A firearm for the lady

Give the lady a gun

I’ve had the urge to shoot things lately.

I think this is what happens when you live in the rural south for any length of time. I live in a place where deer hunters say stuff like ‘IF IT’S BROWN, LAY IT DOWN’ (with no apparent irony), which I take to mean annihilating woodland creatures big and small with gleeful abandon.

Don’t get me wrong, trigger-happy hunter slogans don’t entice me to shoot stuff (though I want to use this awesome catchphrase on my husband. I can just imagine the disturbed look on Jake’s face when I whisper it in his ear like a sweet nothing.) (Note to self: Must do this tonight.) But there’s something so absurd about the kill culture around here that I almost want to know what it’s like.

I want to be able to say once and for all that I actually have an informed opinion about hunting instead of reverting to my old knee-jerk lefty/liberal interpretation of it—which seems to boil down to: shooting Bambi in the wild equals “bad”; eating organic, free-range, hormone-free beef from Whole Foods is “good.” One is raw and dirty, the other is packaged and pretty. One forces you to see pain and death up close, the other is all but invisible to the average consumer. The deer spends his life free and uninhibited, the cow spends his confined to an overcrowded feedlot. And perhaps most significantly, one is perceived as redneck, the other is bougie.

For a carnivore to disavow the shooting of animals for meat (not for sport) seems rather jaded and out-of-touch. I am, after all, a meat eater….a selective one, but I do love me a good steak. I want to know if I have the stomach to eat what I shoot. Will being intimately involved in the death process change my perspective? I’d like to find out.

There’s only one problem. I can’t shoot my way out of a paper bag.

My friend Anna was visiting from NYC this weekend, and we headed over to this amazing shooting school called The Glorious Twelfth, headed up by a gregarious Brit named Andy Tubb, a former soldier in the British special forces. (The Glorious Twelfth refers to the 12th of August, the opening day of hunting season in England.)

Despite Andy’s careful instruction, I think you can tell by his expression that I may be better off taking up macrame or perhaps juggling. I think I only hit 4 targets out of 154. Yep, it might be a year or two before I can think about hunting.

Anna, meanwhile, fared better. She shot 4 targets in a row with her eyes closed. I think she was scared to open them, but I think she has the potential to be a fine sniper.

I’ll have to spend a lot more time target practicing before I can test out my thesis in the wild. I’m hoping I can convnince some of my lady friends to join me. Taking out Bambi may lead to paroxysms of despair, and I’m pretty sure dude hunters won’t show the slightest bit of empathy.