New to shooting, a TIME writer learns respect for guns and for the marksman's art. EFL:
Guns aren't moral agents, they're machines—elegant, superbly efficient, made to fit the human hand. I now think it entirely possible that the American gunsmith John Moses Browning "sitteth," as his admirers say, "at the right hand of God." Shooting for sport isn't, as I once thought, the desperate outlet of sad Hemingway types, but a fiendishly difficult art. As Peter, a former naval officer, says, "It's got all the Zen you could want." Trying to hit a bullseye smaller than a saucer from a distance of 100 m or more—and do it over and over again—demands things of you, and gives things to you. You have to align yourself not just with the gun and the target but with your surroundings: light must be taken into account (people tend to aim lower in dim light), temperature (on a hot day the bullet flies faster and higher), and wind. "Three minutes," says Ian, an Army weapons instructor turned lawyer. He means that to counter today's stiff easterly, he'll move his horizontal sight three-60ths of a degree to the left. Shooting is all about precision, he says. And consistency. And tenacity, says David, an engineer who won a U.S. sniper-rifle championship last year. "Don't let anything faze you. Breathe. Relax. If you do a bad shot, forget it. Put everything you've got into the next one." The reward of total concentration: total relaxation. Even when I score poorly, shooting makes me forget everything else in the world.
Golf has targets just as small and distant—and makes people just as obsessive. The difference with shooting is that, well, you do it with guns. And bullets. Which were invented for one purpose: war. Beyond the shooting range's black-and-yellow targets hover ghosts. My club, Sydney's Royal Australian Naval Reserve Rifle Club, has its origins in the military. Most of the 170 members are civilians, but every Saturday, builders, bankers, surgeons, ex-servicemen, chiropractors, chefs and electricians—men and women, from teenagers to 80-year-olds—compete in honor of some milestone in military history: last week it was the German surrender in 1945. Among those waiting to shoot or scoring at the targets, you'll hear talk about how 19th-century Zulus thought bullets flew like spears and so aimed their rifles too high, why creeping artillery barrages didn't work in the First World War, whether it was Kokoda or the Battle of the Coral Sea that saved Australia from the Japanese. Not all the members think about this stuff. But it's hard to shoot, even at a cartoon, and not be reminded of what you owe all the people who've served as targets on your behalf. |