why I like to shoot guns

I like to shoot guns for the same rea­son I like to throw darts,
a rock,
a frisbee,
horseshoes,
a stick,
a spear,
a knife, or anything. 

Be­cause it is an ex­ten­sion of my­self. It is my abil­i­ty to reach out and touch some­thing at a dis­tance, to be big­ger than I am. 

The abil­i­ty to hit a small ob­ject from 100 yards was an amaz­ing feel­ing when I was in boot camp. As a kid I shot through the cen­ter of a bot­tle cap from 50 feet; I kept that cap for years. I knew it was luck, but still, I felt special. 

Un­der­stand­ing why peo­ple en­joy guns is the first step to un­der­stand­ing why they fight so hard to keep them. There is some­thing in­cred­i­bly em­pow­er­ing about fir­ing a weapon. Peo­ple love rapid fire but frankly you haven’t lived un­til you’ve fired a 50 cal­iber muzzel loader with a full charge. 

Or had only one bul­let to use to try to out shoot some­one else, and won. We all love our fire­works but for­get in our joy that those ‘bombs burst­ing in air’ were meant to kill. 

As soon as we re­al­ize that all the ‘home defense,’
‘tar­get shootin,’
‘self de­fense’ ar­gu­ments are just our way of saying,
‘I’m scared,’
‘Please don’t take my abil­i­ty to be big­ger than I am,’
‘Don’t take my toys away,’
‘They make me feel cool, like hav­ing a sports car, I don’t want to lose them,’ the soon­er we can come up with a way to still have safe toys we love to play with and not hurt the ones we love or others. 

Would I give up my guns? Freely. 

Will I do it now? No. No one is ask­ing for them.
 
 

—Louis Warfield

Flom­mist Louis Warfield is a fab­ri­ca­tion spe­cial­ist who runs the award-win­ning Rhi­no De­sign Stu­dio, “You dream it, we’ll build it.” Copy­right © 2016 Louis Warfield. Im­age: Han Solo, Star Wars 7, 1977.

To sup­port the vic­tims of the Pulse shoot­ing, please do­nate here. Also, jet­BLue is ex­tend­ing an of­fer of free trav­el to/from Or­lan­do for im­me­di­ate fam­i­ly members/domestic part­ners of those im­pact­ed by the shoot­ing, de­tails here.

MOR D’ARTÍCULOS  MOR FLOMM !

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scared out of our minds right about now liv­ing in a war zone vi­o­lence-n-guns the em­path­ic response mak­ing sand­wich­es with swords go­ing to the club get the hell out of our society how ed­u­cat­ed we are