Excuse Me, While My Brain Explodes: Antigunners Converting

Emily Miller, the Washington Times journalist whose multipart account of how difficult it was for a law-abiding citizen to buy a handgun shamed the D.C. City Council into somewhat liberalizing the gun laws there, has an even more startling account in the April 16, 2012 Washington Times of taking someone shooting who you might not expect:

When one of the District of Columbia’s top political leaders is willing to spend a day at the shooting range with a new gun owner, it’s a sign the capital city may be ready to put aside the past. For 30 years, Washington banned handguns, only to face a Supreme Court rebuke in 2008. Now the city is about to make it easier for law-abiding residents to legally own a firearm.

The rest of the story is about taking D.C. Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown shooting. Read it.  And be prepared for more surprise than you can handle.

My experience is that taking people who have no knowledge of guns shooting demythologizes them.  Some years ago, I took one of my liberal co-workers out to the outdoor range to get some experience shooting an AR-15.  He discovered that much of what he was being fed about them was false: it was not "inaccurate"; it was not a weapon that you can spray bullets around with, firing from the hip (at which point it would be inaccurate); and they did not make him want to go on a rampage.  We did something similar with a Democratic Congresscritter's staff guy one evening outside of a meeting, putting an AR-15 in his hands, and helping him to translate an abstract concept into something real--and far less frightening than it was before.