What a self-described liberal learned about guns at the local gun shop

What a self-described liberal learned about guns at the local gun shop | OPINION

Posted by Admin December 1, 2024 Shopping

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Lawrence Brown
| Special to the Cape Cod Times

A while back, an elderly lady popped into the Cape Gun Works in Hyannis — a school lunch lady, it turned out. “I don’t like guns,” she said. “How do I get one?” Looking for answers to this and other questions, I went to visit Toby Leary, the owner and president of Cape Gun Works. If you’re thinking of purchasing a firearm around here, this would be the place to do it. They also have the only public indoor gun shooting range in southeast New England.

Liberals like me talk about guns, but this was my first conversation with somebody who actually knows a lot about them. We need to have more conversations like this.

Cape Gun Works opened ten years ago on Barnstable Road in Hyannis. Now it’s located at 96 Airport Road. I first walked in out of pure curiosity. Here was a Cape Cod subculture I knew nothing about. So I walked over to a glass counter with pistols on display, just casually looking and getting the lay of the land. An attractive young couple was shopping at the same counter. You might have thought they were picking out a China pattern. They were friendly and soon we had struck up a conversation. Turns out, they were picking out their first firearm.

Everything about this was weird. I have believed for a long time that America would be a safer place if there were far fewer weapons in it. So what am I doing in a gun shop? I’m looking around because the reality on the ground is that lots and lots of Americans own guns for all kinds of reasons and maybe it was about time I met some of them and learned something.

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.

“Some people shouldn’t buy guns,” said Toby … “temper, judgment.” But gun ownership is a constitutional right. Here in Massachusetts, there is a system in place to screen out at least some of the folks for whom gun ownership is problematical. The process takes a couple of months. At least someone can’t stalk into a gun shop smoking mad, buy a gun, walk out and shoot someone. The state requires a four-hour mandated safety class and soon, a mandated eight-hour shooting range training.

Toby accompanied me to the shooting range. Newbies will have someone trained to walk them through the safety rules and fit them out with safety glasses and noise-blocking earphones. It’s friendly, patient but careful and professional. Whatever the racket on the range, with one-foot-thick walls, you can’t hear a sound from the street.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2022 there were more than 48,000 firearm-related deaths in the United States. That’s about 132 people dying from a firearm-related injury each day. More than half of firearm-related deaths were suicides and more than four out of every 10 were homicides.

I still have no way to reconcile myself to it — and I’m not sure I’m supposed to. But we just had another election and it’s clear America has no intention of disarming itself anytime soon. So if there are going to be guns, and we know there will, this seems by far the best way to do it.

Besides, there’s no reason why a Democrat can’t learn to shoot straight.

Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@gmail.com.

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