Firing a gun is much harder than it looks. It’s not like on TV, where women with slim, manicured hands grab guns in a vague kind of a way in order to shoot the bad guy, usually towards the end of the episode. The damn thing jumps in your hands; the spent bullet cases jump off your face; and if you are shooting within a building, the noise is truly awful.
The Glock is a semi-automatic pistol, popular with both America’s law enforcement forces (eg the New York Police Department) and with psychiatrically disturbed murderers (eg Jared Loughnane in Colorado in January 2011; Adam Lanza in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012 ). Or the Glock 19 Generation 4, which is a 9mm with a slide (which looks like the back of the barrel) that shoots back with every shot. “You could break your thumb,” said the man at the shooting range. As if it wasn’t frightening enough already.
Then there was the Colt SMG 9mm submachine gun (“highly concealable” and “for close confrontations”, it says on the Colt website.) It was light and very easy to use, if you stood like those action heroes you’ve been watching all your life. It is amazing how fast your fantasies kick in once you have a gun in your hands.
On the Glock, I tried to cup the gun like Angie Dickinson in Police Woman – ah, Angie was so cute. But on the Colt SMG, I tried to stand like Richard Harris in some film I can’t remember the name of, only that he was wearing a beret. “Your stance there is real good,” said the man in the shooting range.
You can change the Colt from semi-automatic to fully automatic. “This is the fun switch,” said the man at the shooting range. He’ll stand behind anyone firing a machine gun to make sure you aren’t driven too far back by the force of it. It fairly rattles your bones. Your adrenalin surges. It is a thrill. We are in Texas.
Lyle Lovett has a song That’s Right (You’re Not From Texas) which expresses both how sorry Texans are for anyone who is not from Texas, and also a welcome to them. The visitor to Texas the beautiful, the hospitable, the profoundly strange, is pulled between wonder and dismay.
Of course the Texans play up to this a great deal – they are as bad as the Irish for shamelessly showing off to outsiders about their country and enjoy shocking you with both its virtues and its faults.
So to the shooting range on Saint Stephen’s Day. It is quite cold in Houston – Lyle Lovett is from just up the road here in southeast Texas; George Bush snr is in a local hospital – and the shooting range is called Top Gun.
Its customers this morning are young white professional males in their 30s, the kind of men who want to get out of the house after Christmas. There are a couple of young women who could be classified in the category of girlfriend, wearing the ear protectors over their blond hair and flinching in their miniskirts at the kickback of their guns.
Strangely enough, and who knows why it should be so, but women are said to be better at shooting than men, at least at the start. But of course it is men who love shooting, really love it. It is drenched in machismo and in masculine defiance. The bumper sticker on the SUV that rolled into Top Gun’s crowded car park just ahead of us read “Come take it” over a small drawing of a cannon, for God’s sake; presumably an echo of the late Charlton Heston’s remark about the guns having to be taken from the National Rifle Association members’ cold dead hands.
Behind the counter at the Top Gun shooting range is a sign that warns potential criminals “We don’t call 911”. There is one black assistant and one Jewish assistant who is wearing a very large skull cap; even the yarmulkes are bigger in Texas. As we leave, a family with young children is coming in.
Down at Collectors Firearms, Piers Morgan would be unhappy – or perhaps triumphant – to see how busy this huge store is. The inevitability of some form of gun control is driving up trade. It is decorated with spiked Prussian helmets, among other things. There is a shelf of old Lugers, with their handles scored to look like alligator skin. In the same case there’s a shelf of Mausers, one from 1896.
The antique and the modern sit together here. At one counter two young men are waiting as a shop assistant fills out the lengthy form to buy a gun. You don’t need a licence to own a gun here, but you do need a licence to own a concealed handgun.
Both the police check and the gun training for getting your concealed handgun licence are pretty thorough. There are a surprising number of old men, very pale under their cowboy hats.
“It’s gonna be crazy til the end of January,” said one shop assistant.
“Well, you’re dealing with an unknown,” said an old man wisely.
“That’s it,” said the shop assistant.
He was very busy.