“You Never Shot a Gun?”

Photographed during my first experience shooting a firearm, with my uncle Tanner.

The question caught me off guard. “You never shot a gun?” It was such a simple question, but it immediately made me realize how different our experiences had been. For some people, firearms are a completely normal part of life. They might grow up hunting with their family, going to shooting ranges, learning about firearms from their parents or grandparents, or being introduced to them as part of a family tradition. For other people, firearms are something they mostly encounter through movies, television, the news, or political conversations. I was definitely in the second group. I had never really had a reason to be around firearms, so I never thought much about the fact that I had never shot one. It wasn't a decision I had made or something I was particularly against. It simply wasn't part of my life.

My first experience handling a firearm came through my uncle Tanner, who supervised me while I learned how to use a sniper rifle for the first time. Walking into the experience, I was curious but also very aware that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. There is a very specific kind of confidence you have when you know something only from movies and television, and then there is the much more humbling experience of actually standing in front of someone who knows what they're doing. I was definitely experiencing the second one. What surprised me most, though, was that the experience wasn't really centered around the firearm itself. Before anything else, my uncle emphasized safety, awareness, and responsibility. There wasn't a casual attitude toward handling it, and there wasn't any sense that I should be trying to prove that I could do something. The entire experience started with understanding that this was something that needed to be taken seriously.

That was probably the first thing that challenged my assumptions about firearm culture. Popular media tends to make firearms look incredibly simple. Someone picks one up, knows exactly what they're doing, fires it, and somehow manages to look effortlessly cool while doing it. Real life was considerably less cinematic. There was no dramatic soundtrack playing in the background, and I was not suddenly transformed into some action-movie character. Instead, I was listening carefully and trying to remember everything I had just been told because I knew that being careless wasn't something I could afford to be. The focus on safety wasn't presented as fear. It was presented as awareness, and that distinction stayed with me.

Before this experience, I had mostly thought about firearms as objects. I understood what they were, I knew they could be dangerous, and I was aware that people had very strong opinions about them. What I hadn't really considered was everything surrounding the object. There are communities, traditions, expectations, and social relationships attached to firearms, just as there are with countless other things that become part of people's identities. Once I stepped into that environment, even temporarily, I started noticing how much of the culture was actually about the behavior surrounding the firearm rather than the firearm itself.

That connects to something sociologists call socialization, which is essentially the process through which we learn the values, behaviors, expectations, and norms of the communities around us. Most of the time, we don't really notice that we're being socialized because it starts so early. We learn what is normal by watching our parents, relatives, friends, teachers, and communities. We learn how to behave in certain situations, what things are considered important, what traditions are worth keeping, and what responsibilities come with different activities. For someone who grows up in a family where hunting is a tradition, learning about firearms may be just another part of growing up. They may learn safety from a parent or grandparent, hear stories about hunting trips, and eventually pass those same lessons down to someone else. By the time they're older, much of that knowledge may feel completely natural because they've been surrounded by it for so long.

My experience was almost the complete opposite. I was walking into something as an outsider, which meant I was noticing things that someone who grew up around firearms might not even think about anymore. I didn't have years of experience telling me what was normal. I didn't have family stories or childhood memories attached to firearms. I didn't have the background knowledge that someone else might have considered obvious. I had to listen, ask questions, and accept that I was the person in the room who didn't know. As uncomfortable as that can be, there is actually something useful about being the outsider. When you are new to something, you notice details that people who have been around it for years might take for granted.

That made me think about how much of our understanding of the world comes from things we never consciously choose. We don't get to pick the environments we are born into, and we don't always get to choose which traditions become normal to us. Someone who grows up around hunting may develop a completely different relationship with firearms than someone who grows up in a city where they rarely encounter them. Someone whose family has been involved in recreational shooting for generations may see firearms primarily as a hobby or tradition, while someone who has only encountered firearms through news coverage may associate them almost exclusively with violence and political debate. Both people are responding to the same object, but their experiences have given that object very different meanings.

That is one of the reasons firearms are such an interesting cultural symbol. The physical object itself doesn't change, but the meaning attached to it can change dramatically depending on the community and experiences surrounding it. For one person, a firearm might represent a family tradition and memories of hunting with a grandparent. For someone else, it could represent recreation or competitive sport. Someone else might associate it with military service, personal protection, or a completely different experience. These meanings don't exist in isolation. They are created through relationships between people, communities, history, and personal experiences.

Family plays a particularly important role in that process. So much of what we consider normal is introduced to us by the people closest to us. We inherit recipes, traditions, stories, habits, expressions, and ways of understanding responsibility. Sometimes we inherit hobbies and interests as well. For many people, their relationship with firearms begins with a family member. A parent teaches a child about hunting, a grandparent passes down knowledge, or an older sibling introduces someone to a sport. Those experiences become part of the person's understanding of their family and, eventually, part of their own identity.

My experience with my uncle was a much smaller example of that same process. Obviously, one experience does not suddenly make me part of firearm culture, and I'm not going to pretend that I walked away understanding every perspective within the community. I didn't grow up with firearms, and I don't have decades of experience to draw from. What I did get was a brief opportunity to see how someone with more experience approached something that was completely unfamiliar to me. I got to see that there was knowledge behind the practice and that the knowledge was something worth passing down.

There is also a difference between knowing about something and actually experiencing it. Before this, I technically knew about firearms. I knew what they were, I knew they could be dangerous, and I knew people owned and used them for different reasons. I had seen them in movies and on television more times than I could count. None of that meant I understood what it felt like to actually be responsible for handling one. Experience has a way of making abstract things much more complicated. Once something moves from being an idea you have heard about to something you have personally encountered, you start noticing details you didn't think about before.

I think that happens with almost everything. I know what skiing is, but that doesn't mean I know how to ski. I can watch someone dance beautifully, but that doesn't mean I can walk into a studio and do what they're doing. I can look at pictures of a place and think I understand what it will feel like to be there, but actually standing in that place is different. The distance between knowing about something and experiencing it firsthand is much larger than we sometimes realize.

That distance is especially interesting when the subject is something people already have strong opinions about. Firearms are obviously a political and social issue, and there are serious conversations surrounding ownership, regulation, safety, violence, crime, and public policy. Those conversations are important, but they can sometimes make it difficult to talk about the people and communities that exist behind the object. When firearms are constantly discussed as political symbols, it becomes easy to forget that people have individual experiences with them that are much more complicated than a political position.

My experience wasn't a political debate. My uncle wasn't trying to convince me to adopt a particular viewpoint, and I wasn't trying to form one. I was simply learning about something that was familiar to him and unfamiliar to me. That distinction is important because understanding something doesn't automatically mean agreeing with it. You can learn why a tradition matters to someone without adopting that tradition yourself. You can understand why a person has a particular relationship with an object without having the same relationship with it. Curiosity isn't the same thing as agreement, and I think sometimes we forget that.

Being unfamiliar with something also forced me to be comfortable with not being the knowledgeable person in the room. I think most people like feeling competent. We like knowing the rules, understanding the language, and feeling like we belong. When you're new to something, all of that disappears. You have to ask questions that might seem obvious to everyone else, and you have to be willing to admit that you don't know what you're doing. As someone who generally likes figuring things out on my own, that can be surprisingly uncomfortable. I would much rather pretend I know what's happening and figure it out later, but that isn't exactly a great approach when safety is involved.

Instead, I had to listen.

And honestly, there was something refreshing about that.

I wasn't expected to already know everything. I wasn't supposed to walk into the experience pretending to be an expert. I was there to learn from someone who had more experience than me, and that made the experience much more about observation than performance. I wasn't trying to impress anyone. I was trying to understand what I was being taught and why it mattered.

That also made me think about the way people sometimes judge cultures and communities from the outside. It's incredibly easy to look at something unfamiliar and decide that you understand it based on the few things you've seen. We do this constantly. We see a tradition, a hobby, a religion, a political group, a profession, or a lifestyle that we don't understand, and we fill in the gaps with assumptions. Sometimes those assumptions are accurate. A lot of the time, they aren't.

Being around something firsthand doesn't automatically give you complete understanding either, but it gives you more information than simply observing from a distance. It allows you to see the small details that aren't visible from the outside. You get to hear how people explain what they do and why they do it. You get to see what they consider important. You notice the things they take seriously and the things they don't. You start to understand that a community is made up of individuals rather than one giant stereotype.

That was probably the biggest thing I took away from my experience with my uncle. I didn't suddenly become an expert on firearms, and I don't think one afternoon could ever give me that kind of understanding. What it did give me was a different perspective on how people develop relationships with the things around them. The experience reminded me that our environments shape us in ways we don't always recognize until we step outside of them.

My uncle's familiarity with firearms came from his experiences. My unfamiliarity came from mine. Neither of us sat down and decided that this would be our relationship with firearms. It developed through the people around us, the opportunities we had, the things we were taught, and the things we weren't. That's essentially what culture does. It gives us a framework for understanding the world before we're even old enough to realize that we're being given one.

And sometimes, stepping outside of that framework is useful.

Not because your own experiences are wrong, but because they aren't universal.

I think that is something I have been learning more and more as I get older. The older I get, the more I realize how little of what I consider "normal" is actually universal. My normal is just the result of my specific collection of experiences. Someone else's normal is the result of theirs. We are all walking around with different backgrounds, different assumptions, and different definitions of what makes sense.

Sometimes those differences are obvious. Other times, they don't become apparent until someone asks you a very simple question.

“You never shot a gun?”

No, I hadn't.

And maybe the interesting part isn't that I eventually did. The interesting part is that one question made me realize how much of another person's world I had never considered. My first experience with a firearm became less about the firearm itself and more about culture, family, socialization, and the way knowledge is passed from one person to another.

It reminded me that understanding another person's world doesn't always require some huge, life-changing experience. Sometimes it just requires being willing to admit that you don't know something and allowing someone else to show you.

I walked away from the experience with more questions than answers, which I actually think is a good thing. I'm not suddenly an expert, and I'm definitely not going to pretend that one experience gave me some complete understanding of firearm culture. If anything, it reminded me that the more you learn about people, the more complicated your understanding becomes.

And I think that's what I like most about experiences like this. I don't necessarily need them to change my entire worldview. Sometimes I just want them to make the world a little bigger.

Before that day, firearms were something I had mostly understood from the outside. Afterward, they became one more example of how much meaning people can attach to the things they grow up around, the traditions they inherit, and the communities they become part of. I may never have the same relationship with firearms that my uncle does, and I don't need to. The point wasn't to become him. It was to understand him a little better.

Sometimes that is enough.

Sometimes you learn the most about a culture when you realize you are the person who doesn't understand it yet.

And sometimes it all starts with someone looking at you, genuinely surprised, and asking:

“You never shot a gun?”