Savages

131

He has a point, so Chon and Ben hit the shooting range.

Chon goes to the range all the time not because he’s preparing for the revolution or the Reconquista, not because he has phallic wet dreams about protecting home and hearth from burglars or home invasion. You gotta love “home invasions”—we thought it would be Mexicans, turns out it was mortgage companies.

Chon likes shooting guns.

He likes the feel of metal in his hands, the kick, the blowback, the precision of chemistry, physics, and engineering mixed with hand-eye coordination. Not to mention power—shooting a gun projects your personal will across time and space in a flash. I want to hit that and that is hit. Straight from your mind to the physical world. Talk about your PowerPoint presentations.

You can spend fifty thousand years practicing meditation or you can buy a gun.

On the shooting range you create a neat, tiny hole in a piece of paper—the crisp entry but not the sloppy exit wound—and it’s deeply satisfying. Anyway, Chon likes firearms, they are the

tools

of his trade.

(The distinction, anthropologically speaking, between a “tool” and a “weapon” is that the former is used on inanimate objects and the latter on animate objects, if you can get with the concept of animate “objects.”)

Not so much Ben, who has been taught to loathe guns

And gun owners.

Who were, in his liberal home, the object of derision. Atavistic redneck goobers and right-wing crazies. His parents would shake their heads and chuckle sadly at the old bumper sticker You’ll take my gun when you pry it out of my cold dead hands. How sad, how sad, how backward. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. (Guns do kill people, Chon says—that’s what they’re fucking for.) Yes, people with guns, Ben’s father would opine.

Anyway, Ben is nonviolent by nature.