NEWS & POLITICS

rain that makes you want to kill God, Dina had already made green smoothies for myself and Tricia, their friend and Starter Wife drummer, and o ered us both hot tea. Later, they made us cheesy grits and eggs before we packed up for the range.

After two hours of Intuitive Tactical Solutions safety training in Dina’s apartment, Tricia and I knew the four fundamentals of gun safety—treat all guns as though they are fully loaded, keep your fi nger o the trigger until you’ve decided to shoot, be sure of what your target is as well as what’s behind it, and never, ever point your gun at something you are not willing to destroy. We practiced how to safely pick up a gun, never touching the trigger, never pointing the muzzle at anything unsafe. We practiced aiming the SIRT at a grocery bag hung up in Dina’s kitchen, fi nding our posture, conscious of our breaths. There was more—so much more— and throughout it all, Dina was attentive and alert to our bodies, our questions, our apprehension and excitement. Like me, Tricia—a thoughtful white woman in her 30s with glasses and a good, thick braid—came from a family of gun owners, at least on her dad’s side, but that gene seemed to have skipped her. This trip to the gun range would also be her fi rst.

Ladies get in half-o on Women Wednesday at Eagle Sports Range in Oak Forest. We arrived midmorning, when the range would have less people (the emptier a range, the fewer opportunities for accidents). Inside, Destiny’s Child sang “Say My Name” via

Weird And Weirder

DRAWINGS BY MAC BLACKOUT

DRAWINGS BY MAC BLACKOUT

DRAWINGS BY MAC BLACKOUT

PAINTINGS BY LARDO LARSON

PAINTINGS BY LARDO LARSON

Agitator Gallery 3851 W Fullerton Ave, Chicago

Agitator Gallery 3851 W Fullerton Ave, Chicago

Agitator Gallery 3851 W Fullerton Ave, Chicago

Opening March 4, 2023 6–10 pm

Opening March 4, 2023 6–10 pm

Closing and performances March 24 6–10 pm

Opening March 4, 2023, 6-10 pm

Closing and performances March 24 6–10 pm

Closing and performances March 24, 6-10 pm

Howard Brown Health is pleased to o er a new more convenient way for current patients to schedule their visits!

Online scheduling is now available for in-person visits. For established primary care patients, making an appointment is quick and easy, and available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for your convenience at howardbrown.org/mychart. Please visit howardbrown.org for information about our walk-in clinics.

If you have any questions about becoming a new patient, the new patient portal, or need assistance to sign up for MyChart, 773.388.1600 continued from p. 13 speakers overhead while a young woman wearing a cream-colored hijab polished a case of ammunition. Dina and a middle-aged white man using a cane greeted each other enthusiastically, then briefly mourned together the loss of another range friend, a Black woman who’d recently passed from cancer. Then, while Tricia and I perused safety goggles, Dina caught up with a tall Black man in his 60s they called Mr. P.

This was James Perkins, I’d later learn, a Navy veteran, fi rearms instructor, and professional jazz saxophonist and woodwind player who’d just finished closing as one of the orchestra musicians for The Factotum , the groundbreaking world premiere opera set in a present-day Black barber shop on Chicago’s south side and produced by Lyric Opera. This month, Mr. P. will be the principal saxophone soloist in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, playing at the James M. Nederlander Theatre from March 14-April 2.

“I carry wherever and whenever I’m legally allowed,” Mr. P. told me in an interview after my trip to the range. “Most people will see me in the middle of some of the largest stages in the country with a fi rearm on my hip.” As a musician, he views owning a gun as part of protecting tens of thousands of dollars of instruments and other musical equipment; as the grandson of farmers, he views fi rearms as sometimes necessary for obtaining food; and as a Black man born in Chicago, “I understand the usage of them in defending my personal freedom, because I have not as of yet seen a law written that will put my life back into my body if I am aggressed upon. For me, it is a necessary staple and part of everyday living.”

Mr. P. believes that “900 percent of the [gun control] laws that exist now only came into being when people such as myself gained access to those fi rearms.” Over the phone, he reminded me that when the Constitution was written, Black Americans were not considered citizens but rather property, and were only considered to be three-fi fths human to a white person. Later, in the post-Civil War south, the so-called Black Codes intended to terrorize and control newly-freed Black people by prohibiting them from owning fi rearms. And in 1967, Republicans in Califor- nia embraced gun control when it was Black Panthers who were open carrying.

As the gun control debate continues today, many people advocate for mandatory prison sentences as a way of regulating fi rearms and thereby improving public safety, but in 2021, a decade after such a sentencing law was enacted in Illinois, Loyola University evaluated its e ects and reported out. Convicting more people for fi rearm possession leads to a substantial and disproportionate increase of incarceration of young Black men, and the report found no evidence that it reduces gun violence or improves safety overall.

Like Dina, Mr. P. also sees a relationship between his work as a musician and his work as a firearms instructor. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s playing a horn and being able to deliver the correct emotional or intellectual intent to our audience,” he told me. “It’s the same thing when I put a fi rearm in my hands: it’s to deliver precision—the effective and safe delivery of what it is I’m trying to do. I wouldn’t expect a poor musician to be a great shot, because the elements of discipline are not there.”

I am not a musician. I am a writer, given to winding sentences and multiple hyphens. Discipline I know, but precision and I are frenemies at best. And yet, at the range, Dina’s .22 in my hand, I found myself badly wanting the prodigal daughter homecoming, to discover, latent in my blood, that I am a crack shot. Adrenaline lit me up like a match. I breathed and felt Dina at my side, watching my form, the position of my hands. I aimed, and fi red.

My shots were fi ne. Not great, but not bad either. My groupings were mostly around the rubber duckie printed on the target paper, nothing human to aim at on it, nothing that, in real life, could really bleed. Tricia, however, was a star.

“Oh no,” she repeated to herself. “Oh no.” (When I later asked Tricia about her response, she said she was having di culty separating good marksmanship from the lethality of fi rearms, regardless of how safely they’re handled or stored. “It’s terrifying to realize you’re naturally good at something you’ve spent years trying to separate yourself from, physically and ideologically.”) Despite Tricia’s involuntary protestations, Dina’s eyes gleamed. They hit the button that brought the target back in. There was proof: Tricia’s grouping was far tighter, a fi st to my melon, and targets had one entry hole for multiple bullets, meaning her aim was very sharp indeed. Perhaps Mr. P’s theory on musicians was right.

The range began to fi ll up, and for a while, we were the only white people there. Black women, in pairs and alone, ages early 20s to 70s, aimed and fi red. Latina women with long black ponytails yelled as they chatted above the sound of gunfi re. Latino men took turns on targets that seemed impossibly far away, and geeked out with Dina over the fi rearms they’d brought to the range today. In the corner, an elderly Latina in a black bejewled hat and a faux-fur infinity scarf held the paper target her husband had just shot, studying the holes in it like a map.

Every time I held one at the range, I never forgot there was a gun in my hand. Sometimes, the enormity of the responsibility in my hands made me shake, so I’d set it down for a bit until my body was calmer. “It’s a huge responsibility,” Dina told me during our fi rst interview, on the subject of owning a fi rearm. “If you’re a responsible gun owner, you never stop training: situationally, socially, in a multitude of ways.” I didn’t leave the range ready to purchase my own gun. Still, the day after my trip to the range, I went running. This is not unusual: I run every other day. It’s when I feel most myself, my strongest physically and mentally, even as some men who see me do it—men in cars, on the sidewalks, alone and together—like to catcall and stare and remind me I’m vulnerable. What was new was how I found my hands curling around an imaginary gun, practicing their muscle memory without me: left thumb under right, fi nger defi nitely not on the trigger, left hand pushing forward while the right hand pulled back. Ready, steady, aim.