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http://www.newsday.com/features/pri...ct26,0,6635356.story?coll=ny-lilife-headlines
http://www.newsday.com/features/pri...ct26,0,6635356.story?coll=ny-lilife-headlines
Trigger Happy
Meet Long Island's gun lovers who shoot for sport - and aim for fun and camaraderie
By Zachary R. Dowdy
STAFF WRITER
October 26, 2003
Not long before sundown, Gun- Toting Tony rode his horse through the serene plains of Riverhead when the black-hatted bandits appeared out of nowhere.
One sprang from behind a dirt mound, others popped up from the dusty terrain. Yes, the bandits were two-dimensional man-shaped metal plates and not really alive, but the gunslinger didn't like the looks of 'em.
"Plink! Plink!" was the sound of his six-shooter's bullets hitting home. Then he slid off the horse - actually a rusty drum turned on its side with a second-hand saddle thrown onto it.
Next, the cowboy, also known as Tony Giammarino, burst through the swinging doors of Fun Faces Saloon and emptied his rifle. The last man standing, he nailed 25 of 26 metal targets in a bloodless 76-second firefight.
His performance was not bad but "not great," either, Giammarino said. He cracked a smile under his red kerchief but seemed mildly crestfallen as he walked from the scene, a set of crude props erected in a cavernous pit at the Riverhead Range on this, and most, weekends.
In his heart, he knew his score would not stand, since another sharpshooter, Steve Freeman, whose nom de guerre is The Brooklyn Kid, was up next.
The Wild West scenarios that Giammarino and the dozens of other members of the Hole in the Wall Gang club played out on a September weekend are fake, fun pastimes - but the guns and ammunition they use to live out these fantasies are real.
They laugh and poke fun at each other as they dress up in circa-1878 garb and take on personas like so many John and Jane Waynes - but they are like thousands of Long Islanders who are dead serious about preserving their right to own and use these firearms.
"For me, this is a freedom issue," Giammarino said, wrapping up his session of Cowboy Action Shooting, the Wild West re-enactment game that is the latest craze among recreational shooters. "The Second Amendment has to do with freedom," said the 50-year-old Lynbrook resident, who publishes The Long Island Sportsmen's Courier, a journal for gun enthusiasts.
"A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed," reads the amendment in the U.S. Constitution.
Many people, like Giammarino, who want no restrictions on their right to own a gun, zealously cling to a view that the "right to bear arms" constitutional amendment of 1791 applies to individuals, and not only militias.
New York State has some of the toughest gun laws in the country, but many safety advocates argue that stricter limits are necessary. Among those who love and own guns on Long Island, though, the debate is academic. What is tangible for them is the grip of the cold metal in the palm and the punch of the shotgun butt as it smacks the shoulder.
They say it's addictive, the thrill of pulling a trigger and seeing a bullet blast a target. And the addictions come in many forms: tiptoeing through woods in a hunt for wild game, yelling "Pull!" during a trap and skeet session, taking down metal bandits during Cowboy Action Shooting, and nailing imaginary enemies in a target shooting set.
The statistics bear that out.
Nassau County had more than 26,000 registered handgun owners last year who claimed more than 100,000 handguns, said Sgt. Kevin Haig of the Nassau County Pistol License Section. That's about as many as are registered in all of New York City, which has stricter gun regulations, he said.
In Suffolk, nearly 29,000 registered handgun owners hold 86,000 firearms, said Sgt. Michael Esposito, executive officer of the Suffolk County Police Department's pistol licensing bureau.
Police say they don't worry too much about registered firearms. "We're not dealing with criminals here," Haig said of Nassau's registered owners. "There's very little illegal involvement with these guns."
Guns were used in half of the 26 homicides in the county last year, notes Lt. Kevin Smith, spokesman for Nassau police, but not one of those guns was registered.
So why do some Long Islanders own guns? In Nassau, Haig said, about 25 percent of the license holders get guns for business purposes: security guards and jewelers, for example. Another 25 percent are retired police officers, and the remaining 50 percent are collectors and others who get handguns for sport.
There are several indoor and outdoor ranges on Long Island, which host high-profile competitions regularly, and several clubs for either collectors or shooters, including at least three Cowboy Action Shooting groups. There are also several gun shows each year where dealers display their wares.
"I think everybody's got an innate curiosity about firearms in general," said John Cushman of Patchogue, president and founder of the Sportsmen's Association for Firearms Education (SAFE), a Long Island group dedicated to educating the public and to preserving and expanding gun owners' rights, such as lower fees and the availability of ranges.
Cushman, a former Marine who calls himself a "for fun" shooter, or someone who is less concerned with competitive shooting than the camaraderie and recreational aspects of the sport, is also one of 75 directors of the Virginia- based National Rifle Association, perhaps the country's best known organization for gun lovers.
Cushman's firearms-education group, for which Giammarino serves as a vice president, monitors laws and lobbies for "pro-gun" rights legislation on Long Island and in Albany. Realizing that guns are dangerous - and sometimes deadly - when in the wrong hands, the group emphasizes both safety training and secure storage of firearms. With 700 members on Long Island, the group has consistently lobbied Suffolk legislators in a years-long battle to reopen the Suffolk Trap and Skeet Range in Yaphank, which closed when its former owner abandoned it.
The NRA counts about 21,600 members in Nassau and Suffolk, said Mary Sue Faulkner, director of the community service programs division of the NRA.
"I got involved by being a native Long Islander," said Bob Baumann of Copiague, who said he used to eat lunch with his father while sitting on his back porch in Bellmore with a shotgun across his lap, keeping watch for hawks that would swoop down and snatch chickens from his coop.
A Long Island-region director of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association Inc., which is NRA's local affiliate, Baumann said there was a time when dozens of Long Island high schools had shooting teams that competed regionally and nationally. Now there are only a handful of school- based programs scattered across the Island.
"It was a different time and a different world," he said. "I'm sorry that time has passed."
Baumann, who is president of the Suffolk Alliance of Sportsmen, another gun-owners collective, is a former Marine who learned to handle a gun on the eve of adolescence.
"I shot my first squirrel when I was 11," he said, adding that he has handled guns in some capacity for about 60 years since that day a neighbor showed him the basics.
"When I was growing up here in the '30s, when it was much more rural than it is now, it was common to have firearms in the home and become familiar with them," he said. "It was not at all unusual for younger people under the supervision of their parents to go to a field with a .22-caliber rifle or a BB gun to hit tin cans and such."
That would be "plinking," the art of accurately striking sundry targets propped up just to be shot down, making the sound that gives it its name.
At The Sharpshooters Café in Ridge, children watch Saturday cartoons over cereal as their parents talk guns and Long Island politics over coffee. An occasional "pop" and "boom" echo from the Long Island Shooting Range of Brookhaven. The sprawling complex features trap and skeet shooting, rifle and pistol shooting and archery.
Maureen Ariola of Holbrook is a regular.
It shows by the way she tenderly pulls her hand-crafted Perazzi shotgun out of its velvet-lined case and handles it as if it were her firstborn. It may as well be: Such premium-quality firearms can cost more than $10,000 and require meticulous care.
The gun she travels with is enshrined in a fortress-like compartment she had built into her sport utility vehicle, a muscular jet-black Ford Explorer Sport Trac with fearsome-looking bald eagles and American flags emblazoned on its sides.
The vehicle also carries the phrase, "God Bless America," bears her New York State Rifle and Pistol Association membership sticker, and sports an only half-joking decal of her "Terrorist Hunting Permit."
Ariola, 55, a mainframe computer programmer, first handled a small rifle as a kid growing up in the Adirondacks.
But she began picking up shotguns and showing up for trap and skeet shoots at various Long Island ranges over the past eight years.
She said she was hooked after she struck her first clay pigeon, the orange disc that's spit out of a machine at about 40 mph when she yells, "Pull!"
"When you see that target explode into a million pieces, you really feel good," she said. "This has basically taken up all of my spare time."
It's also taken up quite a bit of money. Ariola thinks she's spent from $15,000 and $20,000 on her hobby over the years.
She travels to regional and national shooting events, sports different pairs of shooting gloves for each season of the year, owns "shotguns, rifles and handguns" and caches of ammunition.
"If you're going to do it, you may as well do it right," she said.
That's the spirit behind the National Rifle Association's Women on Target series, an increasingly popular seminar that aims to introduce women to shooting.
Long Island's first Women on Target program was held at the Long Island Shooting Center in Islip on Oct. 4, said Cushman, who held the session with Amy Heath, a NRA-trained instructor who has run clinics in New York City. Forty women signed up for the event, which featured instruction on .22-caliber rifles, Cushman said.
NRA officials say interest in these programs has grown nationally, from 13 clinics attended by 496 women in 2000, to 111 clinics last year, where 3,427 women fired shotguns - many for the first time.
Most women learn about clinics through word of mouth.
"Women have said they know they are going to come to a safe environment and will receive instruction from certified instructors, so the focus is on safety," said Stephanie Henson, the NRA's manager of women's programs. "We have seen interest in these shooting clinics from the growth of the programs."
Guns spark other kinds of passions, too.
Collector Bill Bluver, 65, of Oceanside, who doubles as Marshal Ben Thompson during Cowboy Action Shooting, deals strictly in the Colt Peacemaker, the legendary .45-caliber handgun that some say won the West.
When the semi-retired engineer isn't inventing scenarios for the Hole in the Wall Gang to act out, he's reading about, trading or traveling to admire all things Colt.
Whit Fentum, director of the National Firearms Museum in Fairfax, Va., and gun collecting for the NRA, said there are about 120 collector clubs affiliated with the NRA, with memberships ranging from 10 members to 2,000.
Colts, he said, are among the most popular.
"It's a hobby that spreads the breadth of the country, coast to coast," said Fentum, adding that the most avid gun collectors have discriminating tastes, choosing guns with the care that others reserve for purchasing homes or monitoring stock portfolios.
But instead of location, location, location, gun owners obsess over condition, condition, condition.
Colt .45s from 1873, the year of introduction, are classics and hard to get cheaply. Bluver, who belongs to the Colt Collectors Association and attends gun shows throughout the country, said he has a pair on display at the Cody Firearms Museum in Cody, Wyo.
Fentum said collecting is a fine art, with guns being traded like Rembrandts by prestigious auction houses.
Ironically, he said, collectors are perhaps the most paradoxical group of gun enthusiasts. To keep their gems well preserved, they have to avoid using them.
"Every time you pull the trigger there's a little wear and tear on the gun," he said. "Shooting it degrades it, so collectible firearms are rarely ever fired."
That's why Bluver has two sets of guns - some for firing and others for admiring.
"It's a part of the legend of history," said Bluver, a collector for 25 years. "I have some very expensive guns. It just became an obsession."
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
It'll be worth it, to have more people aware of what gun owners are really like.