The store attached to the gun range, from the outside, looked like I expected it to: a nondescript building with bars on the door. However, on the inside, if you replaced all of the gear and ammo with multiple rows of Xbox One cases, it could've doubled as a GameStop. People shuffling aimlessly, waiting to enter a conversation? Check. People who know an almost unlimited amount of technical knowledge and spout off facts while clerks half-listen? Check. Items that are meant for hardcore users beside items for people that think that "gun" is spelled with two vowels? Check. It was GameStop, except in GameStop half your time isn't spent shooting in a dark room at a picture of a golf course or a nipple-less human outline.

Gun culture is also a lot like video game culture when it comes to the span and types of interests. Guns are a little harder to get into (but barely) and video gaming is the second-most-popular thing on Earth (damn you, oxygen. We're coming for you next year, though). They attract similar kinds of passion. You can talk about them in regular conversations, but both game stores and gun stores have the same "refuge" feeling. You don't have to worry about going overboard in your explanations or your jokes. It's a grand exhale.

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Usually during sniper practice.

Does this lead people to belly flop into dialogue that didn't concern them? Yes. Once, I brought up possibly buying one of the new Pokemon games to a GameStop cashier. As she and I talked it over, a guy who had just complained to an un-working demo for five dire minutes announced, "You know what a GREAT Pokemon game is?" Thanks, bud. You stay put, and I'll file away your contribution for a time when I wonder, "What is a great Pokemon game?" Then I'll drive back here and we can start a thing that you'd be a natural part of.

The same thing happened in a gun store when, as I was having a kind of pistol explained to me, a guy behind me began to talk directly over my shoulder. He wasn't adding anything as much as he was just talking at our conversation, hoping that he'd get enough sentences in for us to consider him a participant.

In short, game stores and gun stores are great. Know-it-all assholes are not.

Movies display gun stores and gun ranges as places where boners crescendo the more you talk about calibers. Men in camo jackets and ill-fitting wife beaters finger their belly buttons while they inform customers about the size of the hole that a certain weapon can put in someone. They have Southern drawls that are so massive you'd think that their entire lower jaw was made of chewing tobacco, and they look down on any sissy-boy nonsense that might erupt from a hesitation to pick up a weapon, or as we call 'em 'round here, Uncle Sam's Rib Bones. Either that, or they're used in montages that show how out of shape James Bond is.

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To be fair, random women keep stepping in front of his shot.

To be honest, outside of bad house parties and Facebook groups, I rarely find these exotic gatherings of aggressive rednecks that are so commonly put into movies as a way for an NYC resident with an existential crisis to prove that they have the moral high ground. I'm not talking about the KKK or any other band of merry fuckin' idiots. I'm talking about the cowboy-hat-wearing villains that supposedly inhabit any place that would ruin the "You're an introvert!" result of your online quiz if you happened to enjoy them.

One of the reasons that I didn't find them was because the people that work at the gun range don't have the time to put up with that militant bullshit. If anyone comes in with bravado and a "The only good DemoCRAP is a dead DemoCRAP" sense of self, they get dealt with. Above all, they're running a business. Customers that are going to be awful and cause a ruckus are bad for that business. You're treated nicely if you're sensible. They don't suddenly high-five you when you show up in a Confederate flag shirt with a racist quip at the ready. They'd rather you keep your opinions and your machismo to yourself so that all they have to do is remind you to wear your goofy ear muffs.

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The rest of the outfit is, sadly, voluntary.

A majority of the people that did show up were of the same variety that you'd see, well, anywhere. If it had been my goal to prove that the only people that go to gun ranges are contentious dickheads, I would've left the building tearing my notebook apart and crying. They were well-mannered, and, for the most part, reserved. I couldn't find people that were cockily trying to throw their weight around and be combative at gun ranges. And that leads me to my next point ...

I like shooting guns. Not because they make me feel more powerful, nor do I have some Death Wish fantasy about being armed when shit goes down and having to ask, "What?" because I can't hear the women saying, "Thank you for saving me!" through all the blowjobs they'd be giving me. I like gun ranges because shooting in them is a sport for me. I can practice aiming all day and never once do I think, "And if a robber came in, that would be the crater in his head. What's that, honey? 'Mmffffmmfbbb?' Yes. I could out-wrestle a trained Marine."

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I went shooting quite a few times as a kid, because why have hundreds of acres of land if you're not going to fill it with spent cartridges? But those excursions had always been with older, smarter people, who were ready to call me out if I mistook the gun for a walking stick or something. I hadn't fired a gun for two years when I stepped into my first gun range, so I needed to ask a few questions, like, "If you want to see what's inside, do you bash it open with a rock, pinata-style, or do they all crack open in the middle like they do in that John Wayne movie?" And, "If I hold it sideways, will I gain more respect?" It's hard to realize how much you don't know when you've always had your dad there to tell you, "If you accidentally point the gun at someone, you might accidentally kill them. And that would kinda defeat the point of going on a mountain vacation this Thanksgiving."

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If you do shoot, shoot to kill. Death is still preferable to hospital turkey.

Luckily, the people working there were not above telling me the most rudimentary things when it came to renting and shooting a new weapon. There was no snickering because the boy in the horror movie shirt looked at an automatic with the same expression as when he had to unhook a bra for the first time. I wasn't expected to know everything when I stepped into the store. And that, aside from learning that I wasn't the worst shot ever, was the most refreshing part about visiting multiple gun ranges. No one lorded their superiority over me. I'm sure that there are some gun ranges where people are treated terribly, but I had a worse time when I tried to join my town's local Dungeons & Dragons group and was met with a reception of annoyed grunts and Dungeon Master-induced spike traps.

As an everlasting numbskull, a major theme in my life is, "Remember all that shit you thought you knew? Well, you're a damn fool." And since I'm not allowed to explain that in Gilmore Girls GIFs, I'll have to use words and commas. Loading the clip in a handgun for the first time is difficult, no matter how easy John Wick makes it look. Off the top of my head, the only time that I can clearly remember a guy having trouble loading a gun was in that scene in Breaking Bad where Hank had already been shot multiple times and was almost dead. People in movies load guns like guys with ponytails solve Rubik's Cubes. They don't even have to glance at 'em. It just suddenly appears, fully loaded, in their hands. "Look at that! Eat it, nameless Eastern European dance club security guards!" I think that's a Reagan quote.

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The Berlin Wall came down after the president just started unloading magazines.

My buddy rented the lane next to mine, and I pathetically watched him as he loaded. Bullets don't just fit directly into the clip. You can't just fuck a gun standing straight up. You have to fit them in at an angle. This took a bafflingly long time for me, as I first learned how to load them, and then I marveled at how un-equipped my sad writer hands were for putting them in with any sort of ease. Now, I can give a decent handshake. My dad will tell you that, and he'll also tell you that he's proud of me and that I was kicked off the outdoor track team because none of the other schools would've shown up to the meet if they knew that Daniel "7-Minute Mile" Dockery was there. But when I'd gone shooting as a young kid, I was mostly using rifles and shotguns, and the ammo just kind of fell into them. You could get ammo into an old shotgun if you placed it at the other end of a field and threw shells at it.

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Basically the only way to screw it up.

Gun ranges make shooting about as easy as it can be made. They provide you with a lane and a specific target and with clean weapons that probably won't malfunction when you try to perform basic activities with them. If that sounds unremarkable, spend more time with a friend that is constantly trying to change one type of weapon into another type of weapon. "This was a rife, but I sawed off the barrel and glued two scopes and a deer skull to it for intimidation purposes." Real-life guns are always better when they don't look like something you'd scavenge from a Fallout 4 mutant.

I can't hear about a classroom of people being gunned down and still tell myself, "But sometimes, criminals get stopped, too, so you have to take the good with the bad!" The bad sucks. We should be doing what we can to ensure that the bad happens less. When it comes to human life, to sit by and simply take the good with the bad is a lazy and stupid approach. I appreciate the emails in advance, people that use phrases like "the pussification of America." I, for one, can assure you that the Founding Fathers would love your memes.

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Here's an image to get you started.

The lingering spirit of a trigger-happy poltergeist did not invade my body during my time at gun ranges, and though they're not my favorite things in the world, I'll probably be going back to them because they're fun, and I respect the way that they're run. Being for gun control and going to a gun range is not "sleeping with the enemy" or a hypocrisy thing. It's a game. You see if you can hit targets with a piece of metal that makes a really loud sound. If you don't like guns or anything related to them, that's fine. You don't deserve to be talked down to by people who think that guns are inherently patriotic, like bald eagles that you cram .357 Magnum ammunition into. The people that think otherwise are the people that gun range employees roll their eyes at.

Archery ranges, though? The people that go to them are insane.

Daniel has a blog.

If you really want to have fun at a gun range, try hitting all the targets at once with a Duck's Foot Pistol (joking, not safe!) as seen in 7 Awesomely Insane Guns People Actually Used, and learn more about gun owners in 6 Things Gun Lovers And Haters Can Agree On.

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