Eventually everyone gathers outside the shooting range to select guns. I ask one of the instructors to please prove to me how it’s not possible that my bullets will ricochet off the back wall of the range and hit me in the face. He draws me a little diagram and explains. I’m skeptical. But out of all the people there, I trust him the most; earlier he had offered to watch my purse while I was in the tanks, and he had gingerly set it in a tree. He has my back.
So I ask for the least-scary gun they have. The instructor suggests an MP5. “It’s a good one for women because it’s not so aggressive,” he tells me. Except, it’s a machine gun. That SWAT teams use. But okay, sure!
As the gun is being loaded, I overhear someone ask Tony how he got a permit for his guns. Apparently it’s a $200 one-time fee for a gun like the one I’m about to shoot, which runs $20,000. Tony says he finds the need for permits exasperating because “nobody has ever been killed in a machine gun accident.” I wonder if maybe that has something to do with them being hard to get, but what do I know?
Tony takes me into the vacuum-sealed range, sets up the gun, and describes how to aim. He tells me to take the “football stance,” and I respond by saying, “What?” and he has to kind of push my shoulders down because I’m probably standing like a person who doesn’t want a machine gun in her hands. Then he says, “Okay, shoot!” And I pull the trigger four times. The gun doesn’t kick back too hard, but I don’t like it. It feels powerful, but also absurd. “Okay, awesome, but I think I’m done!” I say. Tony takes the gun and finishes what’s left of the clip, which is almost all of it. And with that, I’m done with my day of adventure. I shake all the instructors’ hands and thank them. They’re really nice people. In fact, they’re literally the nicest people with tanks and machine guns I have ever met.
My experience on the gun range was fun, but it doesn’t change much for me — I still don’t want a gun, and I’m probably more scared of them now than I was before, having seen the size of their bullets. I wanted to be cool about it. I wanted to rep my gender well and be all, “Yeah I’m a girl, but I will shoot the SH!T out of anyone who makes a comment about it!” and then have everyone laugh and give me high-fives. But that didn’t happen. I’m just not a semiautomatic weapon kind of girl.
I do maybe want a tank now, though.
Katie Heaney writes and studies in Minneapolis. She may or may not have pretended she was in a Y-wing starfighter when she was in the tanks.
