GUNS
At a November benefit auction awhile ago in New Hampshire I paid $300 for a morning of shotgunning followed by what was billed as a gourmet lunch. The auction was in a good cause, and unfortunately there was an open bar. In my defense, the kayak we’d bid on went for more than we could spend, and an extraordinary painting by a local artist we admired started too high. Still, shotgunning? We don’t hunt, we don’t own guns, and as New York Liberals we are supposed to disapprove of them. Too bad: I’d raised my hand on the first round, thinking I’d be out-bid. Wrong.
The facility was a clay-target range not far away from our place, and when I called the proprietor he suggested that as first-time shotgunners we should wait until April to come over. “Winter shooting can be painful,” he said, “if you aren’t used to it.”
Over that winter I got to thinking about my history with guns. As a kid during the early 1950s I loved them. Not only did I have a capgun Colt .45 Peacemaker to go with my cowboy outfit, but over time I accumulated a .38 caliber Police Special and a German Luger. These toys were full-sized replicas, authentic in every detail except that they couldn’t shoot real bullets. Eventually real robbers began using them in real robberies, and they were banned.
The game I played with them was eventually banned as well, going out of favor in a nation increasingly obsessed with protective parenting. It was free-form, unsupervised, and improvisatory. We just called it “playing guns.” You’d round up a few friends on a Saturday morning, and ramp around the neighborhood shooting at each other according to scenarios drawn from the Western movies and tv shows of the time. Getting killed was the best part: you’d try to bring off the gaudiest death. “Unh! Ya got me…”, the gun dropping from your lifeless fingers, and maybe a roll backwards down a hill through someone’s shrubbery. Glorious.
I got older, and moved on to a Daisy B.B. gun. Unlike the capguns, its little copper balls could be dangerous, and as my family moved around the country I ran into some kids who fought with B. B. guns. They weren’t just playing. They really wanted to hurt each another. These kids scared me, and so did the B. B. gun, after I took an idle shot, not even really aiming, at a robin on our back lawn in Michigan one day and killed it. The robin did not die gaudily. It just fell over, fluttered once, and lay still. There was a single bead of blood on its breast. I buried it in the woods behind the house and I never told anyone.
Then my stepfather, a World War Two veteran, bought me a .22 rifle for my 14th birthday, and I loved it. It was a Remington single-shot, bolt-operated target model with a heavy barrel and stock, and it came with a membership in the National Rifle Association. Back in 1956 the NRA was still a low-profile outfit, since hardly anyone in the country had a qualm about owning guns, and I thought of my membership as an extension of the Boy Scouts. The NRA promoted competitive target-shooting, and during my first year at prep school I was a member of the Rifle Team. I was a pretty good shot, because paper targets don’t bleed.
And I enjoyed cleaning the rifle, appreciating it as a tool perfectly made for its purpose, as I broke it down into lock, stock and barrel, ran the oil-soaked swabs stuck through the slot in the cleaning-rod carefully through the spirals of lands and grooves in the barrel, disassembled the lock into bolt, firing-pin and chamber, and used more of the nose-tickling gun-oil to wipe the intricate mechanisms clean, rubbed linseed oil into the wood of the stock, and finally wiped off the excess oil and reassembled the weapon. Everything clicked back together.
But I got interested in other things at prep school, dropped out of the Rifle Team, let my NRA membership lapse, and neglected the .22. Like any abandoned tool, it got rusty, and I left it in my closet when I went away to college. My stepfather was hurt when he found it. I don’t think he minded that I’d given up shooting (he’d been in the Army Air Force, not the infantry), but he was good with his hands and he treated all tools with reverence. The gift of the rifle had been one of his rare attempts to connect with me, and I had betrayed his trust, first by letting the rifle go to rust and finally by hiding it and not telling him.
In college, when I thought about guns at all, my thoughts were entirely negative. The iconic weapon of my college years was Lee Harvey Oswald’s mail-order Mannlicher carbine. My cousin Barry, a year behind me at Yale, had one of the few student tvs on campus, and on the night after JFK’s assassination I joined Barry and his roommates and was horrified by the flickering black and white footage of Oswald’s own death, shot by Jack Ruby with a snub-nosed .38 Police Special, the real version of the capgun I had played with as a child.
I graduated in 1964, and began an acting career, never thinking much about the escalating war in Viet Nam until I was drafted in March of 1965. I got turned into a number (US51539767 – I sometimes forget my Social Security number, but I can’t obliterate my service number) at Fort Dix, NJ. The Army was still using the M-14 rifle then, and I hated every aspect of Basic Training except my time with the gun. The M-14 was a great deal more powerful than my old .22, but it was still a fairly simple, rugged tool, basically just an improvement on the M1 rifle of World War Two and Korea, and I had an edge over most of my fellow city-boy trainees when it came guns, because of my time with the Remington. I could break down and reassemble the M-14 faster than anyone else in my unit. And I was happy to see that the firing range at Fort Dix used paper bullseyes. But in the fire-and-maneuver course toward the end of the training cycle, man-shaped pop-up targets replaced the bullseyes, and we were taught to “aim center mass.”
Of course we were being trained to take the rifle to Viet Nam and kill people with it. And although we were all issued patch kits and cleaning rods, cleaning the M-14 the Army way went against my early training entirely. After a muddy day on the range we were ordered to plunge our rifles into vats of almost-boiling water to get most of the dirt and powder-residue out, dry them off and oil them up as best we could. The Army was already shifting over to the M-16 assault rifle, a fully-automatic weapon to counter the opposition’s Russian AK-47. It sacrificed accuracy for firepower, and I suspect the word had come down from the Pentagon to render the existing stock of M-14s useless as soon as possible. My cousin Barry, who joined the Marines, stuck with the M-14 during his four combat tours in Viet Nam. It was accurate, sturdy, and reliable. And the early M-16s (Army troops called them Mattel Toys) jammed frequently at the worst moments, and couldn’t even be used as blunt instruments in close combat because their plastic stocks were flimsy. Well, Viet Nam was a research-and-development war, and after we lost it the M-16 was redesigned. I gather the version used by our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq kills people a lot more efficiently.
When my wife and I showed up at the clay-target range on a chilly April morning for our shotgunning session, I anticipated doing well. The Army had rated me “expert” with the M-14, and had given me a little medal that said so, even though I wound up in Germany instead of Viet Nam and never had to find exactly how little my “expert” medal was worth. And Patsy didn’t like guns at all.
The proprietor was an affable, beefy guy in his fifties who greeted us in the clubhouse of the range, where he’d made a fire in the big fieldstone hearth under a mounted moose-head, to cut the early spring chill. He was wearing a shooting jacket with a padded shoulder and loops for shotgun shells, and he quickly pegged us as New York Liberals who only lived part-time in New Hampshire. He made a few remarks about the anti-gun movement, but quit when we told him we didn’t post our woods against hunters.
There was a long table in the middle of the room where he’d laid out various long guns. I recognized the two 16-gauge shotguns, one single-fire and the other a double-barreled over-and-under. There was a strange gun which looked a little like a .22. But the last weapon was a B.B. gun just like the Daisy with which I had killed Cock Robin fifty years before.
“We’ll get to the guns,” the man said, “but first, Toby, are you right-eyed or left-eyed?”
“Well, I’m right-handed,” I said. “I always sighted with my right eye in the Army.”
“That’s got nothing to do with it,” he said. “With a shotgun you keep both eyes open. But your stronger eye determines the best way to point the gun, just like when you point your finger. Try something. Stretch out your arms full-length and make a small triangle with your thumbs and hands, and look through it with both eyes, at my nose.” I did. “OK, “he said, “I’m looking through your triangle at your left eye. Can’t even see the right one. You’re left-eyed, Toby.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “I mean, when I was in the Army I fired expert.”
“I’m not doubting you, but you didn’t have any choice, ’cause the Army doesn’t issue left-handed rifles. Shoot lefty, the extractor will put a hot casing right into your cheek. If you’d been able to use your left eye, hell, they’d have made you a sniper or some damn thing.”
He did the same test with Patsy, who proved to be as right-eyed as she is right-handed. “Good. Patsy, you shoot righty. Toby, lefty.” And so I spent the morning resting the gun-butt on the wrong shoulder, holding the stock with the wrong hand, and squeezing the trigger with the other wrong hand. We started with the B. B. gun, plinking at tin cans and aluminum pie-plates from about thirty feet away, always keeping both eyes open. It felt incredibly awkward, but of course the guy was right: when I pointed the gun with both eyes open and closed my right eye, my left was always looking down the barrel at the target.
Still, I missed a lot, and so did Patsy, because she was still getting used to the entire notion of shooting at things. The proprietor finally declared himself satisfied, and moved on to the strange gun. In fact it was a .22, more or less, but with a smooth barrel, firing very small shotgun cartridges the size of .22 caliber rounds, and it felt like my old Remington. But firing left-handed still felt ass-backwards. We were shooting at party balloons, and I did a little better, but Patsy was proving a natural, popping two balloons for every one of mine. The proprietor was delighted with her, and I expected he’d start needling me. But he was a patient teacher, and he knew I was having trouble adjusting to his unsettling revelation about my eyes.
Finally he brought out the two 16-gauges and took us over to one of the clay-target ranges. He’d been talking casually but pointedly about gun safety ever since the B. B. lessons, and to put an explosive period to his running lecture he popped a shell into the single-shot’s chamber, pointed it one-handed at the ground, and fired. The bird-shot kicked up a divot and left a four-inch-wide hole in the grass. “Get the picture?”
We spent the final hour of the session firing at clay targets, black miniature Frisbees which arced across the range on different trajectories. By then I was trying to please the instructor. Big mistake. I missed my first seven targets, and he finally said, “Toby, you’re still aiming. Relax. Let the bird fly into the pattern.”
He took the shotgun, loaded it, and, still looking at me, told his assistant, “Pull.” The black disc came up low and started to arc away from him. At the last moment he turned and fired, reducing it to fragments. “Keep the gun barrel moving,” he said, “and move your whole body with it. But don’t worry about aiming.” He reloaded, turned the shotgun upside-down, holding it in one hand. “Pull.” This time he didn’t even seem to be looking. A poof of black shards in the sky. “I promise you I’m not showing off,” he said. “Keep at it long enough, anyone can do this. I’m just trying to show you that the gun’s an extension of my eyes. If I know the gun and if I can see the target moving, mostly I can hit it, same way you can track the flight of a bird with your eyes.” And yes, he actually did hit a clay target with his back turned to it. Facing front, he gave the “Pull” command, watched the disc begin its arc, turned around with the gun over his shoulder, and blew it away. “Well, I know the tracks these things fly,” he said. “Of course real birds can change their minds.”
And I remembered Zen and the Art of Archery. Back in my hippie daze, in Alan Watts’s translation it had been one of my favorite ooo-eee-ooo Eastern Wisdom books. It had never occurred to me that originally, in Japan, it had been an instruction manual. I did a little better after the teacher’s demonstration, by trying to forget about hitting the clay bird, and picturing the place in the air where the target and the deadly force from the gun had to come together.
But Patsy didn’t even need the instructor’s demonstration. She was nailing almost all of her targets, body aligned, sweeping the gun up and tracking, eyes wide open. The instructor – the sensei: I was beginning to think of him in Japanese terms – moved us to the over-and-under two-round shotgun with its fore-and-aft triggers. “Lunch is just about ready,” he said, “so I want you both to double, and then we’ll eat.” Doubling meant hitting two clay birds launched at the same time on different arcs. Patsy managed it on her first try, and did it twice more. It took me six or seven attempts, but I fantasized about the blind archers of legend and martial-arts movies, and finally made my double.
I felt not only humbled but physically confused. I’ve always known I’m a little ambidextrous: it helped me considerably when I was serious about playing the guitar, and when I reach for anything, my left hand is as apt to grab it as my right. But learning that I’m left-eyed as well has been troubling. I’ve felt a little clumsy ever since the shotgun morning, second-guessing exactly where and how far away things are, trying not to look at my feet when I walk because I fear I’ll stumble, and envying my brother Mike, who was born left-handed (and presumably left-eyed), and grew up after the Dominant Righties stopped forcing lefty school-children to write with their right hands. At least I learned that my body agrees with my political bent.
I doubt if I will fire a gun again. At lunch that April day (and yes, the meal was delicious, as promised) the sensei lavished deserved praise on Patsy’s performance and told me, “It’s just a matter of practice. This was a hard adjustment for you, giving up the habit of a lifetime, but you’re a good shooter, and you’ll get better now you know which eye is which.” I didn’t tell him that his lesson had shattered my sense of equilibrium like a clay target. He meant very well, and of course he was trying to convert both of us to the hunting religion.
For of course his range isn’t for skeet-shooting, the formal gun-sport which involves only clay targets. It’s a school for killing birds, and the little disks which fly across the range are stand-ins for live quail, ducks, pheasants and geese. And I had already killed my bird fifty years before.