In one of the classic scenes from The Magnificent Seven, a movie jammed with classic scenes, a Zen Master gunman named Britt uses a hand-held revolver to shoot a fleeing bandit out of his saddle 200 yards away. Chico, the youngest of the seven gunslingers sworn to defend a Mexican village, is awestruck by his feat.
Chico (Horst Buchholz): That was the greatest shot I have ever seen!
Britt (James Coburn): The worst! I was aiming at the horse.
The Magnificent Seven (1960); screenplay by Walter Newman & William Roberts
Right now I am feeling a little like Britt, only my target is not a retreating bandido. It is a stationary white dot with the number one in the center, and it is only ten feet away. I am aiming a Canik T9 SF Elite, a Turkish pistol, to bring it down. Employing the two-handed grip I have hardly perfected over three hours of introductory training, I balance myself and fire. Low and to the left! My finger rests inadvertently on the trigger and another round goes off. High and to the right! I missed both the bandit and the horse! But I did plug a gopher resting nearby and a buzzard circling 20 yards overhead.
I’ll take it!
In uncertain times, a man has to do what a man has to do. But what, exactly? If he is turning 70, as I did this year, one idea might be to sit on his front porch, sip a little Tobermory 15, and reflect upon his life, the good times, the failures, the people he has loved and lost, the dreams that vanished.
Or, another idea, he could hire an ex-Navy SEAL to show him how to blast stuff with a shotgun in the Nevada desert.
Yeah. I went with Door Number Two.
Not everyone was thrilled with my choice. My wife, for one. After 47 years of marriage, I am able to read her thoughts. “Seven decades you live without shooting a gun and, suddenly, now you think you’re Clint Eastwood?” said one seriously annoyed glance. “Aren’t there enough ways to die without adding self-inflicted gunshot wound to the list?”
Those are reasonable concerns. They probably require a reasonable explanation but the best I can do is quote the words of Steve McQueen in The Magnificent Seven:
It's like a fellow I once knew in El Paso. One day, he just took all his clothes off and jumped in a mess of cactus. I asked him that same question, ‘Why?’ … He said, ‘It seemed to be a good idea at the time.’ [op. cit.]
I don’t have a bucket list, but this year learning to shoot seemed like a good idea. I believe knowledge of firearms is one of the essential American skills every adult should possess, along with managing one’s finances, driving a stick shift, changing a poopy diaper, and fixing a leaky faucet. (I’m still working on the faucet.) Guns have been an essential part of American history and culture ever since there was an America. Muskets ensured the new Republic. What kind of residuals would Jason Bourne and John Wick earn if they couldn’t dispatch bad guys with all sorts of neat guns? They use pencils, too, but I couldn’t find a pencil training school.
A Scattergun Approach to Firearms
Calvera (Eli Wallach): Somehow I don’t think you’ve solved my problem.
Chris (Yul Brynner): Solving your problem isn’t our line.
Vin (Steve McQueen): We deal in lead, friend. [op. cit.]
When it comes to dealing in lead, I will admit to limitations. Like the Mexican villagers in The Magnificent Seven, I knew nothing about real guns or gunmen. I do possess an encyclopedic knowledge of movie gunmen but that probably won’t get me far on a shooting range. I have physical impediments, too, infirmities of an ancient greenhorn. I wear bifocals. A three-year-old probably has greater hand strength than I have. My stamina, never a reliable asset even in my youth, rode off into the sunset long ago with Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen.
I have no stomach for hunting, though I do have score to settle with Fred and Ethel, the two squirrels that tear up my lawn every Fall looking for grubs. There is no market for my soldier of fortune skills, either. I doubt I have the ambition to master any weapon, really, even pencils. Besides, where was I going to shoot? Gun ranges in the Bay Area were shut down because of the Wuhan Plague of 2020. I also wanted one-on-one instruction and it had to happen on September 9th, my 70th birthday.
Okay, a few obstacles. Still, I was determined to shoot something…with something…somewhere …on September 9th. Sounded like a plan to me.
I started my quest for knowledge where every dilettante begins, YouTube. I thought, “How hard can this be?” I discovered an interesting fact after binge-watching gun videos for 48 hours: For every one of the 400 million privately-owned firearms in the United States, there are 200 YouTube videos of the same middle-aged guy, in the same pose, viewed from the same camera angle, firing a weapon at the same armor-plated hubcap in the same Midwestern forest. How could one guy make so many videos?
Whoever that guy is, the most impressive video he made was the one in which he demonstrated a shotgun. He described it as “the biggest bang for the buck.” Specifically, he profiled a Benelli M4 semi-automatic shotgun, a tactical weapon currently issued to the U.S. Marines. It is made by the same Italian company that makes Beretta pistols. It has a shorter barrel (18 1/2”) than a normal shotgun so it can be maneuvered more easily. It is also lighter and has less recoil.
I hadn’t really considered shotguns. Images of Elmer Fudd crossed my mind. Not exactly the look I was going for. But wait! Didn’t Steve McQueen use a shotgun during the Boot Hill scene in The Magnificent Seven? Didn’t Jason Bourne use a shotgun to knock off fellow assassin Clive Owen in The Bourne Identity? And didn’t John Wick use a shotgun in Chapter Three: Parabellum? What kind of a shotgun was it, I wonder? It was…wait…a Benelli M4!
Suddenly, shotguns blasted their way into my plan.
Finding a Gunman
Hilario (Jorge Martinez de Hoyas): We must buy guns. We know nothing about them.
Chris (Yul Brynner): Guns are very expensive and hard to get. Why don’t you hire men?
Hilario: Men?
Chris: Gunmen. Nowadays, men are cheaper than guns. [op. cit.]
Yul Brynner’s words were especially true in 2020. Guns (and ammunition) were very expensive and hard to get. My weapon of choice, the Benelli shotgun, is a $2,000 firearm, not something you want to buy before learning how to shoot. So I took Brynner’s suggestion: I starting looking for a gunman, one who could lend me a shotgun and show me how to shoot it.
Predictably, the guy who made all those YouTube videos was not available. (Neither was Steve McQueen.) So I sent enquiries to a half dozen instruction schools in Nevada and Arizona since California was closed for business. The results were not encouraging. All had plenty of pistol and rifle classes, and lots loaner guns. Shotgun training was scarce, though, and the only shotguns available on loan were the long-barreled Elmer Fudd specials. One trainer didn’t even know what a tactical shotgun was. Had my adventure ended before it had even begun?
Then I received an email from an ex-Navy SEAL named Colton, proprietor and chief instructor at Noir Training, and everything changed.
Hilario: It won’t be hard to find men here. Everyone wears a gun.
Chris: Sure they do, the same as they wear pants. That’s expected. But good men, that’s something else again.
Hilario: How can you tell if they are good?
Chris: There are ways. [op. cit.]
One of the ways you can tell if someone knows what they are doing is their manner. Nothing is a problem for them. They have seen everything so they can handle anything. Colton had
no problem teaching me shotguns; he just seemed bored by the prospect. “The shotgun is not a particularly difficult or nuanced platform to train on,” he wrote, “so four hours should be plenty to cover the bases.” He owned a Remington 870 pump shotgun he could lend me for training.
He didn’t press the issue but he did suggest devoting some time to pistol training first. “I do typically recommend people learn with a pistol, specifically because it is the most difficult platform to use. Once you learn it, everything else is easy.”
He made sense. Everything he said about weapons made sense. He challenged my preconceptions without any “know-it-all” condescension. But his emails were curious; they presented an intriguing paradox. I couldn’t reconcile the genial, easy-going email messages Colton sent with the strict bad-ass image conveyed on the Noir Training website. His emails were full of self-deprecating references and jokes which he highlighted with a parenthetical (haha.) What kind of trained bad-ass writes (haha) in an email? Clearly, someone who must know what he’s doing.
Starting with pistol training seemed reasonable but I still had my heart set on tactical shotguns. Colton didn’t have a Benelli but he thought he could acquire a semi-auto shotgun for a training session. “It’s an IWI TS-12,” he wrote. “Tell me if you’re interested.”
What the hell? I found a video from the guy in that Midwest forest featuring an IWI TS-12. “IWI” stands for Israeli Weapons Industries, the folks who make Uzis. The video guy noted many technical details about the gun. No doubt the tech specs were all extremely important but I didn’t care. I only saw one thing. The TS-12 resembled the futuristic weapons used by the space Marines in the movie, Aliens. Whoa!
I wrote back to Colton: “I am in!”
Hasta La Vista Hollywood
[An inexperienced gunman fails his first audition for The Magnificent Seven and leaves the room in humiliation. The Mexican villagers sympathize.]
Hilario: Very [old] and very proud.
Chris: Ah, the graveyards are full of [geezers] who were very [old] and very proud.
— shamelessly paraphrased from The Magnificent Seven
I started entertaining doubts about my adventure about halfway through the eight-hour drive from San Jose to Las Vegas. Why had I engaged a Special Forces guy to guide me through my first experience with firearms? Had I been too hasty? Would I end up embarrassing myself like Chico in The Magnificent Seven?
Pro-Gun Las Vegas is a well-known shooting range situated at the foot of a small mountain in Boulder City, Nevada. It is Colton’s western instructional base. Pro-Gun is spread out like a dusty college campus, only it has dirt berms and expended cartridges instead of snowflake students and safe spaces. The air is filled with the intermittent crack of gunfire.
This is where I met Colton. I had never met a SEAL before. I knew SEALs were tough. (They had to be tough to survive the embarrassment of movie portrayals by Charlie Sheen and Steven Seagal.) My preconceptions of Colton evaporated quickly. He was jocular and accommodating, nothing like the buttoned-down military type I had conjured. In fact, he seemed more like a greeter at a lifeguard convention than a trained killer.
[You can get a glimpse Colton on his website (www.noirtraining.com) but you probably won’t recognize him. Colton prefers it that way. He and his partner, Tim, also prefer to use their first names until they get to know you better. Ex-Navy SEALs, who still venture overseas on anti-piracy contracts, are touchy about things like that. But you can read more about Colton in a companion profile, "Shooting Star."
Colton escorted me to our designated shooting range which was merely an open space surrounded on three sides by dirt embankments, berms. (The berms also serve as the public convenience should the need arise.) His office consists of an equipment trailer, a big wooden table covered in gear and shaded by a canopy. I felt as if I had been transported to a base in Kandahar Province.
“This training will ruin every action movie you see from now on,” Colton said, recalling the words of one of his former instructors. Indeed, it did. The first thing Colton produced was an emergency manual and a medical kit. “If you shoot yourself, I am the medical officer,” he
said, offhandedly. “If you shoot me, call 911 and give the dispatcher these GPS coordinates for the helipad right down there.”
On my 70th birthday, I was introduced to my first-ever Thunderdome scenario: two men enter, one man leaves, via helicopter apparently. Then another thought occurred to me, “Which of the Magnificent Seven was the medical officer?”
I know several novices who have ventured onto shooting ranges for a bang-bang party escapade. Their descriptions of the experience are universally ecstatic. Awesome fun! That’s not how I would describe pistol training under Colton. Though he kept things easy going, he made me work. The first two and a half hours were devoted to equipment explanations, stances, siting fundamentals, grips, and dry fire maneuvers like drawing and holstering. That lasted right up to the moment Colton had me load the Canik magazine, jam the mag into the pistol, and holster the weapon.
I was beyond nervous. It was time to deal in lead, friend.
Shooting Pains
[Bernardo O'Reilly (Charles Bronson) is teaching the villagers how to shoot.]
O’Reilly: Miguel, didn't I tell you to squeeze? Hm? Just like when you're milking a goat, Miguel.
Miguel (Natividad Vacio): It's that I get excited!
O’Reilly: Well don't get excited! Now this time squeeze. Slowly, but squeeze. All right now, squeeze.
[Miguel shoots wildly.]
O’Reilly: Squeeze! I'll tell you what. Don't shoot the gun. Take the gun like this, and you use it like a club, all right?
The first of many discoveries I made on the shooting range was, I am better with a gun than Miguel above, but not much better. Mexican bandidos won’t lose any sleep worrying about my marksmanship. My greatest asset is my old man’s perspective and caution. Colton actually complimented me on my measured approach to shooting. It allows me time to adjust my technique and it saves ammo, a rare commodity these days. I have seen a lot of mayhem created by adventurous, overly-eager neophytes. As I told Colton, “I have had my balls for seven decades. I don’t want to lose them now.”
There were other surprises. In every movie or real-life video I have seen depicting gunfights, someone is always moving: the shooter, the attacker, the environment, or all three. A gunfight is kinetic, meaning it involves movement: sudden, rapid, short-range, deadly movement. That is why I was surprised by my first visit to a shooting range. Nothing moves. The targets are stationary. A shooting gallery at the county fair is more kinetic than your typical shooting range.
Gunfights are intimate and quick. Colton explains, “Our targets are small and close because most gunfights happen within five to seven yards.” I did a little research and I discovered something called the “Rule of Threes,” which aligns with Colton’s statement. Most domestic gunfights occur at a distance of three to five yards, involve no more than three rounds fired, and are finished in less than three seconds.
Clint Eastwood couldn’t even finish a Dirty Harry speech in less than three seconds.
I had presumed the key to pistol marksmanship is eyesight. Eyesight is important, of course. You don’t come across many blind target shooters. But mastery of your digits — thumbs and fingers, particularly your trigger finger — is what is most crucial to successful shooting. I think that is what Colton meant when he advised me to learn pistol techniques first.
With a proper firing grip, all your fingers and both hands intertwine while the trigger finger extends along the side of the gun, away from the trigger. Once set, your arms, hands and nine of your fingers should remain motionless. Only your trigger finger should move. As you site, you depress the trigger slightly, to remove the slack. When you are ready, you pull the trigger all the way to fire. One shot, you release the trigger completely and re-position your finger along the gun, again away from the trigger. For repeat shots, you let up on the trigger partially, then squeeze off another shot.
Arms and eyes, hands, fingers, and weapon: I suddenly realize what intricate choreography goes into an accurate pistol shot. To a gun novice like me, seeing a professional handle a pistol is little like seeing a great hitter swinging a baseball bat. It seems easy enough until you try it. I watch Colton’s hands as he snaps though the inspection, loading, and operation of his pistol. His fingers, trained over years, synchronize like the Joffrey corps de ballet. My fingers, in contrast, are like the Animal House toga party.
The biggest failing of beginners is lack of muzzle awareness, according to Colton. They wave the gun around, à la Yosemite Sam, without respect to where it is pointed. I confess to this sin. Between shots, I was so curious about where my bullet hit the target, I lost track of the muzzle direction. Nothing too egregious but something to work on before I go off to defend any Mexican villages.
Sigourney Makes Her Entrance
Vin (Steve McQueen): I never rode shotgun on a hearse before. [op. cit.]
When we were done with pistols, Colton demonstrated his Remington 870 pump shotgun. It is a long-barrel gun that loads four shells. Colton mercifully restricted me to birdshot. Birdshot cartridges are smaller gauge shells meant for bird hunting. The advantage is, birdshot shells have a smaller powder load, rendering a more muted bang and recoil. That is easier on ancient greenhorn shoulders.
The Remington is only 7 ½ pounds (unloaded) but I found it heavy and awkward, probably because of the front-ended weight distribution. It was agonizing to support the barrel while trying to aim. No wonder Elmer Fudd never hit anything. Manually pumping the next shell into the firing chamber requires the strength of someone like, say, Colton. After just four rounds, I needed a full-body massage. (Incidentally, massages are not part of Colton’s course.) He wanted me to use the long gun first to demonstrate the challenges of firing a traditional shotgun. Point made, verily.
About this time I was starting to feel as if my maiden voyage into Gun Land had gone off course. My inexperienced fingers were too rebellious to fire a pistol like Yul Brynner. My ancient greenhorn arms were too weak to wield a shotgun like Steve McQueen. Don’t misunderstand, I was grateful for every moment of the experience. If nothing else, it demonstrated how shallow my knowledge of weapons was. Still, it would have been nice leave Pro Gun with some slightly credible achievement, something about which I could at least lie to my wife.
That was the moment Colton introduced the star of the show, the Sigourney-Weaver-in Aliens special, the IWI Tavor TS-12. Now we’re talkin!
The TS-12 is called a “bullpup” because, like a bulldog puppy, it is short, compact, and ugly. Ugly is in the eye of the beholder, though. A Benelli shotgun may be elegant, like an Armani suit, but the homely Israeli gun felt like…victory. It sports three five-shell magazines which can be manually rotated when more ammo is needed: Fire five shots, pause, rotate the mag, fire again. Sigourney Weaver used something similar — complete with flamethrower and grenade launcher — in the final shootout with the alien bug queen. In her honor, I now refer to the TS-12 as “The Sigourney” even though the shotgun does not actually come with a flamethrower. Or a grenade launcher.
The Sigourney is heavier than the Remington shotgun, nine pounds vs. 7.8 pounds. But the weight is distributed differently. Most of the weight of the gun is behind the trigger, supported by my shoulder, not by my feeble left arm. That makes the weapon immensely more maneuverable. Even with all the cumbersome gear I was sporting — safety eye glasses, noise reduction headphones, and a padded shooting shirt — the Sigourney was a breeze to shoot.
The laser sight made aiming simple, even for a geezer with bifocals. I literally hit everything I targeted, no sweat. Red dot on target…kablooey! There goes the target! Before using The Sigourney, based on a lifelong study of cartoon gunmen, I believed shotguns were essentially all boom and spray. Not this gun. It spits the shot out in a remarkably tight pattern. Colton had me fire at some small rocks on the back berm 50 yards away. The shot pattern was so tight, there was only a barely perceptible puff as the pebbles bit the dust.
The Sigourney and I were made for each other! Time to deal in lead! The alien queen bug (the stationary steel target to my right) was the first to feel my wrath. It went down in a hail of birdshot. Calvera, the outlaw leader (the stationary steel target to my left) fell in the next volley. He died with these words on his lips: “You came back…for a place like this. Why? A man like you. Why?”
The last bandido (the stones on the far berm) fled for his life but a single blast toppled him out of his saddle. He struck the ground with a gratifying thud. Then all was silent. My work was done.
[Having vanquished the Boot Hill mob, Vin and Chris share a bottle of whiskey provided by the Traveling Salesman (Val Avery).]
Stagecoach Driver: Thanks for the free show!
Vin: You’re more than welcome.
Salesman: Boy, that was really something! You know, I won’t forget that if I live to be a hundred.
Stage Passenger (Bing Russell): Henry, the stage is leaving!
Salesman: Alright, alright. Wait ‘til [my wife] hears about this. You know, she won’t believe one word of it!
Not one damn word. Wives are like that. Luckily, I was able to get the battle on video.