Firearms
Initial Draft: February 16, 2025

Growing up where I did (rural Pennsylvania), there were a few traditions that everyone engaged in. A couple of those are firearms-related: It seems like every dad takes their kid out to shoot a .22LR when they're old enough to shoulder the thing, flintlock rifles are christmas gifts because there's a special hunting season for exclusively them, and an absence from school on the first few days of deer season doesn't actually count because all the other kids are out in the woods with their parents.

When I was seven or eight years old, my dad had me shoot the old .22LR that his dad gave him. That one little thing in the backyard quickly became a monthly thing at the state range, getting a hunting rifle and that little Stevens out of his cabinet and spending a few hours trying to shoot quarter-sized groups on paper. When I was twelve, I got a junior hunting license. I went out with family and walked around miles of state gamelands, got a few deer, and learned a lot about how meat gets processed. When I was thirteen, my parents got me a Lyman GPR in .54 as a Christmas gift. I'd take it behind the house and shoot fifty yards once a week, caring for that thing better than I was caring for anything else I owned.

I was playing games with guns (Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty were huge to me), I was playing airsoft on weekends with my friends, and I was handling real firearms pretty often to say the least. Is it any surprise that I've kept firearms as a main hobby of mine?

Despite all the fun, "Guns" is a hobby that I'm constantly conflicted over these days.

On one hand, I really do enjoy shooting! It's fun to set something up at a few hundred yards and hit it with a rifle! Hearing steel go ding is satisfying, getting tight groups on paper is similarly nice, and I can't deny the fact that venison tastes pretty damn good.

On the other hand, there's so much horrifying stuff around firearms. I grew up with school shootings on the rise, going from something like fifteen a year when I was in middle school to 119 a year when I graduated high school then 257 in just the year I graduated college. The companies that produce firearms do horrifying things without a care - lobbyists are funded by the sales of guns with no goals but to sling the filthiest right-wing slop and promote hate groups, they do nothing but push the worst stuff. Organizations like the NRA are made up of human trash at their best, the popular people making videos about firearms online are similarly shitty, and it seems any communities (no matter how close to my views they are) frankly suck to engage with. I couldn't tell you why I let the hobby persist when I recognize all of this stuff but I guess I just find too much fun in it, I may be on my own island with nothing but a few buddies to shoot with a year but that's quite alright.

For the most part, I just buy funny collectables with the goal of poking targets at long ranges. I started off with an AR-15-style rifle and a Glock, I branched out into milsurps, and now I just get whatever looks like good fun to take to the range and chat about. Said AR-15-style rifle and Glock get out regularly, I practice an amount of marksmanship at least once a month for the same reason I go to the gym (to see myself get better at an activity over time because it feels good). I don't know if I would ever willingly take a "defensive" course, the idea of firing a weapon at a person is something that I'd love to not think about, but I'll gladly go to things like Quigley matches or a NRL .22 shoot as I love the challenge that competition can provide.

I hope to get into reloading one of these days, I have desires to try out some wildcat cartridges (KAK's 17-5.56 sounds relaly neat!) and it is a bit pricey running things like .30-06 when I only give my rifle rounds that cost $0.90 a shot. Will it actually save me cash? Probably not. Would I enjoy it? I think so, I did an amount of shotgun reloading as a kid with my dad and I always found the process quite satisfying.