Almost all gun owners can benefit from back-to-basics firearm safety. I watched a Navy Seal training showing seals learning to clear buildings. The trainers, you will notice, focus on moving slowly, knowing where their firearms are pointing, and knowing when they are firing a shot. There’s no cowboy shooting going on in this training. No one is saying “run faster, shoot more.”
Watching a gun being test fired on video by someone else is never what you want it to be. It is like golf. The camera is still, the thing happens, and it is over. The gun represents itself just as it is, as a mechanical object that functions in a repetitive way, the same each time if the shooter takes care.
If you want a shooting to be exciting, watch a movie – any movie. A B-grade horror flick is more exciting and dramatic than gun trials on video. Watching “US Guns of World War II” on the History channel is more action packed.
In a movie the actor animates the gun. Tears and anguish and aggression and rage well up and spill over the barrel aiming hate, fear, and loss at the target. When the shooter finally, in a fit of vengeance or passion lets the bullets fly, we can finally slide back from the edge of our seats with the realization that the emotion is resolved. (Unless, that is, we are watching the last minutes of the last episode of the Sopranos.)
Good firearm training is very present and very, how can I describe it, maybe, “boring.” Your trainer should ask you to slow down – to place your shots. Accuracy is more important than speed. Once, after a liberal frowned disapprovingly at me when I said I enjoy shooting guns, I described it in terms he could understand. He was interested in Buddhism and Buddhist meditation, something I have practiced myself.
“You know how some monks have used archery as a form of meditation?”
I also like archery a lot.
“Shooting guns is the same. To be accurate you have to be calm, very present, and you have to be in tune with your breath, the alignment of your sights, your muscle action, and you practice to be non-reactive.”
My friend was surprised. “Well, I never thought about it like that,” he said. “Just make sure you keep ‘em locked up.”
“Of course,” I said. “I wouldn’t think of leaving them laying around.”