the ability to concentrate more deeply.
During this leisure-quest, I’ve met a lot of new people as well. People who are probably out of my political comfort zone and yet have been welcoming. You know what they say – the liberals are probably right, but the conservatives throw a better barbeque. I have found this checks out. RULE NUMBER ONE: You know the one thing you don’t do in a room full of people holding semi-automatic weapons? Start discussing politics. In this way, it’s actually LESS politically fraught than an average day at my local Irish pub where people feel less inhibited and occasional skirmishes occur. You just don’t do politics in a room full of guns. People would assume you’re crazy and disregard you. I have found the kids at the range are likely to say hello, remember my name, honor my requests to be far away from the AR-15 guy, and even go out of their way to help me when my red dot sight falls off. There are ‘tells’ that I’m in a land far, far away, however. Occasional MAGA bumper stickers…. A T shirt that says: “Support Your Local Military Industrial Complex”. And yet, there are occasional cracks in the armor too. I’m pretty sure that there are a bunch of closet liberals day-playing here just waiting to reveal themselves – if they only could! I might be wrong. But rule number one applies. No politics.
On the subject of firearms in America, there is an elephant in the room for me that reveals itself from time to time, as I see someone in the next lane holding a large caliber rifle with a vague gleam in their eye, or when I’m browsing target shooting catalogs and mentions of “stopping power” or “lethality” appear in the body copy. I entertain this leisure-quest with some trepidation and self-analysis. I’ve been very gun adverse for decades. Probably since Columbine, but certainly since Sandy Hook. I was local to Sandy Hook that day in a room full of parents whose pagers all went off at the same time during the company Christmas party. They all had children in that Connecticut school system, though not in Sandy Hook, and got the notification about an active shooter. I had many friends in the press who covered that story, and some came away changed by it. Here in South Florida, on February 14, 2018, a mass shooting occurred when 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz opened fire on students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. That’s 8 miles from where I’m standing, at Gun World of South Florida, and just 8 years ago. 17 people were killed there and 17 more injured. An emotionally disturbed ex-student who had been expelled a year earlier, Cruz, 19, used an AR-15 style rifle purchased legally in Florida – allowing him to fire 139 shots in bursts on three different floors in roughly 7 minutes. Most of those people would have graduated college by now, have jobs… be visiting their families for the holidays. So many shattered lives. As a father I can’t even imagine. My son was a high school freshman that year in gun adverse Maplewood NJ. Most of the workers at Gun World – the range wardens and counter workers, are of this age group – mid 20s, and local.
Parkland is a prosperous, pleasant place. I pass through it every day. It has fancy housing developments, well stocked luxury malls and many golf courses and public green spaces. It’s hard to imagine such an act taking place there…. But where is such an act part of the landscape if not in America? While practicing my target shooting, I often stand near people using weapons such as AR-15s– and the thought of that much firepower being turned on a living thing is, in a word, horrifying. Terrifying. Obscene. If I’m asked, I’m not sure what the purpose of such a weapon is in civilian life…. But I’ve not been asked. There are 24 million plus AR-15 style rifles in circulation in the United States, based on production since ArmaLite version 1.0 in 1956. To put that in perspective – there are roughly 2 million Fender Stratocasters in the United States, based on reported numbers from 71 years of manufacture since 1954. So, there are 2000% more AR-15s than Stratocasters. What does that say about us? AR-15s are inexpensive, a consumer item at this point. Available at sporting goods stores. In gun ranges like this, with proof of ID and a 5-day waiting period. They are cheap to manufacture and easy to market. They are ‘sexy’ in tactical fashion way. Cheaper in most cases than the conventional old fashioned wooden rifles one would associate with hunting. As I’ve grown to know some of the people who are fire-arm curious – I’ve met many who own such weapons. It would be impossible to paint them all with a broad brush.
One revealing conversation I had was with a gentleman at the range who was re-installing my ‘red dot’ sight on my target pistol one evening. It fell off again. I mentioned to him that I am a writer; I was interested in his thoughts. He told me that one of the young men on the sales floor of Gun World was a survivor of the Parkland shooting. That salesman’s reaction was to delve MORE deeply into gun ownership – gaining his concealed carry permit – to make sure “he never felt that helpless again”. I’m not sure I would feel differently than that, certainly not at 18 years old. Then the apprentice gunsmith told me a story that forced me to do a little research. David Hogg, briefly the DNC chair and a national figure in the gun control movement, is a survivor of that mass killing. He has been continually targeted by right wing disinformation campaigns and threats – most prominently the rumor that he wasn’t actually there, at Parkland, on that day. He was on campus and live streamed from a closet in an adjacent building during the rampage. It’s readily available on YouTube. His sister lost 4 close friends on a classroom floor in Building 12. He was just 17 at the time. A look up on Fact Check finds that this talking point, that Hogg was not on campus, is verifiably false. And yet the emotion that this story brought forth in my young friend was very real for him. As the young gunsmith told me this disproven story, he became quite incensed. It’s become a talking point that Hogg wasn’t in the SAME building as the killer… and therefore was “standing on the graves of the victims”. Standing on their graves for personal political gain. “Their blood on his shoes”. That’s the language of it. Graphic. Visceral. How does one answer such a challenge you’re when having a conversation with a friendly, champion marksman, who is, in fact, holding your gun?
Rule number one applies again. You don’t. You back out of the conversation. Change the subject. Glance at your watch. Perhaps mention that it’s Taco Tuesday. As I’ve spent a few months coming to these ranges, I’m less sure of myself and my opinions on the current state of America. Because 25 million AR-15s. Because the genie is out of the bottle. It’s a sport, in the physical world, and one of the most popular leisure activities in the United States. A sanctioned Olympic discipline. A target sport that forces you to fold into the deepest part of your concentration to want the bullseye at 50 yards badly enough to hold on it at the expense of inhaling. It’s also the single thing that reveals us as the most barbaric versions of ourselves. All at the same time. The ability for mankind to hold convenient, instantaneous death in his hands at any given moment has not been a positive development. And yet, here I am, in the Miami Adjacent, exploring slow fire .22 caliber target shooting as a way of exploring my capacities in the physical world. My level of perishability. My ability to understand cultures so different from the way I was raised, by hyper-liberal artists, film makers and jazz musicians, in New York City.
Last weekend, I placed 10th at the Hollywood Rifle and Pistol Club, out of 30 target shooters, in the monthly ‘fun pistol shoot’. Relaxed rules, two handed allowed, red dot sights or iron sights acceptable. Occasional jeers and good-natured ribbing… I think many of these guys have been at this a while. There is a strong safety culture in place – the range warden makes all the load, fire and retrieve calls over a PA. I won $9. There was beer in the clubhouse afterwards, once everything had been put safely away. It felt pretty good. The Hollywood has been around for 90 years. The clubhouse is a cinderblock box with a kitchenette, a huge central table, and yellowed, historic photographs of former champions on the wall. Think Tom Wolfe – The Right Stuff – Happy Bottom Riding Club vibes…. The two gentlemen that tied for the win, with matching 896/900, only missed 4 possible 10 rings in 90 tries – and only by a point. That’s pretty incredible. I wonder if I could do that, with enough practice? Rick and Jimmy, two septuagenarians who have been coming since, perhaps, forever, scored top 5. Jimmy sponsored me for club membership, seeing as I already had the T shirt… which means I can practice whenever I like for $200 a year, provided I mind my manners.
It’s a perishable skill.