It was spring, and my sister Lisa and I were in her toy-size car, riding from the airport in Greensboro, North Carolina, to her house, in Winston-Salem. I’d got up early to catch my flight, but still she had me beat by more than an hour. “I like to be at Starbucks right when they open, at 5 A.M.,” she said. “Speaking of which, I was there a few months ago and saw a lady with a monkey. I don’t know what kind, but it was small—not much bigger than a doll—and was in a pink frilly dress. And it was just so . . . upsetting to me. I wanted to go up to this woman and ask, ‘What do you plan on doing with that thing once you lose interest in it?’ ”

Like a lot of pet owners I know, Lisa is certain that no one can take care of an animal as well as she can. “Look at how that guy is dragging his Irish setter on that leash!” she’ll say, pointing at what to me just looks like a man walking his dog. Or, if the dog is not on a leash: “That beagle’s about to be hit by a car, and his owner’s not doing a thing about it.” No one’s spaniel has the shots it needs. Nobody’s bird is eating correctly or getting its toenails trimmed to the proper length.

“What made you so sure this woman was going to lose interest in her monkey?”

Lisa gave me the look that said, “A monkey—of course she’s going to lose interest in it,” and said, “A monkey—of course she’s going to lose interest in it.”

It was right around there that we came upon a billboard for a firing range called ProShots.

“I think we should go to that place and shoot guns,” Lisa said.

And so it was that on the following afternoon we arrived for our three-o’clock appointment. I had assumed for some reason that a firing range would be outdoors, but instead it was situated in a strip mall, next to a tractor-supply store. Inside were glass display cases filled with weapons, and a wall of purses a woman could hide a dainty pistol in. This was a niche market I knew nothing about until I returned to Lisa’s house later that day and went online. There I found Web sites selling gun-concealing vests, T-shirts, jackets—you name it. One company makes boxer briefs with a holster in the back, which they call Compression Concealment Shorts but which I would call gunderpants.

Lisa and I quite enjoyed wandering around the store. “Rossi R352⁠—⁠$349.77,” read a tag beside one of the pistols. Were I in, say, an office-supply shop, I could have made a judgment concerning the cost, but I have no idea how much a gun goes for. It was like pricing penguins or milking equipment. My shooting experience was limited to air rifles. Lisa had no experience whatsoever, so before stepping onto the firing range we sat for a forty-minute gun-safety class taught by a retired Winston-Salem police officer named Lonnie, who co‑owned the business and was wearing one of its T-shirts. The man was perhaps in his early fifties, his pale eyebrows and wire-rimmed, almost invisible glasses shaded by a baseball cap with the Blackwater logo on it. He might not be someone you’d choose as a friend, but you wouldn’t mind him as a neighbor. “I shovelled your drive while you were asleep,” you could imagine him saying. “I hope you don’t mind. I just wanted the exercise.”

There was a classroom at the back of the store, and, after seating us side by side at one of the desks, Lonnie took the chair across from us. “The first thing you need to know about firearm safety is that most people are stupid. I don’t mean you folks personally, but people in general. So I have a few rules. No. 1: Always assume that every weapon is loaded.”

Lisa and I leaned back, wincing, as he laid two guns in front of us. One was a Glock something, and the other—the nicer-looking one—was a snub-nosed .38 Special.

“Now, are these loaded?” he asked.

“I am going to assume that they are,” Lisa answered.

Lonnie said, “Good girl.”

I found a gun once while cleaning someone’s apartment in New York. It was under the bed, where the pornography should be, wrapped in a T-shirt, and it was in my lap before I realized what it was. Then I froze, the way I might have had it been a bomb. Eventually, very carefully, I nudged it back into place, wondering what the person who owned this looked like, for I had never met him.

I used to think that guys with beards had guns. Then I realized by asking around that guys with beards had fathers who owned guns. It was amazing how spot on this was. I once met an Asian-American fellow with a very sketchy goatee—no more than a dozen eyelash-length hairs on his chin—and when I guessed that his dad had bullets but no gun he said, “Oh, my God. How did you know?”

This was before beards came back into style and everyone grew one. Now I think that guys who wear baseball caps with their sunglasses perched on the brims have guns, if—and this is important—the lenses of the sunglasses are mirrored or fade from orange to yellow, like a tequila sunrise. As for women, I have no idea.

Lonnie had moved on by this point, and was teaching us how to pick up our guns. Like most people raised with water pistols and dart-shooting plastic Lugers, we automatically reached for the triggers, a no-no in the Big Book of Safety. “These weapons absolutely cannot fire unless you tug that little piece of metal,” Lonnie said.

“They can’t go off if you drop them?” I asked.

“Absolutely not,” he told me. “Almost never. So go on, David, pick up your Glock.”

I screwed up my courage and did as instructed.

“Good job!”

When it was Lisa’s turn, her finger went straight for the trigger.

“Busted,” Lonnie told her. “O.K., now, David, I want you to pick up the .38, and Lisa, you go for the Glock.”

We’d just advanced to rule No. 2—never point your weapon at another person, unless you intend to kill or wound him—when Lisa explained why she was taking the class: “If anyone ever tries to shoot me? And accidentally drops the gun? I want to know how to handle it properly.”

“That is a very good, very smart reason,” Lonnie said. “I can tell you’re someone who thinks ahead.”

Oh, you have no idea, I thought.

Our safety session went a little over schedule, but still allowed us ten minutes of shooting time, which, in retrospect, was more than enough. Seeing Lisa standing ramrod straight with a loaded Glock in her hand was as startling to me as seeing her in front of an orchestra waving a baton. Her first bullet hit the target—a life-size outline of a man—and missed the bull’s-eye of his heart by an inch at most.