Most of us know Horde centurion Erik Vanderhoff for his enthusiasm for guns. His feelings regarding guns are not very common around these parts. Which is why I wanted to hear more from him. Below are some of his thoughts. The hope is that a productive conversation will follow.

I suppose, first off, I should point out that "gun nut" is a bit of a pejorative. And, despite some claims to the contrary, I have a pretty minor case of the obsessive-compulsive collecting that gun addiction can spark; but addiction it is - once you become serious about guns and shooting, you do start to think a lot about them. I don't know of any major research into the phenomenon, but my clinical training leads me to think that the adrenaline and the focus required in shooting, even just at a simple range, are physiologically and psychologically powerful forces. I've never been one for yoga or meditation, but I imagine the mindset required similar to going to the range: Shooting a gun requires intense focus on your task for safety's sake, and shooting well requires the imposition of calm over both body and mind. I am, oddly enough, never more at mental peace than when I go to the range.





In discussing gun ownership with my family, some friends, and many the Internet liberal, I often get the urge to be defensive, as though I need to justify my hobby to them, lest I be dismissed as a lunatic. Your average liberals, for all our vaunted curiosity and stereo-typical claim to ownership of "reality-based" thinking, don't really know all that much about guns or gun ownership. This makes for a real problem in crafting effective laws for firearm regulation and for selling those laws to the people whose exercise of rights and property they will affect. Occasionally such laws actually end up being accepted and successful; for example, the California "drop-safety" law has made handguns much safer should you drop a loaded one. But they can also work counter-intuitively: California, again, with its "magazine disconnect" law added moving parts to semi-automatic handguns so that a loaded chamber could not fire with the magazine removed. The addition of this part makes the gun more prone to jamming and misfire, and thus less safe.





The bottom line, for me, is that guns are fun. Yes, there's a thrill to the bang, to the power you know you're holding in your hand even when it's just using my little Ruger Mark III 22/45 .22-caliber rimfire ("Just makes a small hole!" as Robin Williams once said). But for me, the most fun is the painstaking care you have to take - I don't usually function in my day-to-day life with the kind of precision a gun requires - and that utter focus the act of shooting requires. Learning how different types of guns function, how different calibers interact with weight, size, barrel-length, and so on to become different functioning wholes and how small movements of the body radically effect their precision and function... Amazing. Do you or a friend collect cars or motorcycles? Or even computers or stereos? It's the same deal. You want to buy the latest GeForce visual card or Suzuki SV650, I drool over a custom Nighthawk TRP 1911 in .45 ACP.





I had a very interesting conversation with my wife's father this Christmas over guns; he has ever been very supportive of my interest in shooting, and himself owns several firearms. I learned, for the first time, that he used to have an older sister. They were visiting his uncle, who accidentally dropped a loaded revolver while moving it from his underwear drawer. The revolver went off, the bullet passed through the wall of the bedroom into the living room, and killed my father-in-law's sister, instantly. She was nine. Despite a very personal connection to gun violence and death, my father-in-law has never stopped owning guns; what he has been is incredibly committed to safety, keeping them locked in safes and teaching his children from a very early age to respect the danger they pose.





There is no denying the seriousness of owning a gun over any other sports addiction that requires you to spend insane amounts of money and time in participating, like say golf. Guns are tools, yes, as many gun advocates state repeatedly, but they are tools primarily of killing, even when, as with myself, they are used for sport. While I have a serious philosophical and physical commitment to self-defense as the bedrock for all of the political and social rights we assert, when it comes to guns the reality of having small children makes using guns for defense more theoretical than practical in my life. Now that my son is of the "What's this thing I'm not supposed to touch?" phase of development, the guns remain disassembled, individually locked in their cases, and no ammunition is kept in the home. I've done the math, looked at the crime statistics in my city and my neighborhood, and know that they do not justify the slightest chance that my young children will find a loaded gun and be able to get into where it is stored for access. Neither of them will become a statistic because of my erroneous calculations.





2012 was a particularly bad year in the United States for mass shootings, hosting the most deaths from such events since 1982. This has led to a wholly appropriate public outcry against politics as normal with respect to the Second Amendment, pitting, on its face, ideologically-rigid gun owners against an unarmed and fearful majority clamoring for relief from what is seen as the constant threat of a fusillade of bullets. Faced with a gun culture awash in the mythology of lone gunmen warring against a vicious and capricious world on one extreme with the loathing and distrust of my political peers, I find myself - a California liberal with a fondness for firearms - in the uncomfortable position of being distrusted by both sides of the gun control debate, viewed as a quisling by gun rights advocates and as party to a foreign culture to the gun control advocates. Where I would hope people such as myself could be the connections that allow for increased, pragmatic regulation of firearms that respects their history and part in American culture, I find instead only distrust from all sides. It is my hope that fear and hostility can give way when confronted with mutual respect and information.















