SATISFACTORY BANGING NOISES

Martin Vander Weyer discovers the joys

of the American pastime of handling an assortment of deadly weapons

Duchess County GUNS ARE to American country houses what croquet mallets and Scrabble are to the English. Last Sunday morning, in the course of a birthday-party weekend on an estate in Duchess County, New York, 90 miles north of Manhattan, I took target practice with a cold, fearsome chunk of sculpted metal called a Colt .44 Magnum. This is the calibre of six-shooter favoured by Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry: `. . . the most powerful handgun in the world,' he famously remarked to a cornered adver- sary in mid-firefight. 'I don't recall whether I got off five shots or six back there. Do you feel lucky, punk?'

The weapon is heavy enough to do seri- ous injury if you drop it on your foot, never mind the savage jolt to your shoul- der when you pull the trigger. It would require superhuman strength to shoot straight one-handed, as Clint does, and you would rapidly go deaf unless equipped at all times with industrial ear-defenders. When I suggested that we raise the target on to a convenient tree-stump on the ridge in front of us, it was pointed out that a bullet which passed over the ridge (rather than embedding itself in the ground) would travel for a mile or so down into the township of Smithfield in the valley below, where it would still be capable of blowing a significant hole in a worshipper leaving the colonnade of the charming Greek- revival church or tending the flag-decked graves of veterans of foreign wars. A Colt .44 is an unusual thing to play with at a birthday party.

But it was only one of many guns on dis- play and in use over the weekend. Invited for a pheasant shoot, one American guest arrived in his 5-litre pick-up truck equipped as though for an assault on the Fort Apache police station in the South Bronx. My hosts, an Englishman and his American wife, have highly civilised tastes: they have built a beautiful house on sloping ground landscaped according to 18th-century prin- ciples. And they have a gun-rack in their elegant drawing-room which would not look out of place in Saddam Hussein's bunker.

In pride of place is a matched pair of Edwardian 12-bores. There are over-and- under shotguns preferred for clay-pigeon shooting; smaller-bore shotguns perfectly adapted for the mass slaughter of Spanish partridge and Mexican dove. Next are rifles with telescopic sights for deer, wood- chuck, groundhog and raccoon, not to mention a .38 revolver and a Luger pistol. The only piece not actually in regular use is a Hemingwayesque blunderbuss suitable for those rare moments when you meet a rogue elephant or have yourself heli- coptered into the Yukon in search of griz- zly bear.

This glimpse of the pervasiveness of gun culture in the politest of American society may help to understand why, 30 years after the assassination of JFK, even the very limited gun-control measures now under Senate debate — the so-called Brady Bill, imposing a brief waiting period in the pur- chase of a handgun — are so fiercely resisted.

There are 200 million guns in circulation in the United States, compared with 826,000, most of them sporting shotguns, in Britain. The number of handguns in pri- vate ownership has more than quadrupled since 1968, to 70 million. The National Rifle Association, which lobbies powerful- ly for the American citizen's ancient right to be armed, has 3 million members. Meanwhile, a young American male is 20 times more likely to be shot dead than his English equivalent, and a young black Cal- ifornian has a greater chance of being shot dead than of attending the University of California. But guns are by no means the preserve of the hoodlum, the underclass and the homi- cidal maniac. They are fashion accessories and familiar household objects, instru- ments of male-bonding, buddyism and out- doorsmanship, symbols of the American belief that a man's land is his own king- dom, to be defended come what may. Killer weapons are everywhere, in all shapes and sizes, owned by all manner of decent, home-loving, fun-loving people.

I rarely shoot in England, but in America I seem to do little else. I have never passed a day in Duchess County without being invited to blaze away with some component of my friends' arsenal, whether at targets, clays or passing wildlife. Ironically, the only days in the year when they themselves pre- fer to stay indoors are at the beginning of the deer-hunting season, when their land and all the surrounding countryside is men- aced by car-loads of beer-swilling, rifle- waving city-dwellers, revelling in one of the great American rituals of machismo.

Our own hunting days (for pheasant) at the nearby Mashomack Preserve Club, one of the smartest shooting venues in the United States, are relatively restrained, for- mal expressions of this national fascination with firepower — walking, four guns abreast, through melancholy marshland and uncut maize. Here European notions of etiquette are applied, automatic weapons disallowed and the story derisively told of a trigger-happy Texan visitor, seeing that the gun-dog had cornered a live cock- bird on the ground, running up yelling, `Hold that little sucker, boy, I'm gonna nail him right there where he is.'

Some of the club members could pass for dukes, but our own companions were per- `Actually, as dinner parties go, it was quite bizarre. The only man there I hadn't had sex with was my husband!' haps the more archetypal American sportsmen: on one outing the best shot was Skip, an advertising executive in red base- ball cap and fluorescent-panelled, ammu- nition-laden deer-hunting suit; he and others with us were just the kind of middle- class liberal professional who would abhor guns and bloodsports if they were English.

The weekend experience would be incomplete without a visit also to the local gun-store, where the purchaser, whether sporting or psychotic, has only to show a New York driving licence as proof of resi- dence within the state to buy all the muni- tions his heart desires. On special offer, for example, was a short-barrelled, pistol-grip, pump-action shotgun.

`What game is that for?' I asked inno- cently. 'Self-defence,' was the matter-of- fact reply. The short barrel (as with a sawn-off model) gives a wide scatter of shot which ensures that at short range, even when firing from the hip through a closed bedroom door, you can't miss. The distinctive clunk-click of its automatic cocking action somewhere in a darkened house is enough to deter many an experi- enced burglar; a tape-recording of it would be almost as effective, and a lot less fright- ening to handle.

In some states — like Texas, proud of its red-neck, gun-toting frontier traditions, and Kentucky — there are no state laws to be complied with at all before tooling up for a hunting trip, a bank raid or a Waco siege. Florida, conscious of the bad public- ity associated with the casual murder of foreign tourists, is slightly stricter: a three- day waiting period for purchases and a ban on ownership by juveniles. But a friend of mine, who has a riverside house there and likes to shoot poisonous water-snakes, found it impossible to register his armoury with the local police.

`We don't even have a form,' the desk officer told him, adding helpfully that it is quite legal for a citizen to keep a loaded handgun in his car so long as it is not con- cealed, and finishing with some homely advice: 'Any o'them niggers start comin' through the windows, you-all just go ahead and shoot 'em.'

Back in Duchess County the visceral thrill of our Sunday shooting practice was increased by using targets which explode dramatically if you hit the little pink bull's- eye. In a curious echo of the adult male psychology involved, we returned to the house for lunch to find two four-year-old boys, made to stay indoors during the shooting, jumping on a sheet of plastic bubble-wrap to achieve their own satisfac- tory banging noises.

Explosions are fun, guns are exciting. Perhaps, like me, you have always imag- ined a Colt .44 Magnum to be something which exists only in films. When offered the real thing, you will find that it feels good; it fits just right in the masculine hand. So God bless America, but thank Him also for British gun laws.