Shootin' Guns

The night before I left to England, Amanda and her friend Matt and his friend Kevin took me Shootin’. 


If you know anything about me you would know what a great big hippie pacifist I am, and in fact this  whole idea of taking me shooting guns began in the MTC with the following story…

So about the 3^rd week in to a 12-week stay at the Provo Missionary Training Centre I was talking amongst the missionaries in my district, who I thought were pretty cool. Somehow the topic of people’s perceptions of Americans came up and I laughingly exclaimed "haha! yeah I heard every American household owned a gun! Isn’t that funny?!"
 A moment of contemplation came over the lunch table..’well  I own a gun’ one 19 year old boy piped up, ‘me too’ another exclaimed, both my companions said ‘yeah we have guns’ another elder said ‘we have a whole room full of guns at my house. ‘

I was shocked! These people were no longer who I thought they were! Dangerous criminals!, gun toting weirdoes! – What was going on?  To make matters worse they all thought it was Hi-larious how shocked I was. They even got our teacher in on the joke (who claimed to own several big guns).

these people became.....

this person

And so it went down in mission folklore and eventually the entire American division of the Hong Kong mission were in on the hilarity of taking great delight in telling me all about their gun’s and gun adventures at home.  

To explain: I wont get into anything overly political (right now anyway) Ill just say in a multitude of ways I’m morally opposed to America's incredibly liberal gun laws : ) (if you can call them ‘laws’ )

So when we were thinking about a real American way to spend my last night in Utah - both Amanda and I had the same brainwave. Shooting dangerous weaponry. Of course, very sensible.

just one of the many targets you can buy.....

Im actually way good it turns out

The night was so funny in and of itself but an amazing thing happened - I found out I was actually good at shooting and wasted my target.

So have my beliefs about guns changed? Well, I know some relatively sane people who own guns and it was a rush to be good at shooting stuff, but, regardless I am still a hippie at heart and am glad to live in a country where I dont have to worry if the creepy guy next to me is legally 'packing'. I have one last blog I want to write about the states but Ill save it for next time, heres a sneak peak...