Until seven years ago, I hadn't seen a gun. Sure, I knew what they looked like, I mean, I'd been to the movies, but I'd never actually *seen* a gun. There is, it must be admitted, the world of difference between seeing a gun on screen and actually being in the same physical space as one. "This is not a pipe," said Magritte, as the title to his painting of, well, a pipe. He was right. There is the thing and there is the perception of the thing and never, ever confuse the two. I did. I thought a gun was like a hammer or a nail clipper. A piece of fashioned metal made to a purpose. What I forgot, until I actually stood in a room surrounded by guns, was the purpose.
They had an oily sheen of violence; the nature of guns sweat from the metal.
I went to a shooting range, taken along by friends for whom guns really were matter of fact. Not something to be trifled with but, like crossing a busy road, understood, a known risk.
I fired off a lot of rounds, running them through several types of guns, just to get the feel of them, the difference in texture, response, noise between a Baretta and a Smith and Wesson.
Initially it was a lot of fun. It really was. It was like hanging out with a movie star, like going for a beer with Robert DiNero or having dinner with Meryl Streep. For me, a hand gun was as much a part of the movie experience as the person holding it. Not, you understand, because of any great love of guns, but simply because they were every bit as unreal. I had no more actual experience of a Colt revolver than I had of Clint Eastwood.
There was, for me, a pervading sense of unreality about the whole thing.
Then finally it occured to me on a level I could grasp that yes, this really was a gun and if I pointed it at someone and pulled the trigger, they would fall over and bleed a lot. That sobered me up.
I've been a couple more times, just to see if my aim improved any, which it did marginally. In the end though, I really don't want to like it too much. There's something a little too seductive, too glitzy about gun culture. The gun, and not it's purpose, begins to take on too much importance and I didn't want to find out if that's the sort of person I am.
Coming face to face with guns, I didn't really learn anything about myself at all. Nothing. No moment of self revelation, no epiphany, no flowering of inner knowledge.
The cold, hard fact is that I wasn't looking.
There are some things about me that I just don't want to know.