THIS WEEK IN GUN CULTURE: TRIGGER TREAT

It’s halloween tomorrow, and I was in my gun room lubing up one of my favourite rifles (the superlative BCM Recce-16) and looking out at a foreboding autumn sky, which naturally got me to thinking about monsters, vampires, and zombies.

To be honest, I’m glad the zombie fad is dying off.  It was pretty entertaining for a bit, but like any joke, if you hear it often enough, it just loses its entertainment value.  And at this point, now that every manufacturer has pounded it into the ground, and the CBC is doing documentaries about hipster survivalists and the cultural appropriation of zombification culture (I’m not kidding, it was on Ideas today) it’s about as entertaining as those commercials where people asked each other what was up, for a really, really long time.  When you type it out, you wonder how that was ever supposed to be funny.

The one thing I liked about the zombie theme, though, was that if you chose to do so, you could really interpret it as a metaphor for any obstacle to survival, and I think that accounts for a lot of the staying power it had.  That was certainly the origin of my interest in zombie stuff: I saw the Dawn of the Dead remake back in 2004, and I realized that not only was I not ready for zombies, I wasn’t really ready for any serious disruptions in modernity.  For example, I’d owned guns for my entire adult life, but I’d never really put much thought into them.

In fact, to extend the halloween theme a little further, I basically treated my guns like safety talismans: I owned a pump shotgun and was therefore ready if ever an emergency arose that I might address with a gun.  Subconsciously, I somehow felt that the presence of the gun was warding off evil.

After watching the first zombie movie with full-on sprinting athlete zombies, I realized that I had no particular idea what I was doing with guns.  I could shoot with some degree of accuracy, but I had no formal training in shooting at all.   So ridiculous as it was, that was the catalyst for me to begin taking shooting seriously.

Now, I’ve never considered zombies to be a realistic threat, and I don’t think anyone who’s got his head on remotely straight ever would.  In fact, tomorrow I’m heading to a halloween party hosted by the head of the Georgia chapter of the Zombie Squad, which is an actual, zombie-themed, survival and disaster preparations organization, and I know he doesn’t believe in zombies either.  We’ve talked about it.  Several times.

But anything that gets you thinking about preparing yourself, providing for yourself, and protecting yourself has some merit.

And so, back in 2004, I embarked on a long journey of becoming proficient with firearms.  Of course, that wasn’t my only area of preparations, nor would I ever recommend guns as the sole or even primary solution to all that many survival problems.  No, I took on a laundry list of tasks, from becoming financially secure (for a writer) to physically fit (again, by writer standards) to owning a well-stocked cabin that I know I can always stay at in times of trouble (also there’s good fishing around there, so it’s not purely utilitarian).

But the part I enjoyed most was the shooting, and so I spent a lot of time on the firearms file, researching and training, competing and experimenting, and I eventually developed some degree of expertise.  Certainly I’ve been privileged to train with some big names in the industry, and one of the great perks of the life I’ve led for much of the past decade has been getting to spend much of my time around some of the great shooters, and great warriors, of this age, many of whom I couldn’t name for security reasons even if I had the time or the space to list them all.

And of course I eventually began to work primarily in the firearms business, writing and consulting for manufacturers, and that led in turn to Calibre Magazine, which is the latest, and possibly best, turn in my entire career in this industry.  Frankly, being the editor of Canada’s gun magazine isn’t just a job for a writer.  It’s a dream come true.

So as you approach halloween this year, don’t underestimate the transformative power of spooks, goblins, witches, and, of course, zombies.

As it turns out, the impact they have on your life can be pretty profound.

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