Shooting guns is fun.

We're all divided on the issue of whether or not private citizens like you and me should own guns for our own in-house use. And what kinds of guns. Should we -- you and me -- be allowed to have a high-powered rifle or a semi-automatic handgun? A machine gun that spews bullets at many rounds per second? A bazooka that shoots a mini-warhead?

Why would we need such weapons?

Yada, yada, yada. We've heard it all before. Gun control and licensing and all that. Liberals vs. conservatives. My own thinking is that if you own a gun that is meant mainly for military use, you ought to register it just to keep it from slipping into the hands of evil-doers. Let's keep track of where those military-style weapons are, for our own safety. I mean, you don't want someone holding up a bank to be sporting an AK-47 he stole from your house, right? He could shoot everyone in the bank and get away in seconds. And you'd be left wondering -- was that mine?
And the cops might show up with questions.

But that's not what I want to talk about, which is this: Shooting guns is fun.

Most of us who have shot guns were introduced to the .22 caliber rifle or a shotgun or maybe both. The former is used to dispatch squirrels -- or, more humanely, for target practice -- and the latter is mostly used to shoot birds out of the sky: ducks or pheasants or even geese. Sport shooting, as they call it. Larger-caliber rifles are needed to bring down elk.

The twenty-two delivers a bullet on an accurate trajectory over fairly short distances and doesn't sound too loud or kick back on your shoulder. A shotgun, on the other hand, of whatever caliber, disturbs your ear and spreads its pellets over a wider range, and does indeed whack your shoulder hard. (The bigger the caliber, the harder the whack. I once had the opportunity to shoot a double-barrel whatever and declined.)

The guns criminals usually use, for urban street crimes, are often small-caliber pistols -- yes, the .22 -- that are easily concealed. After all, if you're holding someone up at close range, you don't need the bullet to travel very far. A more powerful pistol - a .45, for instance -- obviously does even more damage but is as easily concealed. The more daring criminals use shotguns whose barrels have been sawed off, meaning that the distribution of death-dealing iron pellets is wider and at even shorter range but no less lethal. The very worst, the gangs, have fully-automatic guns (machine guns) that often out-shoot the cops.

But back to my premise: Shooting guns is fun.

When I was a kid growing up in Texas, I was introduced to the .22 rifle, and to its more powerful neighbor, the 30-30, and they were really fun to shoot. They're one step up from the pellet rifle your dad bought you, which was one step up from your first BB gun. With the .22, you launch a metal projectile over some distance, aimed at a target, maybe a deer but likely as not just a paper version of a human, and it's up to you and your eye-finger coordination whether you score a hit or not. It's kind of amazing to think that, with the pull of your trigger finger, you can launch a precisely-honed piece of metal through the air, at such speed, and maybe actually hit something. The bow and arrow on steroids, in a sense.
A 30-30 does the same but with greater distance and accuracy but not much kickback. If you want to own one rifle, for protection or to deter predators on your property, I'd go for the 30-30 over the .22. More fire power, but still not much kickback.

I'm not a student of military history, so I don't know when guns were invented or got popular, but I can say that warfare before them was not demonstrably more humane. Can you imagine charging into an enemy line of soldiers with a sword or a spear? Or an ax? What must that have been like? You either had to kill some human face-to-face or be killed yourself, by slashing and chopping and -- you get the picture. Ouch!

The invention of the gun probably humanized battle -- yes, I see the irony -- to the extent that it eliminated the need for such immediate contact with someone you wanted to kill or who wanted to kill you. It was finally possible to dispatch your enemy at long distance. The bullet, propelled from a gun, made it possible to kill your enemy without knowing who he was, without looking him in the face, which seems to me a less traumatic way of killing someone.

Of course much shooting in battle is blind: just point your gun and and hope you hit someone, right? And hope the other guy is doing the same. But that also means that your own chance of being killed or maimed goes up, as you never know who is aiming at you at any given moment or just shooting his gun in your general direction. And if your head is up, oops!

The rifle, and then the machine gun, and finally artillery -- big shells launched for miles onto targets determined by guys at maps (now at computers) -- de-personalized combat but didn't make it less lethal or traumatic. A horrible wound is still a horrible wound. A life lost or ruined at long distance is still a life lost or ruined. A family is still left distraught. War is hell. Duh!

But here's another twist. The invention of the rifle -- and, to some extent, the handgun -- made possible what we now know as hunting (of wild game) and target-shooting. And we all know they've gained in popularity, right? There are millions -- yes, millions -- of guys, but not all guys, who apply for hunting licenses every year. Many more of us own guns just for the love of shooting them.

Guns are here to stay. Hey, once we've invented something that appeals to us, there's no going back, right? Once we invented guns, we were doomed to always have guns. And once the war was over -- this particular one anyway -- we were stuck with all those weapons we created to fight an enemy but that now ordinary people wanted to use, too.

I once shot a grenade-launcher in Viet Nam. It's an odd weapon, kind of like a mortar but looking like a rifle and shooting a shell not quite as destructive but almost. It made almost no noise -- kind of a whump --but launched an explosive that landed almost exactly where I thought it would. I got high-fives from my buds. But that grenade, if it had fallen on a village, might have killed a woman and her children I had never seen and didn't even know existed. To me it was like a video game of the future that I couldn't imagine at that time (the late Sixties). Scores on a board, not even a screen. My direct hit. End of discussion. Or the beginning of one.

Once you've unleashed weapons, it's really hard to put them back into Pandora's Box. We may or may not succeed in confining nuclear warheads to responsible countries, but for sure we'll never lock those death-dealing machine guns and rocket launchers up for good. That evil genie is out of that particular box and won't be put back in.

Which brings us back to the question of what to do about all those guns that exist among us, the odinary citizens. We can try to ban them -- running up against the NRA at every point - or just learn how to use them to defend ourselves and own up to owning them. Guns are kind like insurance: we can have them but may never need them. But once they're in your house or mine, we're responsible for them. Keep them locked up, at least those you don't need right away for protection. And don't let your kids know where the key is.

In the meantime, they really are kind of fun to shoot. Even the machine gun. When I was much younger and in Advanced Infantry training -- was I really there? -- I qualified as Expert on the M-60 machine gun. It was fun to shoot! I mowed down those targets with ease!

I don't think it's a mistake to take your kid out to the range to learn how to shoot a rifle. Hey, you can't malign guns if you don't know anything about them, right? Pay your money, get a certain number of targets, and shoot away. It's really kind of fun, if noisy.

Most of us won't graduate to weapons of mass destruction, but we'll always want to shoot guns. Just like we wanted to shoot arrows or throw spears in an earlier time. To kill game, yes. To kill each other, probably. Arrows were inaccurate, as were spears. Even those big catapults that sent stones or explosives over the walls of fortresses were pretty much hit or miss.

Nowadays lots of us like to shoot guns just for the thrill of sending something, with accuracy, at long distance at something, be it an unsuspecting animal or just a target.

I vote for the target, but I understand the impulse to kill, whether for food or to win a war.

I'm working on that. My dark side. Let's all work on it, okay?