Parachute cutie sent us a link to the Boston Globe written by associate editor Joan Vennochi describing “What I learned at the shooting range“. The short answer is “Nothing”, but she doesn’t get paid to write short, accurate answers.
This first-time shooter — an extremely near-sighted baby boomer wearing prescription sunglasses — fired five rounds that hit their mark 50 yards away. All it took was a Bushmaster XM-15 with Trijicon Reflex optical sight.
I had never touched a firearm before. My only gun-related experience involved childhood visits to a relative’s dairy farm in upstate New York, where my born-in-Brooklyn father would inexplicably spend a morning trying to shoot a woodchuck with a borrowed rifle. Thankfully, he never succeeded. That’s the way I feel about all hunting. As for guns, generally, I like to imagine a world without them. But offered a chance, with colleagues, to learn more about them, I recently spent several hours at a shooting range.
So, those pesky woodchucks, which do more damage to a dairy farm than they are worth, are free to multiply because her dad didn’t have the good fortune to shoot at the beasts with a Bushmaster XM-15 fitted with a Trijicon Reflex optical sight.
My prejudices came with me. A firearm, loaded or not, is menacing. A “cold” shooting range, with flags flapping to signal it’s safe to walk across, is still scary. But I did learn something. I started off believing there’s no reason for a nonmilitary person to own a semiautomatic rifle. After firing one, case closed.
So Joan, here, fired a scary, black rifle, and that makes her an expert on gun control, now.
Some firearms are definitely harder to use than others. For example, General George S. Patton Jr. called the M1 Garand rifle “the greatest battle implement ever devised.” But the World War II and Korean War soldiers who carried this semiautomatic military rifle had to continuously feed clips loaded with eight rounds. If not done quickly enough, the bolt slams on your thumb. Ouch. Meanwhile, peering through the iron sight line is tricky. I hit nothing but the berm – maybe — and my shoulder ached from the recoil.
She fired a Garand and couldn’t hit shit, but the scary black rifle scored a 5 for 5 series of target hits. So give each AR-style rifle owner a Garand in exchange.
Gun rights advocates believe semiautomatic rifles should be available for competitive shooting, where participants follow strict safety rules. Hunters use these weapons, too, and it’s easy to see why: A woodchuck wouldn’t stand a chance. Then there’s the NRA’s favorite argument: A good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.
Yet if someone like me can easily hit a target, it’s terrifying to imagine the same weapon in the hands of someone on a mission to kill. Actually, there’s no need to imagine it. Just watch the news.
Um, Joan, a Garand is a semi-automatic rifle, too, they were the “assault rifle” of their era – for more than twenty years from 1936 – 1959. If you spent anytime with the rifle, you’d find it at least as accurate as the ARs, but that would cripple your point, wouldn’t it?
Believe it or not, the whole point of target shooting along with the other things rifles can do, is to “hit a target”. Missing a target is a terrible feature of marksmanship.
If you want all rifles to miss their target, you would be demanding that all ARs would be fitted with bump stocks.
