Winning!

A pro-gun article in…Elle Magazine?

It starts off slow and it’s kinda long, but well worth the read. A couple of pull quotes:

On terminology:

For hands-on shooting practice, we separate into three groups: pistols, shotguns, and rifles. On my way to the pistol instruction area, I stop to ask a tall man with an NRA belt buckle for directions. “The handgun clinic is that way,” he says, pointing over my head.

“I’m looking for pistols,” I say.

“Honey,” he tells me, with an indulgent smile, “pistols are handguns.”

On that first time shooter experience:

My first thought is, I can’t believe how loud that was. I’m wearing earplugs, but you don’t just hear the firecracker noise in your ears; you feel it with your whole body. Even if, like me, you’ve never handled a gun, they figure so heavily in the entertainment we watch—from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit to Sarah Palin’s reality show to movie trailers and video game commercials—that firing one for the first time is a weird combination of startling and banal. Guns are (pardon the pun) loaded with so much cultural baggage that you think you know what to expect. You don’t. TV gunshots sound and act no more like real gunshots than construction-paper snowflakes resemble real snowflakes.

My next thought is, I want to do that again!

All this comes from a woman who grew up in Chicago and has lived in LA and NYC.