Faster than None
While I was out visiting Susi in Ohio last week, I took the chance to get more of an education on an American pastime that doesn't happen in my culture, and we went out to a shooting range where I failed as usual to appear anything other than a coastal yuppie dipstick come to the country.
Click to viewhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OEFdZU7TY8
The outdoor range was a set of aisles walled off by enormous farm machinery tyres to absorb stray bullets and smelled (and sounded) like bonfire night. At first I was slightly nervous about the security on hand because to enter you only had to sign in at a completely unmanned hut with several informational signs, none of which were spelled even close to correctly. The list of rules slapped up on the wall said that no ottos were allowed (but Turks were all right) and that you couldn't use anything explosive as targets, threatening that they had CCTV running and would report you and your number plate. It tried to say "Smile, you're on candid camera" at the end, but spelled it "candied" as if their cameras were coated in butterscotch.
We found a gallery with nobody else there, a short-range one with a sign that warned "NO SHOOTGUNS" above the entrance, and I was taught on the correct handling of several kinds of weapons. I can only really tell the difference between guns by classifying them as "pistol", "shotgun", "rifle", "bazooka", but I was most adept with the revolver shown in the video above. You wouldn't have thought it from the first time I fired it, though, because nobody in the films warns you that firing a pistol is like being punched in the face - there's a huge opposite-force reaction that shoots through your arms and knocks you backwards, and I couldn't imagine ever getting used to it when it first happened, but eventually you get the hang of when it's going to react in the arc of the trigger and learn to compensate for it.
I was impressed with the respect and safety shown by the people at the range - small weapons are kept in locked boxes, and ammunition for larger rifles is locked away as well. There are strict procedures for readying a weapon and putting it down again after emptying it, and when people in a party go out on the range to put up targets (which for us were anything from paper targets to filled water bottles, foil baking plates, clay discs, a bowling ball and a butternut squash that was lying around), it's made sure that either everybody is beyond the firing line or nobody is. There was a worrying round hole in the wall behind us, but someone had circled it with a felt-tip pen and labelled it "BAD". Anything unexpected gets written down as an "incident" (for when a gun does anything that you weren't in control of) or "accident" (if that involves personal injury).
I did leave with a plaster on my thumb, because one of the guns we used - a semi-automatic pistol - reloaded itself by snapping the chamber back and forward again, and I was holding my thumb a bit too high so it skinned the knuckle. I was told that was a learning experience that everyone goes through - and that a common more painful injury was getting the flesh between your thumb and finger caught in there instead.
I've only seen a limited amount of America around the coastlines, and having seen the landscape in Ohio - where houses are a lot more spaced apart even in the built-up areas, and many people live far from any neighbours - I can absolutely understand why someone might feel that they needed a gun in the house to defend themselves. It doesn't excuse what many of the more obnoxious gun enthusiasts on the Internet say (often surprisingly directly) about me and people like me, but this outing gave me an insight on why people might need them or just enjoy collecting them for their characteristics and for practicing incapacitating a bottle of vegetable juice from a safe distance.
(I'd like to affirm that I do know what Dirty Harry is - it's just that I couldn't hear a sodding thing with the warzone going on around me and the hearing protection headphones gripping my skull.)