Stuck to your guns? - The Michigan Daily

Content warning: This article contains mentions of suicide.

I knew there was video footage in which a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer kills Renee Good, but I tried so hard not to watch it. I kept having discussions with people in which they described it, in which they quoted it and told me the story in horrifying detail. I just didn’t know if I could handle it.

I know so many people who are from Minneapolis. I went to summer camp in Minnesota with kids from Minneapolis. My sister goes to college in Minnesota; her neighbors are from the Twin Cities. My current adviser previously lived only 1.5 miles from the place where Renee Good was murdered.

When Alex Pretti was murdered, though, I wasn’t as careful. I don’t know why; maybe it was just so much more publicized, or maybe I felt like I was ready. Maybe I subconsciously felt it was important to viscerally understand the brutality, to make myself a witness to what was happening in our country. I saw one of the videos and quickly proceeded to watch videos from every possible angle. Every time, the events made my stomach drop. I felt confused; how does this happen? I knew ICE had been abusing its power and killing civilians, but was I really watching video evidence? Was it even possible for there to be some context in which the killing made sense? But I also felt despair. The killing seemed so careless, and that only made it all the more cruel. I instinctively pored over every detail, as if it would help make the situation make more sense. But it never made more sense. The phone in Pretti’s hands, the people stumbling across the sidewalk, the care he shows for other protesters — the multiple rounds fired into his body without concern. I learned this style of shooting is called “mag dumping.” I still can’t stand to watch any of the videos with sound.

Immediately, the federal government claimed that Pretti had a gun on his person, and that was not only the cause but (allegedly) complete justification for his murder. I doubted this (hadn’t I just seen the videos where Pretti held a phone in his hand?), but I also questioned the internal logic. Pretti was a legal gun owner with a valid permit to carry a concealed weapon. Those who defend ICE typically also defend Second Amendment rights — certainly the Republicans on my hometown Facebook feed who are now defending ICE have always defended the Second Amendment. Ironically, many people whom I’ve never heard support the Second Amendment have also been defending it a lot recently. Perhaps not coincidentally, ICE officers were previously issued the same gun that Department of Homeland Security records suggest was on Pretti’s person at the time of his death.

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To be clear, before this week, I had never fired a pistol or, God forbid, a rifle. For the sake of immersion, I was willing to try out firing a handgun. It was a kind of experiment to see how it differed from my past experience, to see if it could help me make sense of the trigger-happy ICE agents or the demonization of Alex Pretti. Previously, I had used a shotgun for hunting and hunting-related target practice. It was comfortable because it was something I did with my family, and it was always in a safe and controlled environment. I had shot at clay pigeons. I had tried to shoot a few ducks. I had shot at least one duck-shaped decoy. The experience never felt core to my identity, but it did always factor into my discussions of the Second Amendment. There were times when it felt hypocritical to completely disavow guns — after all, hadn’t I shot at ducks and felt completely safe? But there were other times where I felt it gave me some authority. After all, I wasn’t just parroting statistics or following the lead of politicians. I was tepid about guns, but I wasn’t giving up a right without trying my hand at exercising it. If other people had never been around guns, I would have the relevant experience to offer some wisdom. I had been around guns. Did I think they served a purpose? Sure. Did I think they were great for self-defense? Well … I couldn’t even shoot a duck.

I always knew, though, that shotguns were very different from pistols and rifles. Generally, I think the latter two are more central to debates about gun control and more central to gun culture. For those who are unacquainted, shotguns are not handguns — you cannot conceal them easily, you need to really use some shoulder muscle to fire them safely, and many take large shells to fire pellets rather than bullets. Pistols are handguns, usually easy to conceal and possible to fire with a single hand, often with a magazine or a cartridge that holds multiple bullets. You typically do not use a pistol for hunting; they are most common in sport, self-defense or military and police applications. Rifles are large like shotguns and similarly difficult to conceal, but they tend to have greater accuracy over large distances. Because they use bullets and may have automatic reloading, some rifles allow for multiple rounds to be fired in a matter of seconds. Rifles can be used for hunting large animals (like deer or wild hogs), but they are also infamous for their use in mass shootings.

There is some gun culture among shotgun owners. I remember once going to the local Izaak Walton League to practice shooting clay pigeons with my parents. I was young — probably 15 — but an older man came up to me and offered to show me a gun. He led me (with my parents, thankfully) out to the back of his truck, revealing a beautiful antique gun inlaid with what looked like mother-of-pearl. He wanted me to shoot it. I politely refused. It wasn’t even about the act of shooting a gun, though. It just felt intimate. It felt inappropriate. I had the gut instinct that this man’s gun symbolized something, and if I shot it, I would become part of some greater narrative in his mind. I didn’t want to find out the rest of that story.

Compared to that, though, the culture among handgun and rifle owners is even stronger. Unlike the shotgun’s narrative of romantic self-sufficiency and hunting, handguns and rifles position themselves between life and death. The narrative is about defending oneself, usually from malicious people. This seems to make these guns more central to individuals’ identities. If you’re looking for a shirt with a gun on it, it’s probably going to be a handgun or a rifle. Because of these differences, I knew my experience firing a shotgun did not match the experiences of most gun owners or gun rights activists. To really know what it was like, I needed to try a different kind of firearm. Even if it scared me, I needed to go to the gun range.

When I went into the gun range for the first time, I was greeted by some elements of gun culture that were familiar to me. The front section of the range, mostly a store and showroom, looks relatively similar to the gun counter at a Cabela’s. I had been to Cabela’s. I could handle the gun range.

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I was surprised, maybe relieved, to see a station labeled “Background Checks.” My surprise was perhaps premature, though, because I was not subjected to a background check. Everyone took me at my word, possibly because I arrived with a member, i.e., my partner. (Side note: Seeing the care and education with which my partner visits the range has massively set me at ease about his time there. I’m also not sure I could have gone with anyone else, except maybe family, and felt so comfortable.) As it turns out, you only need a background check to purchase a gun, not to shoot one. That’s still better than most states, where most gun purchases do not require a background check. That fact didn’t entirely set me at ease, though.

In accordance with Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations, everyone who exits the showroom for the shooting range must have their “eyes and ears” — protective wear for their hearing and glasses to keep their eyes safe from wayward shells. I purchased a noise-canceling ear covering on site, but they allowed me to wear my regular eyeglasses for eye protection.

Although we showed up early, right as the place was opening Sunday morning, there were other people waiting at the front entrance with us. One family was particularly interesting to me. The father wore a sweatshirt promising that he “stands for the flag and kneels for the cross.” His wife and young son were with him. Another patron asked, perhaps jokingly, but certainly euphemistically, if the son was going to be handling the “bang-bangs” today. The father answered proudly that the kid loved “everything to do with bang-bangs,” but the range wouldn’t allow him to fire until he was 10. He was 8 years old. “A year and a half left!” they wallowed, sincerely.

Later, I watched as the flag-stander and cross-kneeler took aim at a target. He had chosen the “self-defense” target, which features a man with a completely neutral expression, underneath which his vital organs are outlined. This guy was not planning to shoot someone in the shoulder, even though he had the aim to do so. He aimed straight for the heart with every shot. I wondered what he was training for, because it was clear he trained to kill. Perhaps he thought of family in those moments, wishing to protect them from some imagined figure — a home invader who also has a gun, maybe? I almost hoped that was the case, if only to justify the unforgiving repeated blasts. Twenty shots, straight to the heart. Even in self-defense, you should never need that kind of severity. Just beyond the double doors to the range, sitting at a countertop where you can watch everyone shoot, his 8-year-old son was on an iPad. I heard him mumble something about snipers, so I stealthily peeked at his screen. He was playing Roblox. He was indeed a sniper. He was shooting people with a digital rifle. He complained to his mom about the screen on the iPad.

To actually shoot, you need to first put on your eyes and your ears. Thoroughly muffled from the outside world, you go through a door to a little mudroom. You take off your coat. There are signs advertising gun repair services. There are two doors from that point. One leads to the pistol range, which anyone can watch. The other leads to the rifle range, which I don’t know anything about.

I walked through the door to the pistol range, and I was immediately hit by a rolling wind of hot air. I was already anxious, but the heat made me nauseous. At the moment, I wondered if the heat was coming off the barrels of the guns; you could literally see the flames as each one fired. Later, I found out that, in fact, most gun ranges advertise great air circulation. Without air circulation, you would be breathing in the lead-tinged fumes from the guns. The circulation at this particular range just happened to be hot.

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I wasn’t prepared for the physicality of the blasts. Even when I wasn’t the one holding the gun, I could feel the firing of the other pistols. It was uncanny to feel the vibrations in my chest without hearing them in my ears. Maybe it’s silly, but I wondered if that was how it felt to get shot. I stood at the back of the room while my partner filled the first mag and fired a round. I could not shake the feeling that at any point, someone in another lane could turn around and kill me.

Then it was my turn to fire the gun. I had, of course, watched the safety video included with my liability waiver, so I knew the basics of how to handle the gun. There are four cardinal rules, if you care to learn them: 1. Always keep a firearm pointed in a safe direction. 2. Treat all guns as though they are loaded. 3. Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot. 4. Always be sure of your target and what’s beyond it.

I kept the gun pointed down the lane the whole time. My hands were a little weak and sweaty, but I managed to load one bullet into the magazine. I kept repressing the sensation that one could blow up at any time. That’s not really possible — it takes so much pressure for the gun to propel the bullet forward, and I barely had enough pressure to push the bullet into its little holder. I used the meat of my palm to force the magazine upward, into the body of the gun. I clumsily got my hands into position; there are grooves intended for your right pointer finger, your thumbs and the curve of your open hand, but I felt my hands were slightly too small to hit every divot perfectly. I aimed cautiously. I moved my index finger into the nook of the trigger. I fired. At first, I fired just one bullet from an otherwise empty magazine. Then I moved up to five. Then 10. The full magazine holds 12.

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My partner explained that most right-handed people tend to have a deviation in their aim that veers to the left and down; your stronger right hand anticipates the kick-back and inadvertently steers you off course. His shots had that pattern, but mine did not. I don’t think it’s because I have a great aim. Every time I pulled the trigger, I was surprised at the force and the literal fire I saw at the barrel. The first couple of times I shot, I actually realized I was closing my eyes. That is not good practice. But I certainly did not have the skills to anticipate the kickback. For this reason, I shot with pretty impressive first-time accuracy. The paper target was only perhaps twice as wide as my shoulders, and I never missed it. In fact, my partner and I tried to stay in separate halves of the paper, and I don’t think I ever veered from my half. I say this not because I am proud, but because it further proved to me that anyone could shoot another person and catch them square in the chest.

We were there for about an hour, long enough to fire 100 bullets between the two of us. It got a little easier as the rounds went by, but it was still a relief to walk out of the lane and back into the real world. A weight was literally lifted off my head as I removed my heavy-duty ear protection. I could hear the world again. I could no longer feel the soundless blasts of the guns.

On the way out, I noticed a sign advertising future classes. There is a ladies’ night every month, including one on Feb. 13 that was already sold out by the time I checked on Feb. 8. Guns are much more likely to be used against women, often with fatal results. By the same logic, though, women could so easily be persuaded by the undercurrent of self-defense in gun culture. Upon reflection, I realized that there was a shocking gender balance in the pistol shooting range. There were other women who had arrived with a man, presumably their boyfriends or husbands, in tow. There was also one woman who had arrived alone and tried at least four different handguns, presumably to purchase one. She wore a long leather jacket and knee-high leather boots. I couldn’t help but wonder what drove her to purchase the gun. I didn’t ask, though.

I thought, also, about the liability waiver I had signed beforehand. The first question is about for whom you will be signing. The options are “MYSELF Adult 18+” or “MINORS ONLY Under 18.” From there, you sign away the right to press charges on the gun range, and you reassure them that you’re safe to operate a gun. They ask if you are currently under the influence of any drugs or alcohol. They ask if, in the past few weeks, you have had any thoughts of self-harm or suicide. They also ask if you are pregnant.

*Pregnant? *I thought this was odd at the time of filing the paperwork, before I learned about the lead exposure and before I felt the vibrations inherent to the range. The first time I read that, I was thinking about self-defense. Homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant people. Seventy-five percent of those homicides involve the use of a firearm. I guess gun advocates would recommend you master firearms before you conceive. I felt suddenly disgusted with myself for debating the merits of guns during pregnancy. Certainly, I was having a mental debate where the terms needed to be adjusted, and yet, perhaps we are all living through a debate where the terms must be adjusted.

My partner pointed out that if I wanted to visit the gun range again, I would need to go with him or at least bring someone else. They prohibit people from visiting and renting a gun alone unless they purchase a membership — it’s to safeguard against suicides. As someone who has been suicidal before — an experience that is now thankfully years in the past — I can’t imagine the $50 membership fee is really the thing standing between someone and them ending their life. This is one of the risks that people commonly associate more with handguns than any other firearm, but I also know it is not unique. I had a family friend commit suicide via shotgun.

I do feel the range took strong precautions against possible tragedies. They closely surveil the entire property on closed-circuit TV, and most employees have a background in emergency response, ranging from medical trauma training to EMT experience. Yet, I can’t help but feel that some questions were missing from the online liability waiver. I wasn’t asked if I had been feeling homicidal in the last few weeks. I wasn’t asked if my partner was pregnant. I also wasn’t asked about my mental health medications, and I wasn’t asked about my arrest record.

I also couldn’t help but question some of the membership levels. For $49.99 a month, you get the basic membership: you get unlimited range time, your kids ages 10-17 get in free, you get a discount on gear, among other things. For an extra $20 each month, you effectively get insurance on top of that: you get unlimited coverage of your legal defense expenses, $100,000 coverage on your bail expenses, $20,000 worth of coverage for incidental expenses and $2,000,000 of coverage annually in liability insurance, among other perks. If the presumption is that defending yourself and exercising your Second Amendment rights is likely to land you in jail, it makes me wonder why supporters of other amendments don’t band together in the same way. Since my time at the gun range (and researching this article), I’ve been getting emails that position concealed carry insurance as absolutely vital for making snap judgments confidently. They also presume you will kill someone and need legal defense. When I exercise my First Amendment rights, I do sometimes worry about being arrested, but I never worry that someone will die by my hand. Perhaps protesters ought to form a union to cover their bail.

I walked out of the range that day with new skills, but without any newfound sense of security. If anything, I had learned that the tenets of safe gun ownership likely also advise against the kind of gun usage I saw in videos of ICE. If you truly believe you shouldn’t point a gun anywhere you wouldn’t be comfortable shooting, what purpose is there to pulling a gun on unarmed civilians, even if you don’t fire at them? Then again, when you assume every gun is a loaded gun, what purpose do guns hold in public at all? My mind was swimming with contradictions: eye protection without bulletproof vests, waivers without background checks, 10-year-olds permitted to shoot when you can only access the gun range’s website if you’re 21+. But throughout all of it, I kept coming back to one thought: I still felt more like Pretti than the ICE officers who murdered him.

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I’ve gone back to the gun range since then, and I have to confess that I’ve gotten more comfortable. I was drawn back by curiosity: I went back because people told me it does get easier and less scary, and I wanted to know if that was true. It is. I’m no longer scared to fire the full 12 rounds from the magazine. I still take my time, but I can load the magazine pretty efficiently now, too. I don’t think my accuracy has improved much, but I can shoot long enough to feel the muscles in my wrists adjusting to the pressure of the pistol jumping back against my hands. And I’ve seen all kinds of people visit the gun range. I’ve seen grandmothers shooting one-handed with sportsman-like skill. I saw a guy with the African American flag on his backpack leading a group of (what seemed to be) first-time shooters. I’ve looked around the shop more, too, and I know more about how safety mechanisms work on each gun. I know a little about which modifications make a gun safer, and which ones make a gun riskier. I’ve even played with the dog that hangs out in the lobby of the gun range.

All of this has made me more sympathetic to Pretti and even less sympathetic to ICE. Some part of me feared that I would hold a handgun and understand the ease with which the agent killed Pretti. When I hold a handgun, I do feel its power to harm another human being. But I wouldn’t say that the emotional impact of that was ever lost on me. It’s not easy to fire a full magazine into a paper target, let alone a human being with a life and a family. I don’t put my finger on the trigger before I’ve aimed because that’s just a cardinal rule of gun safety. Because you have to plan to even put your finger on the trigger, I know that the ICE agent planned to kill Pretti.

I also undertook this experiment to see what the culture was really like among gun owners. It’s easy to villainize gun owners from any side of the political aisle, but the truth is that this is a much more diverse category than we sometimes realize. Visiting the range didn’t convince me that Pretti was involved in a dangerous, weapon-obsessed undercurrent of American culture. Going to the gun range gave me a chance to see the people who shoot guns and imagine what they fear. Often, I saw people who feared harm to their families. I saw people who feared domestic violence or violence against women. I saw people who feared threats to their independence and even threats to the Constitution. People from all walks of life own firearms. When firearms become an excuse for government-sponsored brutality, people from all walks of life are vulnerable to that brutality, too.

My breath still stops when I replay the images from Pretti’s last moments alive, but I’m glad I watched the video. I’m glad I took the time to be with him, if only in a stilted and digital way. He did not have to die that day, but his death does not have to be meaningless, either. We can take the time to give Pretti the significance his life deserved. There’s one video of me from the range in which I shoot a target almost perfectly. You can see the blast of the firearm, and then a crisp bullet hole forms beneath the “4” on the target. It’s almost instantaneous. I keep the sound turned off, but I watch it over and over. I don’t look like myself in it. I don’t feel like myself when I watch it, either. Maybe this is always how it feels to be the person who fires the gun, even when the target is only paper.

*Statement Correspondent Anna Whitney can be reached at [email protected]. *