The First Time I Fired a Gun

The summer of the year I turned 14 is mostly a blur. But reading all the news about shootings, from Alec Baldwin’s on-set accident to anniversaries of Columbine, the Pulse nightclub, Sandy Hook elementary school, Parkland high school, the Jason Aldeen concert in Las Vegas, one memory does come back to me. The first time I discharged a firearm.

In 1977, after some uncomfortable experiences, I was adamant about not returning to sleepaway camp. My parents enrolled me in a series of weekly “Trips for Teens” through the Highland Park Y.

The second week, we traveled to Montreal and slept on the floor of the auditorium in a local Y. The final week was day trips to various tourist sites around Manhattan. But the first week took place in upstate New York, I’d remembering somewhere around Saratoga, at a dude ranch.

There are different levels of dude ranch camping. At the top of the food chain, you rent an air-conditioned cabin, with a private bedroom and bathroom and even a spa to work out the kinks after a day of riding horses in your recently- purchased designer faux cowboy gear.

As a group of ragtag teenage campers, we were relegated to an Army-style barracks filled with creaky cots. The girls slept on one side of the structure, and the boys on the other side. One set of bathrooms split the middle of the facility, with males…