Targets

It is one thing to do something that you know will be difficult. You prepare yourself. The nerves are not nerves of anticipation as much as a fear that the hard thing will not play out the way that you have imagined it playing out 500 hundred times in your head. It normally does. And in any case you have predisposed yourself to the best and worst case scenarios before you are in any position to face them.

It is another thing to do something that you don’t think will be very difficult and find out that it is the most challenging, terrifying thing you have faced in recent history. There is no way to prepare for that. You are essentially caught with your pants around your ankles, hoping not to trip and fall on your face or be photographed doing so. Today was one of those days.

Admin fun day. We had rescheduled four times and yesterday I had been informed that for Admin fun day Zack, Dave, and I would be going to the shooting range. When he told us I tried to smile enthusiastically and he believed me, mostly because he was caught up nerding out with Zack about it. I, on the other hand, was internally panicking.

I have never been to a shooting range.

I don’t like guns.

I don’t want to shoot one.

I don’t want to touch one.

Why did they assume I was okay with this?

….

But they are so excited... It will be fine. I’ll get over it.

So we are driving to the gun range and they are pumped and I am sweating. I start to think about how I can get out of it. I can watch them shoot the first few rounds and then decide what to do. Probably I am over thinking this. Probably I will calm down when I get there.

We get there.

I am not calm.

I am thinking of the people I have lost to the barrel of a gun. One grandmother, three uncles, one aunt, one niece, one nephew. 7 family members. 20 elementary school students. 50 LGBTQ community members. Countless thousands of soldiers with families and friends.

Jesus would have hated this. Just the idea of a gun is the epitome of what He died to forgive.

They are excited.

We get to the range and watch a two-minute informational safety video. We sign paperwork. We take a quiz. I slip away to the bathroom just before we enter the range because I can see their faces. I can see the faces my family and school children and teenagers at a night club and I see the faces of my two dear friends who are ecstatic to recreationally handle these weapons.

I don’t understand. It hurts.

But I don’t let myself cry.

We go into the gun range and the little old lady (her name was Jude—like the song) shows us how to fire the guns we rented. Every pop echoes in my head as what could be the last sound a person ever hears.

The guys put a few rounds in. I reluctantly pick up the 22. I force a breath and put a round into the target. I am the only one of the three of us who shoots the middle of the white box. Then I make Dave show me three times how to take all of the bullets out of the gun. Eventually I shoot the other gun (A Colt Python) one time. I hit the target in the shoulder. For the rest of the time I stand with my arms crossed and pay attention to way they hold the gun.

The thing I can’t get out of my head is the way I felt when I was holding the gun. In the lane, with the gun in my hand and my double earplugs—there was nothing beyond me and the gun. No notion of the target or even of the other people in the room with me. It was like I was reduced to the muscles of my trigger finger and my breathing pattern. I forgot about the people I had lost and the people I could lose, as if the significance of the thing had been blocked off along with my sense of hearing. The weapon was gamified and I wanted to win.

What does that even mean? What does it say about me? And about the rest of society?