![\"\"](\"http:\/\/graphics8.nytimes.com\/images\/blogs\/happydays\/guns.480.jpg\" "\\"Photographs")
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Once again in the New York Times<\/em> Happy Days blog, I’m testing myself. Last time<\/a>, I was testing my faith. This time, it’s my trigger finger:<\/p>\n I\u2019ve always really liked guns. Growing up, I fantasized about them endlessly, though my parents discouraged it every way they could. I came to agree with them in principle \u2014 that violence doesn\u2019t solve much of anything, that the world would be better without weapons \u2014 though it didn\u2019t keep me from stockpiling toy armaments. In the years since, I\u2019ve become a partisan in pacifist causes, around which congregates a community that has no patience for packing heat. But I continue to feel that old attraction. I can still get swept away in fantasies of firepower. So nearly a decade into legal age with nary a shot fired, I decided it was time to test my reveries against the real thing: would a gun really satisfy them or cause me to recoil in horror?<\/p>\n It was with this purpose that, together with my indulgent friend, Rachel, I set out for a nearby shooting center, an unmarked building hiding in a quiet Long Island neighborhood, around the corner from a front-yard shrine to the bravery of firemen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Read the rest of “Warm Gun<\/a>” over at Happy Days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n