Well, if you want to learn about guns, there are few people better to learn from than Toby Leary. He gave me a walking tour around the facility. Turns out, a lot of people come into the shop looking for ways to improve their home security (or their peace of mind) without buying a firearm at all. One display was filled with non-lethal home defense options. There was a line of products from a company called Byrna.  The Byrna products, brightly colored in black and orange, are available in pistol and short rifle formats. They don’t use gunpowder. They fire a marble sized plastic ball, powered by a CO2 capsule.

Shotguns can be equipped with beanbag rounds, dense rubber balls or pepper balls. In every case, the idea is not to kill someone but to make their continued advance into your home such a painful process that they’ll change their minds and leave. These alternatives have become highly popular — “Flying out of the store” as Toby put it.

When I was a boy, lots of kids learned to shoot through the Boy Scouts. They could take gun safety courses through the NRA, which had not yet reinvented itself as a lobby for gun manufacturers. That’s how Toby got into the sport, as a Boy Scout. If you want to take a gun safety course today, they have a variety of classes offered at the Gun Works.

Hunters can certainly find a variety of rifles there. In the early 60s, every fall my father would join a bunch of friends, go down to West Virginia and hunt deer. He never shot one. I asked him about it, and he told me once he’d lined up the perfect shot, but then the deer swung its head around and looked straight at him. “If you’ve ever seen Bambi as a boy,” he said, “it completely ruins you for deer hunting.” But he loved his friends, and he loved the camaraderie and camping out all the same. For serious hunters, a good-sized deer can help feed a family all winter.