Hot shot. (Scan).

I have never been what you would call a gun nut. Sure, I've always taken libertarian pleasure in defending an individual's Second Amendment rights in a theoretical argument. But when it comes to real-life encounters with guns themselves, I've been happy to keep my distance. I know that "guns don't kill people" that "people kill people," but it always seemed to me that the "people and guns" combo posed the greatest likelihood of doing real damage. So I've been content to argue consistently for a right to bear arms, while staying far away from those arms in my everyday life.

That's why it was so strange to find myself standing in the lane of a Florida shooting range recently, staring down a paper target through the sight of a loaded 9 mm Glock handgun, slowly moving my index finger onto the trigger. And enjoying every minute of it.

I don't come from Florida. I'm a Canadian living in Toronto. I was in Florida with my boyfriend for the wedding of one of my college pals, and I agreed to accompany him to the shooting range because he had been so patient and good-humored over the weekend in sitting through endless "Whatever happened to ..." stories, innumerable SARS jokes, and much mocking of his Canadian accent, without complaint. If he wanted to spend the last evening of our vacation at a shooting range, I wasn't going to be an obstruction.

I was going to be a bit freaked out, mind you. I didn't know what to expect, and when we walked into the lobby of the shooting range and were greeted with shelves of ammunition, two display cases full of handguns, and a series of automatic weapons mounted on the wall behind the counter, I was ready to turn and run. But the boyfriend was all business, and before I had a chance to plan my escape he was chatting with the reassuringly diminutive young woman behind the counter and setting up his rental of an AK-47.

I, meanwhile, did my best not to hyperventilate as one of the male employees showed me a small cannon whose bullets, I was told, would break through a brick wall.

"Try not to look like a deer caught in headlights," my boyfriend whispered to me with a smile, as he took my hand and led me over to a table where he could fill out the many sheets of paperwork that were required before the kind folks at the ...