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New York
March 29, 2024
Worship Media
Humorous

I Got Triggered at the Firing Range

I pull my pickup into the parking lot of the Nashua Firing Line Range, off U.S. Route 3, when it hits me like I’ve been rear-ended: the memory of the time, right after I got my license, when I braked too late on Bloomfield Avenue and bumped the car in front of me, and I got out, and the other driver got out, and I apologized profusely and he said it was O.K., and then I drove home, shaking.

The range is surprisingly crowded for a Tuesday. I choose a Glock 19X Crossover, a Glock 17L Long Slide, and three boxes of rounds. Dropping the magazines into a shopping basket, I remember when I was a toddler and I stole a gummy bear from a grocery store and ate it. I later confessed to my parents, and they told me not to do it again. Now I wince as I carry my guns across the linoleum floor, wishing someone had prepared me to face this painful memory.

I strap on my noise-cancelling headphones and enter the range. The rapid-fire explosions make it hard to think straight, and I shudder, remembering when my dad yelled at me because my younger brother and I kept playing “bumping tummies” in the living room while he was trying to work.

In the lane beside mine is a man wearing a camouflage vest. Damn it, I think. Not again. And I push aside the memory of my day-camp group getting lost in the woods, eating all our Gushers, and returning to the parking lot forty-five minutes after our pickup time, to find my dad waiting for me in our car.

I shake my shoulders, refusing to be governed by my past trauma. I won’t have another shooting experience ruined by firing-range employees’ insensitivity to their customers’ potential triggers. I slap the magazine into the Glock, stand firm on both feet, and fire at the human silhouette at the end of my lane. The recoil is so strong, I remember the time I knelt down to pick up my umbrella at my therapist’s office and then got up too quickly and hit my head on a sharp door handle.

I am not my thoughts, I am not my thoughts, I repeat in my head as I raise my protective goggles and look at the silhouette—shot through the heart, and I’m reeling, remembering when I received a store-bought valentine from my crush in second grade with the sweet message crossed out in black Sharpie.

I take four-part breaths. Although I have been in danger in the past, I am not in danger now, I tell myself. I am in a perfectly safe facility where people voluntarily shoot thousands of bullets at targets made to represent the human body. I must, at all costs, remain rational. I must not let the expressionless head of the silhouette remind me of the day I learned that people with bangs aren’t born with bangs.

I hold back tears as bullets fly from my Long Slide, recalling the rapidity with which my first cat, Big Kitty, ate slices of American cheese. The cheese eventually killed her. “Big Kitty” were my first words.

And then I’m full-on weeping, and the man in the lane next to me wearing camouflage looks over the berm to ask if I’m O.K., and I remember when someone asked me the same question at the Rocky Mountain Museum after I lost my bear Sam—the original Sam, not the replacement my parents bought for me—and I slap another magazine into my Crossover and answer him like I answered the museum employee that day: “I miss Sam.” And then: “You got an extra gun cheek-rest pouch?”

And I resolve to write a Yelp review of the Nashua Firing Line Range to help future customers like me, adding several trigger warnings, including that a male employee looks a lot like my eleventh-grade gym teacher, who once gave me the job of “collecting all the balls” and walked away, snickering.

I pull off my noise-cancelling headphones and close my eyes, until my body is tingling with the report of firearms. I decide that this will be the last time I expose myself to reminders of the toe ring that made my skin tingle and turned my big toe sea green. I have to take care of myself, I think. I will choose a new, less triggering hobby, like fish gutting.

But in the meantime I slide the headphones back over my ears and finish off my magazine, refusing to let my emotions drive, refusing to wonder if the man next to me, too, once opened his news app and saw a photo of a person carrying a sign that read “Books Not Bullets,” and if he, too, felt his stomach hollow as he minimized the window, knowing what it means to be victimized. ♦

Click Here to Visit Orignal Source of Article https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/14/i-got-triggered-at-the-firing-range

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