And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (12 page)

Perhaps fifteen rows of rectangular tables sat on either side of a central aisle. At the front of the class hung a large American flag, and just in front of it were four lunch tables covered with rifles, pistols, shotguns, bows and arrows, and, to my surprise, a crossbow. I don't think I had ever seen a crossbow in person before that moment.

There are roughly 280 million legally owned firearms in the United States, according to the American Firearms Institute. And the Institute boldly states on its website that this equates to nearly eight of every ten Americans being a gun owner, before sheepishly mentioning that more than 50 percent of all people who own guns own more than one. When I realized that all of the twenty or so firearms on the front tables—including the crossbow—were from the private collection of one of the instructors, it became clear that the 80-percent-of-the-populace-as-gun-owners assertion was, perhaps, a bit skewed. I don't know a single gun owner who owns less than three.

Still, I understand why the AFI wants to make it seem like everyone owns a gun. It's good for advocacy. And though it's hard to nail down the exact number of gun owners in America, a commonly repeated statistic is around 80 million. In a country of roughly 320 million people, that's closer to one in four as opposed to eight in ten. But the exact proportion of the gun-owning populace to non-gun-owning is less important than the idea that people who own guns are often collectors. Judging by the collection presented on the table at the front of the room, I guessed at least one of my instructors was very serious when it came to guns.

I had no idea how serious until the class began.

A middle-aged gentleman with close-cropped hair and a Boy Scout–style shirt (tucked neatly into matching cargo pants, which were, in turn, tucked into the type of boots you might expect a SWAT team member to wear) handed me the course book, a supplemental course book, a pocket guide for identifying Ohio game animals, a sticker bearing the Ohio Division of Wildlife emblem, and three unsharpened pencils the color orange you associate with hunting—garish and bright. Before I could ask him anything, he shooed me up the aisle and attended to his distribution duties with the person behind me.

At that moment, a huge wave of relief washed over me, for while I may have been a few minutes late, I wasn't the only one. There were at least ten people who shuffled in behind me. So I actually had time to debate seating arrangements. Sitting in the back might leave me unnoticed, which suited my desire for anonymity, but I worried about accidentally nodding off or letting my mind wander while staring out one of the windows. The middle section of the room was filled with fathers and young sons and grandfathers with their grandsons, and I felt out of place being on my own. It goes against my personality to sit near the front, but on this particular morning my desire to beat Kosta was more powerful than my ego. I chose a seat in the front row and waited for the course to begin.

Because I never actually made my presence as a writer known, I'll call my instructors Matt, Tim, and Arthur (not their real names). Each brought his own particular expertise and teaching style, and they would alternate teaching the nine chapters in the
Hunter's Safety
book.

Matt was the man who handed me materials when I first walked in. In his introduction, Arthur described Matt as a lifetime hunter and Scout with more than fifty years of experience “in the field.” He seemed nice enough, if serious, and carried himself with the poise and posture of a man who had never quite left the military despite decades living as a civilian.

Tim was tall and thin, with a thick white mustache and hair parted so sharply as to imply the use of a gas-powered implement—an edge trimmer or weed whacker, maybe—who reminded me of a teacher I had in junior high named Mr. Dunkle. Mr. Dunkle taught woodshop and mechanical drawing. He was easygoing in a way most teachers who deal with preteens can't bring themselves to be, and I often imagined him sitting on his porch at night, listening to bluegrass music and whittling a snack bowl out of a piece of driftwood.
Happy
isn't quite the word to describe him, maybe
content.

Tim seemed content. He was the friendliest of the bunch and struck me as possibly an engineer in real life outside the classroom. He taught the most technical aspects of the course and made clear from the start that he felt his job was to tell us exactly what questions we might expect on the multiple-choice test and how to answer them. He seemed to be the instructor to take follow-up questions to, the most eager to help.

And then there was Arthur. If forced to guess, I'd say Arthur was slightly younger than Dwight Eisenhower, but older than Dick Cheney. The guns sitting on the front tables were his, and he was quick to warn us “not to touch them unless given express permission, which you're not likely to get.” Of the three, he was the instructor who spent the least amount of time looking at the course materials in favor of editorializing on media conspiracy and left-wing lunacy.

I felt immediately uncomfortable around Arthur, not only because I have spent most of my professional life working as a journalist and have voted Democrat in, say, 70 percent of the elections in which I have participated, but because he didn't seem to be all there. I imagined he lived in a house in the woods with a false basement floor, beneath which lay a cache of rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles that he keeps “just in case.” Not particularly scary physically—he stood with the slight stoop of a man in his eighties—there was a certain degree of menace in his smile. I knew to pay attention to him, but to discard half of everything he said.

After an initial diatribe about how the media wants to take guns out of American hands, and a strong suggestion that everyone in the room should join the NRA (he just happened to be a recruiter and took cash, check, or plastic), Arthur launched into the first chapter, which explained the construction, uses, and safe handling of shotguns.

There are four basic safety rules when it comes to hunting:

• Always keep the muzzle of the gun pointed in a safe direction.

• Treat every gun as if it were loaded.

• Be sure of your target and what's beyond it.

• Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.

These rules are emphasized at the beginning of every chapter in the book, drilled by rote into the minds of every student. They are good rules. If you follow them, it's very hard to have an accident. And being simple enough to remember means that, with a little bit of experience, they can form the basis of good safety habits. Uncle Mark, who is a hunter's education instructor in Iowa, hammered them into my head as a boy on the range in Grandma's backyard.

Arthur read them verbatim, and as he was midway through rule three, Tim piped up with a “this is on the test” from the corner of the room, like a choir director in one of those lively Southern churches shouting “Amen!” to a preacher. I can't say I completely understand the segue, but for some reason Tim's approbation took Arthur down a completely different subject track all together.

“They don't want you to know this,” he said with a bit of devious mischief, “but there's something called a Class 3 license that lets you hunt with machine guns. There are thirty thousand of these licenses in the United States. The people who have them pay $200 a year and not one of them has been used in the commission of a crime. Think about that.”

And so it went for the shotgun portion of the class. Arthur would read a sentence or two from the book, then make a comment on them. For instance, he described the procedure for safe handling of a shotgun while crossing a fence line, then retreated to his table of guns and picked up a torn and twisted hunk of metal.

“This is what happens when you don't handle your shotgun correctly while crossing a fence line,” he said. He held what had once been a shotgun barrel in the air for all of us to see. It was completely destroyed, looking very much like Elmer Fudd's gun after Bugs Bunny put a finger in the barrel. “This was given to me by a former student who didn't check his gun after he crossed a fence. There was snow in the barrel, so when he fired it blew up. He lost two fingers and had a chunk torn out of his face. Don't let that happen to you.”

The terror-by-example method of teaching has been highly effective with me ever since an elementary school art teacher warned me that mishandling the drying racks would result in our eyes being “turned into hamburger.” So I made a note to always check my gun barrel after crossing a fence line and underlined it in my notebook three times.

Matt taught the second section on rifles in approximately a quarter of the time it took Arthur to get through the equally long first chapter. He read verbatim from the text, highlighted the information that would likely show up on the test, and kept the editorializing to a minimum.

Arthur was back for pistols, and over the course of ninety minutes, managed to cover exactly four pages of heavily illustrated text. Though the materials strictly covered the basics of how handguns are made and their safe operation, Arthur proselytized his views on why Americans are better off being armed at all times and just how ridiculous it is that carrying a gun into an elementary school is illegal in most states.

Damn Democrats,
one imagines his inner monologue going,
always trying to ruin a guy's good time.

It might seem hyperbolic to describe Arthur's teaching as brainwashing, but with so many young impressionable people in the room, it's hard to come up with a more tactful description. He was prattling on about his favorite junkyard—where handgun carriage is actually encouraged—when my mind began to wander and I started examining my fellow classmates.

I was among the very few students attending the class alone. By and large, they were there in pairs, and most looked like relatives. There was a man who was obviously an avid hunter and excited to bring his son, perhaps twelve, into the fold. He laughed at Arthur's jokes, flipped the occasional affirmation into the lesson, and was positively atwitter with excitement as the discussion moved into the mechanics of felling large game with an old-fashioned six-shooter. I mean it: his legs were bouncing and arms shaking with excitement. If talking about the proper way to brace your handgun for more accurate shooting had him this excited, imagine what this guy must have been like the first time he went all the way. It's surprising his head hadn't exploded.

On the other side of the room, a well-groomed grandfather beamed with pride as his eager and articulate grandson—again probably around twelve—raised his hand to answer every question asked by Tim, Matt, and Arthur. The way he spoke, his poise, this young man had the promise of a career in politics. Of the fifty or so questions asked over the two-day class, he raised his hand for forty-nine of them and answered forty-seven correctly. I wanted to be in the woods with this kid—at least you'd know you were safe, even if you were overcome by the uncontrollable urge to give him an atomic wedgie and stuff him into a locker.

Trust me, I know what I'm talking about. I was this boy. I was the eager beaver in my class. While I have always hesitated to be noticed, I've also had to deal with impulse control, or, more specifically, the lack thereof when it comes to knowing something. There was, let's just say, an incident my freshman year of high school. I was in English class and doing my best to play it cool because a girl I liked very much was sitting next to me, passing me notes about how boring the class was and how much she hated poetry. I gave her knowing nods, as if to say, “You bet, babe. I'm with you.” The problem arose when the teacher asked the class who the author was of one of my favorite poems. No one's hand went up, and I could feel something inside of me begin to boil. The right answer was there, in the pit of my stomach, just waiting to burst free. I tried to resist and hoped the teacher would eventually get tired of waiting and simply reveal the answer, but she didn't. And the longer she waited, the more I felt I had to speak and the harder it became to suppress the impulse. I wanted to be cool, I really did. I wanted this girl to be impressed by my swaggering remove. But it's like trying to get dogs to sit when you hold a cookie in front of them. They can resist for a while, but eventually their instincts take over. My instincts took over and I burst. “William Butler Yeats,” I said. Shouted really. Needless to say, that particular girl and I never dated. When I saw her recently at a high school reunion, she asked if I was still into poetry. I told her no. “That's funny,” she said, “because I remember you really liked it in high school.”

Hang your head in shame, you big geek. Hang it in shame.

I understood this kid. I ran into him as he was coming out of the bathroom on a break. “Please, pardon me, sir,” he said earnestly, if a bit too formally, then held the door for me as I went in. I wanted to shake his hand, take him aside, and let him know that everything, no matter what, would be okay. I wanted to tell him to never resist the urge to answer no matter what his peers tell him and that being smart would, eventually, get him far in life. But I didn't. Instead, I touched the brim of my baseball cap and said, “No trouble at all,” then continued inside.

The rest of the people in the class fit somewhere between obligated teenager and mentoring parent. Except for the two girls in the back of the room. I could not figure out what they were doing there. Every fifteen minutes or so, they would push back loudly from their table and step outside. They were teenagers, dressed in too-short shorts and T-shirts, and had the attention spans of fourth-graders at a real-estate conference. I gathered being there was not their idea, but I wondered who they were trying to impress. Boys? Their fathers? Was hunter's safety some sort of elaborate goof? Something told me that they didn't share my burning desire to ace the final.

We took a break for lunch and proceeded en masse across the parking lot to the club building, where a woman named Clara sold very reasonably priced sandwiches, hot dogs, and cheeseburgers. I took my cheeseburger out onto a covered porch overlooking a trapshooting range. There were two four-man teams shooting expensive-looking shotguns at blaze-orange clay targets, which were fired from a launcher hidden in a structure beneath their feet. It was fun to watch—the orange disks gliding gently toward an open field in graceful arcs, the percussive snap as the men took turns shooting at the targets in a highly organized succession.