Riga For Guns
Ours is Range 2, bigger than Range 3, and darker. It is also colder here, we can see our own breath. Inside is a desk, a cabinet and a table on which sit bullets and a couple of guns varying in size. Our instructor talks to us in Latvian with less confidence than seems necessary from a man holding what, he tells us now, is a Glock. For the first time we are briefly excited before each of us fires the Glock into sheets of paper and shrinks back to the end of the room, shaking slightly, realizing that to fire a gun is not what we thought. Most of us question Hollywood’s ability to depict the shooting of guns as trite.
With these initial shots, we develop surprisingly immediate gun-related mannerisms: the way we distance the sides of our faces from the barrel; the way a stance is adopted (with one foot just in front of the other or else miles apart); the way we react to noises made in other rooms. Idiosyncrasies isolate elements of our personalities that aren’t as obvious in less potentially dangerous situations – work meetings, for example, or while bowling.
Some of us are nervous or all of us are nervous and some of us are better at hiding nerves than others. In any case, our small, introverted worlds are extending, somehow. Now they contain, in real life, things (mechanisms) capable of killing other things. We all drive. We understand death as a consequence of speed, inebriation, carelessness, etc. But guns are different: to hold and carry and really feel them makes us feel queasy and ultimately unsafe.
We cannot wait to use the pump-action shotgun.