Bang pop-pop-pop zip zing.

Cowboy shooters -- or members of the Single Action Shooting Society, as their group is officially known -- are part of one of the fastest-growing shooting sports in a country of gun lovers. The men (and few women) who partake in it are not slick, like the crew-cut, law-enforcement guys who meticulously measure the distance between bullet holes they shoot in human-silhouette targets. The hats, the nicknames, the old guns -- the whole thing is a little dorky. But cowboy shooting, with no solid connection to either self-defense or hunting, is also unique among the shooting sports in its purity of purpose.

"I do it because it's fun," says Gunslinger Grandma. The outfits were a little hard to get used to at first, she says, but she enjoys firing the weapons.

Less than two miles away from the Richmond Rod and Gun Club, in notoriously violent North Richmond, weapons are being wielded in earnest. According to the Small Arms Survey, a monitoring center in Geneva, Switzerland, Americans own roughly 300 million guns, or just under one gun for every child, woman and man -- the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world. Advocates of gun control point to the roughly 10,000 Americans murdered with firearms every year. Gun rights advocates retort that Americans have a founder-given right to bear arms. Guns aren't the problem, goes the refrain -- it's the people who use them.

But the cowboys at the Richmond Rod and Gun Club -- whooping at good shots, ribbing each other over their costumes -- hint at a more basic reason for the popularity of guns in America: They're fun. Like an old car and a Roman candle rolled into one, guns are a hobbyist's dream. They're collectable and endlessly customizable, fit for tinkerers, pyros, and sporting types alike. The objections to guns are learned, based on moral and intellectual arguments, but the physical appeal is natural, childlike in its simplicity -- pull a trigger over here, and something happens over there. Pop pop pop pop pop!

Understanding the fun of guns is part of understanding why people own guns, says Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA, and author of Gun Fight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. "Gun control advocates ask, 'Why does anyone need this particular kind of gun, like an AR-15 (an assault rifle similar to the one used by the U.S. military)?" Winkler says. "The reason people like an AR-15 is because it's fun to shoot."

Firing a weapon, he says, triggers the same chemicals in the brain as riding a roller coaster: endorphins and adrenaline. "I was out at the range two weeks ago, shooting an AR-15," he says. "It was a lot of fun."

There are a lot of things that are fun, though, that are also illegal. "We don't let people drive 150 miles per hour just because it's fun," he says. For that reason, hobbyists don't have a real role to play in the debate over gun control. "When you see 12 people die in a movie theater, it's not a very satisfying answer to say, 'Oh, guns are really fun to shoot.'" Still, he says, "By leaving hobbyists out of the debate, we miss a large reason why people enjoy firearms."