A Pleasant Weekend at Woodland Brutality

or: I entered my first shooting competition

Last weekend I entered a shooting competition for the first time, and I didn’t come in dead last, which rules. I shot farther and faster than I have before, which rules. I didn’t get myself disqualified (an easy thing to do when you’re new to competitive shooting, apparently), which rules. And I spent several days in the woods surrounded by trans girls in tactical pants who can easily hit moving targets while under physical duress. Which, you know, rules.

It was the Woodland Brutality match, put on by InRangeTV. A Better Way 2A was there giving out snacks for free. These are both organizations who work to make firearms education more accessible to marginalized groups, advocating the radical idea that the second amendment is for everyone.

Now to be clear, this doesn’t make Woodland Brutality a specifically “leftist” event. It’s just built on a community that is committed to inclusivity and acceptance. Grouchy old cis men got my pronouns right. A 64-year-old firearms instructor, who blew through stage after stage of the match, gave me thoughtful compliments about my progress after I rallied myself to successfully shoot moving targets for the first time.

The Brutality matches are committed to inclusivity and acceptance, but they also committed to setting up some of the most physically challenging shooting competitions you can find. The first stage I shot involved dragging tires and ammo cans back and forth, pausing to shoot targets with pistol and rifle both. Another involved lying prone on a swinging platform before moving from barricade to barricade, before dragging a 150lbs dummy, before returning to the swinging platform to shoot. The optional “Kasarda challenge” involves throwing a kettle ball, over and over, as you make your way downrange while shooting a steel target. That particular stage is scored separately from the rest of the event because the match organizers don’t want upper body strength to disproportionately influence scoring.

I thought I was only going to come to watch, but my friend Karl, the founder, gently encouraged me to participate. I found “gentle encouragement to push yourself to do hard things” to be the vibe of the whole event (other people, optionally, preferred to be heckled as they went. To each their own.). So I loaded my gear and guns into my van and drove through the beautiful mountains of West Virginia to the shooting range. As I drove past signs that read things like “firearms use in progress: trespassing may result in death,” I thought to myself “I sure hope I’ve got the right place.”

I got lucky enough that Karl was the first person I saw as I drove in. He shot the whole match with lever action rifles while dressed in a perfect Battle of Blair Mountain outfit, overalls and buttondown. A good tribute to West Virginia, where a hundred years ago, workers went to war against the owners who were gunning them down.

I wanted to compete, but I had a problem: where I live, I don’t have long sight lines, so none of my rifles were adequately zeroed. Karl lugged a steel target over to the end of one of the many shooting bays and patiently worked with me to zero not just the gun I competed with (a cheap-but-trusty AR-15 carbine with a red dot sight and no magnification) but my 308 bolt-action deer rifle and the 22 magnum bolt-action varmint gun that my dad used to shoot groundhogs with before I was born, when he got out of the marines and lived on a farm for awhile. Anyone who knows me will not be surprised to know that that 22 is far and away my favorite gun. It’s just not for competition.

With everything sighted in, we went off to go shoot. The eight stages were spread out over a mile or so of gravel road that runs through the property, and most people drive from stage to stage. (Those in the hardcore “trooper” division of the competition have to carry all of their gear with them on foot and are not allowed to resupply anything besides water over the course of the weekend.)

The very first stage was that aforementioned “run around carrying tires and ammo cans while pausing to shoot targets” and I learned two things immediately: one, I am an adequate shot with my rifle; two, I need more practice shooting a handgun at distance. I wasted round after round firing at two torso-sized steel targets at 40 yards, and I only made it halfway through the stage before the buzzer went off and my time was up.

I’d missed so much that I handed Karl my pistol and asked him to prove that the problem was me, not the gun. He quickly took three shots and got three hits. As I suspected, the problem was me.

Here’s where I tell you that I have no competitive shooting experience, and that 40 yards is farther than I’ve ever fired a handgun. I’ve been shooting for awhile now (I got my concealed carry permit years back after nazis doxxed me and started sending me photos of my family), but all of my experience has been focused on either community defense (why I’m passable with a rifle) or self-defense by way of concealed carry (most classes focus on engagements at about 10 yards, not 40).

I don’t want to overstate my experience with community or self-defense either. I’m a professional dabbler. But the community defense experts I trust (like Yellow Peril Tactical) say over and over again: if you want to get better at community defense, start competing. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that they’re right. Going to the range and standing still and shooting paper or steel targets is a good way to keep the dead basics of the skill from going fully to rust, but it doesn’t get you much farther than that.

I went into the competition expecting to lose. I texted my friends and told them I was gunning for last place. But in truth, I wasn’t there to compete against other people, I was there to compete against myself. In just two days of shooting, I found my strengths and weaknesses. Before this weekend, I’d never shot further than a hundred yards. On day two, I made regular and repeatable hits on targets at 400 yards, without magnification on my rifle. Before this weekend, I’d never shot a handgun out to 40 yards, and while I sure didn’t master that skill, I proved I could do it. I shot moving targets for the first time, I shot while exhausted for the first time. I even finished one of the eight stages with time to spare—an all-rifle stage that involved crawling under wires while wearing armor and shooting a target from kneeling.

To be one of the worst shots at one of the hardest matches in the country was in no way embarrassing for me, and not a single person made a negative comment as I wasted round after round trying to hit the stupid little pop-up steel target. Everyone knows why they are there, and it’s not to get mad at the new girl. When I look at the scoreboard, there’s someone with a score almost twice as high as mine (that’s a bad thing, you want a low score since it’s measured in seconds) and I look at that name and I don’t think “well at least I did better than whoever that is.” Instead, I reflexively thought: that person right there was bravest motherfucker of the whole weekend.

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I have complicated feelings about firearms. I’ve got some firsthand experience with the aftermath of gun violence that I wish I didn’t, and frankly that’s a large reason why I’m so out practice. I think people with anger issues or issues with suicidal ideation should probably not own guns. I think that every gun ought to be locked up when not in use. I don’t believe “an armed society is a polite society” because I have the ability to understand fairly the basic statistical analysis that shows that when everyone is armed, interpersonal violence is more deadly.

At the same time, I believe the right to individual and community defense is inalienable, and I believe that in the modern world, the most effective tool for self-defense from deadly force is a striker-fired, semi-automatic handgun with a decent magazine capacity. I think the most effective tool for community defense is a semi-automatic “modern sporting rifle.” An AR-15. I think firearms safety and handling is a skill that should be generalized, even if many people might want to not personally own or carry a gun on a regular basis.

There’s a sort of basic conundrum when it comes to firearms and safety. On an individual level, guns tend to make us less safe. As I understand it, a house with a gun in it is less safe for everyone in that house, statistically. Especially when a man and woman live in that house, the woman is less safe.

At the same time, the slogan “armed minorities are harder to oppress” seems to be supported by history. The first step to committing genocide is to disarm a population. A common anti-gun talking point is that since the government has tanks and missiles, there’s no reason for people to bother owning small arms (rifles and pistols) to potentially oppose that government. This is… not a belief that can be supported by history. Small arms have been absolutely essential in conflicts against state-level military powers. The people in the Warsaw Ghetto needed food, printing presses, and guns. Best as I can tell, that’s what they spent their energy acquiring.

It’s good to be part of a group that is known for being hard to kill. Fascists are cowards—they literally wouldn’t be fascists if they were not cowards. They prefer easy targets. Yet at the same time, the proliferation of guns makes a community less safe from itself.

The solution to this contradiction, I suspect, is to redefine gun culture and redefine how we relate to firearms. There are communities that have firearm ownership that don’t have the problems unique to American culture.

Some aspects of building a better gun culture are fairly specific and concrete. I don’t believe in top-down solutions (like laws, which are applied unevenly and also don’t foster people’s sense of agency and responsibility), but instead horizontal solutions. Gun owners ought to be encouraging gun owners to keep their guns safely locked up, controlling who has access to the guns. We need a culture in which it is normal and expected that, for example, after a bad breakup, your friends hold onto your guns (or the barrels, or the bolts) until you’re feeling more like yourself.

But the larger issues around gun ownership are just the larger issues around culture. Poverty and patriarchy are (I suspect) the driving force behind the majority of gun violence. There’s one version of masculinity (at the risk of using a trite phrase, the toxic version of masculinity) that teaches its adherents that they are the lone wolf protector, that they are the ultimate determiner of right and wrong, that they need to act on everyone’s behalf. For people like that, the gun is the talisman of empowerment. The gun owner decides who lives and who dies. It’s a bad fucking idea.

I’m not, in two paragraphs embedded within an article about a gun competition I went to, going to solve the problem of toxic masculinity. But I will say that one thing that undermines that particular form of masculinity is when men learn how to teach hard skills with patience and kindness. I found Woodland Brutality a particularly fascinating place because the core concept (“go to the woods and shoots lots of guns in an environment that is so physically demanding that you can call it ‘brutality’”) doesn’t, on its surface, sound like it lends itself to a caring and welcoming environment. Yet what the staff and community have built is sort of the polar opposite of those Alpha Wolf Training Camps For Dude-Men Who Want To Pay Lots Of Money To Get Yelled At In the Mud places you hear about. It’s about doing a hard thing together, supporting one another.

Lately, when I’m at a shooting range, I look around and think to myself “probably about half of the people here are training because they want to kill me and my friends.” It’s not a particularly nice feeling. At Brutality, I saw people who will protect me. They don’t all look like me, either… the average competitor was (by my read) a white cis man. Presumably, most people aren’t there specifically training for community defense—they’re there because shooting is a sport, and a fun one. But they’re specifically choosing to be in a place that explicitly welcomes queer and trans competitors.

I brought up this idea to some strangers over the weekend, that it was nice to be around people who are learning to protect people like me. One man nodded, then thought about for a second, then offered the addendum: we’re learning to protect each other. To keep all of us safe. Because it’s true: I’ve got to keep that man safe too. Mutual aid is, after all, mutual. It’s right there in the name.

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As I drove home, I thought to myself: I’m glad we’re hard to kill.

We’re all just flesh and blood at the end of it, and unlike what Dungeons & Dragons has taught you, you don’t get more hit points as you skill up. No matter how hard to kill you make yourself, you’re still in some ways easy to kill.

But I’m glad the working class has claws. I’m glad the people who fought on Blair Mountain were able to say to the mine owners: if you machinegun the shanty towns we live in, we’ll take you out with hunting rifles. There’re a lot of arguments about where the word “redneck” comes from, but one of the likely contenders for an origin are the red bandannas that the Blair Mountain combatants wore around their necks to identify each other. It’s my favorite origin story, because it means the original rednecks were a multiracial coalition of miners who decided that the working class wouldn’t go down without a fight.

I’ll be real though: most of what I learned at Woodland Brutality wasn’t about the nature of masculinity or how to build a better culture or what it means for the working class to be armed. I mostly learned that I need to work on my pistol technique, and that the cheap mag pouches on my gun belt are not up to the task of holding magazines tight while I’m crawling through pipes and sprinting from tree to tree. I learned that last part because, on the more than one stage when the mags came loose, someone found them and brought them back to me.

Meanwhile, Karl, in his Blair Mountain getup, nailed shot after shot with lever action guns, the same shots I sometimes struggled to land with a modern rifle with a red dot sight. I’m glad we’re on the same side.