I hadn’t shot a gun since Boy Scout camp eight years ago. Born and raised in Miami, Fla., hunting is not something that was handed down from my father to me as it is often in the Deep South. For us, the purpose of guns could usually be summed up by their usage in drive-by shootings and home invasions that littered the evening news.

Stephen, on the other hand, was raised around guns and owns several himself. When his high school friends get together in and around Anniston, Ala., there’s a good chance the group will spend some time on firing range, bragging about a new firearm or scope, quietly competing to see who’s most accurate that day.

Together, Stephen and I are a solid example of the differences President Barack Obama described when in an address on gun control he said, “Obviously, across the country there are regional differences. There are differences between how people feel in urban areas and rural areas.”

The divide of big city life to that of rural living, of red states and blue states is at the core of many of our nation’s most pressing issues; but that cultural tempest is currently raging right here in Alabama over the issue of gun control after President Obama made it clear that gun control reform would be high on his list of second term priorities.

In the coming weeks, The Crimson White hopes to delve deeply into issues revolving around guns and violence in our society. It wouldn’t be possible to understand the issue unless we abandoned our comfort zones and challenged our preconceived notions.

In that spirit, Stephen and I headed west with a trunk full of his guns to share the range with a few of the millions of gun owners in America to find out what made shooting important to them.

A family affair

The sun mostly extinguished, Walter Powell took out some chewing tobacco and placed a dip in his mouth.

It was getting cold out, dinner was cooking and a Dora the Explorer toy ball rested near a car in the driveway.

“For me personally, if somebody harmed her or was in the process of doing something to her, then he’d be a dead son of a gun,” Powell said. “I’d kill the hell out of him. No doubt in my mind, I would kill him.”

Powell was talking about his granddaughter in light of the Sandy Hook massacre which took the lives of 20 first grade students in Newtown, Conn. The girl in question was at the house and eager to greet visitors by crashing their conversations with an adorable flourish.

Powell owns C&W Shooting in Ralph, Ala. The range sits on his sprawling property 45 minutes from campus and includes a skeet and trap course, a five-stand sporting clay combination area and pistol and rifle firing range. His daughter works at the range and his son helped him set up the business a few years back. It’s a family affair for Powell, as guns have always been.

“My dad taught me everything that I know about guns,” he said. “That’s just what boys in the country used to do, grew up shooting.”

In his professional life, Powell worked for The University of Alabama maintenance department and is now retired. After shooting clay targets 10 years ago with a group from work, Powell said he became hooked and organized the range with his son.

He charges a modest $6 for 25 shots on the clay courses and $10 an hour for using the pistol and rifle range, but said the money wasn’t important to him.

“If it was something that I didn’t enjoy and didn’t enjoy the people who are associated with guns, I wouldn’t do it for the money,” Powell said.

The next generation

Powell said the local 4-H club shoots at the clay course every Sunday and recently a baseball camp of 30 kids came to his property to shoot skeet.

“For a lot of those boys, it was their first time ever handling a gun, the first time they ever shot,” Powell said. “When they bust their first clay out there, some of them are probably bit.”

He said the size of the group and the short amount of time they spent on the range, kept him from making the boys skeet shooting experts, but allowed time to teach them about gun safety.

“At least,” he said, “They have had the opportunity to shoot a gun and know what a gun is capable of doing without reading it in the damn newspaper or some liberal ass on TV telling them how bad they are.”

Powell is no fan of President Obama or most of his gun control proposals. He voted for Mitt Romney in November and supports the NRA’s proposal to place an armed guard in every school across America.

Sandy Hook had an emotional impact on Powell, but he said he doesn’t know what can be done to prevent another mass shooting.

“I wish I was smart enough to know what the damn solution would be to correct everything,” Powell said.

Out on the range

“Not too long ago, I was sitting on the couch one night and I heard a sound outside my door and there’s a guy literally karate chopping, kicking trees in my front yard and shaking my mailbox,” Jodi, a gun enthusiast, said after a few hours of shooting at the pistol and rifle range. He owns six guns, and attributes some of his ownership to self-defense issues in his rural town.

“The guy was disturbed or drunk or whatever else but he kept getting closer and closer to the house,” Jodi said.

While the police made their way to his house, Jodi watched and waited, worried that the man would try to enter his house or his neighbor’s, or throw rocks through his windows and doors. Times like that, Jodi said, made him glad to have a gun in his house.

Jodi declined to give his last name for this story, as did his friend Brian. They were both at the range with their friend Jeremiah Davis, a professor of Agriculture Engineering at Mississippi State University.

Davis grew up on a farm in the Texas panhandle and said guns are more of a utility than anything else.

“People from the city don’t understand, these are tools,” Davis said. “It was never a big deal to have them around, even as a little kid. You knew you weren’t supposed to touch them without an adult around.”

Brian was quiet and reserved during our time at the range. Tall and topped with red hair, he said that he was originally from Western Kentucky, where he grew up hunting deer and birds.

Jodi’s story is similar. He said he is from a rural part of southeast Texas and said that the landscape is dotted with poisonous snakes and coyotes.

“It’s just a consequence of where I grew up and the environment I was raised in,” Jodi said. “There’s never been a time in my life when I haven’t been shooting or hunting, it’s just life.”

Some of the guns Jodi owns are for hunting, and some are for the defense of himself and his home. Others, he takes to the range with his friends because they’re fun to shoot.

“I equate [the guns I own] to pairs of shoes,” Jodi said. “I’ve got a pair of shoes to wear with my suit, a pair to run in, a pair of work boots and they all serve a different purpose.”

The three men shared Powell’s distrust of the federal government’s push to ban assault weapons and to limit the amount of ammunition a magazine can hold.

Jodi said if he had the chance, he would tell Obama that there are millions of American gun owners who have never fired a shot in anger, and addressing the nation’s gun violence should be done carefully, with an eye for the cause of the problem, not its symptoms.

“I’m a scientist for a living and my job is to ask ‘why?’ And I don’t think we are asking the ‘why?’” Jodi said. “We’re spanking the kids and sending them to bed without asking them why they threw the rock through the window.”

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