Im someone who likes to shoot a gun at targets at the range. I find it SO creepy and unnerving when it becomes clear that someone would like to shoot at a person. They don’t usually outright say it, but some make it clear in other ways.
Right? Like in my ideal world, guns would be a hobby for weird nerds in the same way fencing is today. The one or two times I have felt like there’s even a small chance I may need to use a gun in self defense were terrifying and stressful.
There’s quite a few hobbies where the other people who meet up to participate as a group as a group are a huge turnoff.
Guns are one of those hobbies for me.
I would love to talk about the amazing mechanics and different approaches guns have to firing an exploding charge to move a mass of metal at supersonic speeds just like I love talking about the mechanical parts of trains and cars. But the gun crowd tends to have too high of a proportion of very vocal terrible people.
If you like guns as a technology Open Source Defense is a good newsletter imo. They don’t delve into politics thankfully but look at how laws are implemented, improving safety at scale etc
See if you can find yourself a group with operation blazing sword. Whatever you do, LGS usually have just FUDDs who want to talk how turnip daddy is going to make everything like it was back in the 50s again…most of the sane ass people who are into owning and shooting are online now (there are still a shit ton of magats but just avoid those places). It also helps if you can find a group that has a private range, it’ll make it a lot easier to setup times to go enjoy shooting.
A couple years ago I joined a private shooting club. They have a range with targets from 10-300 yards. It was so cool to shoot there, and all the other members were total marksmanship nerds. Seeing all the great equipment, and ridiculous scopes was always fun, and the other members were nice to talk to. There were no soldier LARPers there. We operated as our own range masters, and everyone took safety very seriously. It was a refreshing change from the public range. Unfortunately I moved a couple hours away from that range, so it didn’t make sense to continue paying the membership anymore. Now I just go to the mountains to shoot.
Ew what a horrible, gross thing to say
Heard it a buncha times without ever really hearing it
They don’t usually outright say it, but some make it clear in other ways.
Like showing up at the range in full combat gear. Dude, simma downa!
I don’t think this is an actual case of that. I have a few friends that get kitted out with plate carriers and night vision for the range and it’s just LARPing. No different than ren faire people showing up to the faire in steel plate when obviously there isn’t some sword fight that’s about to break out at the fairgrounds.
It’s dorky but generally not malicious.
It is very different than ren faire people showing up in military gear obsolete for hundreds of years, you can kill an entire crowd of people with an assault rifle in seconds, a person carrying around a murder weapon of that spontaneous ability to catastrophically induce violence isn’t “LARPing” they are normalizing carrying around a murder weapon and being utterly obsessed with it which even if their motivations are innocent provides a nice big smokescreen of normalcy for the Kyle Rittenhouses of the world to hide behind.
I am not even making an argument against guns here, I am just pointing out how much more lame and uncool this is than ren faire or LARPing stuff .