I love old sci fi movies of the fifties, the cheaper the better. The reason is that they are unintentionally funny. They defy the laws of physics, explosions taking place in vacuums, fires breaking out on the moon, you name it. Their unreality makes them fun to watch. What you’re about to see here is unreal as well, but it is not comical. It’s frightening.

Full disclosure here, friends. Among the skills I picked up over a lifetime, at one point I was a crack marksman. Markswoman, I guess. I owned a Smith & Wesson .45. I learned how to shoot at Beverly Hills Gun Club and my instructor was a very laid back, retired L.A.P.D. detective.

All of the people in the gun club had a great temperament. They had the same kind of temperament that medical personnel display when you show up bright and early to check in for surgery. They want you mellow, so they are mellow. If you didn’t know better, you would swear everybody was grinding valium into the soft drinks, it is so laid back.

There were moving targets at this gun club and I got to be pretty good after a while. I also shot at some gun ranges which were outdoors, in various parts of California.

The laws of gun ranges are strict and immutable. I recall many a sign which said in no uncertain terms that there was Zero Tolerance on certain issues and they listed them. Shooting or even handling a gun while somebody was downrange was an absolute no no. You did it once, you were out. Zero Tolerance.

I give you this preface because what you are about to see Congressman Cawthorn do would never fly in any real world gun club, at least not any legitimate one. Maybe a MAGA clubhouse range allows this. And that’s not my sole opinion, as you will see.

I will repeat to you what Terrence, my shooting instructor, said to me. He was talking about training a young woman to work at the range and he said he hired her for her temperament. He said that a gun range was no place for a hot head or a fool. It was a place for level headed adults who enjoyed marksmanship to enjoy the sport in a safe and congenial environment.

I don’t shoot anymore. I haven’t gone shooting in many years. One good reason is that my gun was stolen. The police later recovered it but I told them to melt it down. I had been advised years earlier that if a gun gets out of your possession and possibly gets tampered with, just write it off.

I never bothered to get another one because the cultural shift happened and now people who shoot for sport are lumped in with MAGA crazies. It’s a lot like how people who used to wear crucifixes (and I did that too, for many years) stopped wearing them for fear of being labeled evangelical wingnuts.

You might want to hit this link to a news story about a 9-year-old girl who accidentally shot and killed an instructor who was teaching her how to shoot an Uzi submachine gun. That was at Bullets and Burgers, which is a gun range in Mohave County, AZ. They teach kids as young as five how to shoot.

“We instruct kids as young as 5 on .22 rifles, and they don’t get to handle high firearms, but they’re under the supervision of their parents and of our professional range masters,” Scarmardo said.

They’re under the supervision of professional range masters until one of them gets shot in the head, which happened to the instructor of the 9-year-old girl.

Totally batshit and it’s not the least big surprising that Madison Cawthorn is right in the heart of it.

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