I might have missed my calling

Maybe I missed my calling as a sniper. Went to the gun range at Lake Chabot Park in Castro Valley with the SO's friend from work J. Nice guy. Gave us our gun safety lesson and the tour of his various 22 caliber rifles.

It's a beautiful location. You drive 6 miles down a windy road through the redwoods to get there. Far from the usual hiking and biking trails of Lake Chabot. You are allowed to shoot in 15 minute intervals with breaks to put up and pull down your targets. It's highly regulated with people monitoring to make sure you follow all the rules. And if a deer happens to want to walk through the range, a cease fire is called.

He explained the different sized bullets. Metal bullet casings littered the ground, some worn and rusty, some still shiny with copper. He had rifles without scopes (open sight), haloscan sight (get to match a red dot and cross hairs to the target), and a magnified scope (where you can see where your bullet actually hit).

J likes to shoot in the morning he says when it's not hot and before the rowdier folks get there. To get to this park at 9am, most of these people were like the bicyclists we passed on the road, they were here to practice a discipline. Many were hunters, though alot of them were simply there to be marksmen. J shoots ground squirrel on farms in the central coast where he grew up. Ground squierrels create holes where the cattle step and break their legs.

Of course, J is a member of the NRA though he thinks there are folks who take the politics of the 2nd Amendment too far and he believes "anti-gunners" don't understand what guns really are. He says their safety training program is by far the best one.

He likened shooting to playing golf, the art of taking this small thing and hitting a target far far away. It's in the focus of the goal that allows him to let go of the stresses of the workweek. You drive through wonderful woods, and spend the morning outdoors, plus it costs less overall than golf. Well, unless you walk down the range and see some of these customized guns people have: shaft, trigger, scope. Three grand. These aren't hunting rifles, these are for marksmanship. And yeah, if I had all that stuff, I better have a spread of bullets less than half an inch. These guys pack their own bullets. Literally pour he gun powder and everything.

He explained the major points of gun safety:

1. Always assume a gun is loaded even if the magazine is out and you think you've removed all the bullets.
   
2. Always aim the gun barrel up or down the range
   
3. Leave your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot
   
4. Only aim at something you want to destroy
   
5. Always look at what's beyond the target. A bullet never really stops at the thing you want to hit, even if actually hit it, it'll travel well past that target.
   

J believes that we don't need more gun laws, just enforce the ones out there. But in his explanations I noticed that the mighty flaw of gun control, is that in the end, people don't care. The gang bangers who shoot up Oakland's streets don't care about where all their missed bullets fall. The "legitimate" guy who walks in and purchases a gun for an "illegitimate" person for some serious cash doesn't care where that guns goes when he calls the cops to say he was robbed and his gun was stolen. You can create all sorts of restrictions for the people who actually follow the laws, but in the end how do you stop the people who just don't care. How do you bust the "legitimate" guys who are selling to the street? And the ones doing drivebys want to destroy people, whether it's their target, or the kid playing down the street.

Firing off the various rifles, you begin to realize how hard it is to really shoot a very specific target. One slight shift in your finger, and you've missed by a foot. Shift your arm and now its 20 feet. No wonder the people doing drivebys use automatic weapons (guns that continue to fire so long as the trigger is held), they're hoping to hit their targets by luck. It's a guessing game. When they pull the trigger they're only "hoping" they hit the guy. In the more rural areas, where you still might eat and use the animals you kill, guns have a function and a purpose. In the urban areas, other than the gun range, the only thing to really shoot at are people.

The rifles we used were not automatic. One was semi-automatic which means one trigger, one bullet and the bullet loads itself. The non-automatic rifles you have to open and close before each shot. There was a deliberation and rhythm to it all. Only aim at what you want to destroy.

I can understand the allure of marksmanship for these men. I think I was the only woman there in the rifle areas. Most women are in the pistol section of the range. Though he says that the women who do come out are very very good. It's a challenge you make with yourself. How accurate can you be. In order to be that accurate, you have to have a certain sense of calm in order to be in that moment. For these people at the range, it's about an inner peace.

I found myself to be rather good at all of the rifles and simply got better the better the equipment got better, staying well within the 8 inch diameter of the black centered target. With the magnified scope I hit 12 of the 14 bullets within the very center circle, 2 inches. On the open site, I stayed in the black, hitting the center area most often despite the gun drifting high. At times you feel crosseyed. Sometimes I would hold my breath as I slowly squeezed the trigger. I don't know how these people in the biathalon do it.

The difference between swords and guns is that with swords you can do this destruction at a long distance. If you aren't really aiming, that furthers your disassociation with your target. I've always understood the idea that if I were to really injure someone, or perhaps even take their life, using my martial art skills, that that life would now and forever be bound to me. I have destroyed a world of every life that interacted with that person. And I am responsible for the destruction I have created. There is a choice for me to make. And I have to know whether that choice is worth the consequences, it may, it may not. But the further we get from that, the farther the target, when the "target" simply becomes a point on a map, the less we have to make these "choices" and we can no longer see the worlds we are actually destroying, that is how we lose our humanity.