Shoot Club: Shot Club, Part Three

"I don't know if they're any good still." Trevor pulled from his backpack a box of bullets arranged on end, five rows of six, little bronze helmeted soldiers in formation.

"Can we shoot it?" We were pumped up on Rainbow Six. "Where would we go?"

"The backyard?"

"Sure, if you want to get arrested," Douglas laughed. "You can't just go into your backyard to shoot a gun. This isn't Arkansas or something. Plus, it's the middle of the night."

"Since you don't have a silencer, we could shoot through a pillow," the new guy said. "Do you have a silencer?"

Mike was looking through some online yellow pages. "This place looks fun. Ready, Aim, Fire. It's out by the airport."

"You guys have never been shooting before?" Douglas finally said, shaking his head. "Man, this should be a sight. Count me in. I haven't been in a few years, but I can show you the ropes."

Eight of us resolved to go the day after tomorrow, but three of us would flake. So that afternoon, me, Trevor, Mike, Peter, and Jude piled into Trevor's Honda and drove out to the airport. I called shotgun, where I held the silver case in my lap.

Ready, Aim, Fire was a non-descript, windowless concrete building. There was an oddly cheery red and yellow sign over the front door. We opened the door and the sound of assault rifles roared out at us, but it was only a TV.

We filed in uncertainly, like freshmen on their first day of school. Inside, there was a counter with a TV behind it. Two dudes who worked there were watching a movie. Heat. It was the shoot-out scene.

"Without gun control taking away your freedom, this would never happen," one of the guys was saying.

Maybe I should have told him that this, in fact, didn't ever happen, that it was a movie. But to be fair, he might have known the North Hollywood Bank of America robbery in 1997 may have been inspired by the scene. The police adapted after the fact by selecting different loadouts. As anyone who's played SWAT 4 would know, cops can have weapons that are varying degrees of lethal or non-lethal. Some cops can have the GB36 assault rifle. Others might just have that pepper spray paintball gun. Some cops take a taser instead of a sidearm. Just ask Mostafa Tabatabainejad, that guy who got tasered at UCLA. Yes, I had to look up his name.

"What can I do you for, fellas?" one dude asked. His buddy kept his attention on the shootout. Val Kilmer whipped around and fired off a few shots in the other direction.

Trevor put the case on the counter, popped the snaps open, flipped up the lid, and spun the case around. "We need bullets for this," he said.

"Look at that. An old Model 10. You don't see many of these six inch barrels anymore." He picked it up and popped the cylinder out, then sighted down the length of the barrel. "You've taken good care of it."

"Thanks. I mean, I haven't really used it."

"Well, that's one way to take care of it." He snapped the cylinder back in and then closed the hammer, which one of us had left back. "You don't want to leave this pulled back. It weakens the spring."

"Right," Trevor said, slightly embarrassed, the same way you'd be if your mechanic chided you for not setting the emergency break. De Niro fired a sustained burst into the side of a police cruiser. The cops with nothing but pistols and shotguns ducked down. Suppressing fire.