Paper Targets.

• Author: Lynch, Michael W.

In which our man in Washington shoots his rocks Off, keeps his lunch down in the company of Janet Reno, and attends a Ralph Nader sermon

Subj: Point & Click Technology

Date: 6/14/2000

From: mwlynch@eason.com

Wade's Eastside Guns is in Bellevue, Washington, a plush suburb of Microsoft. I was in the Pacific Northwest to attend a conference organized by Academics for the Second Amendment, a group dedicated to encouraging scholarship about gun rights. About 20 people participated, mostly professor types, but a few journalists and a retired cop too. We were at Wade's on a field trip. We didn't just talk about guns at the conference, you see. We got to shoot them.

If guns do cause crime and suicide, then Wade's should have been a dangerous place. A federal judge had just ordered Microsoft to split up, and the net worth of most folks around these parts had taken a substantial hit. Yet there was neither a run on handguns nor a single suicide at Wade's, at least for the three hours I and the other conferees spent firing off 17,000 rounds from five submachine guns, one modified machine gun, and a long-range sniper rifle.

Members of the Microsoft Gun Club--each attired in the club's black polo shirts imprinted with the slogan "Point and Click Technology"--helped run the range.

"Judge Jackson didn't understand the technological issues," was how ex-Microsoft programmer Jim Gordon put it as he loaded up the magazine of a fully automatic Heckler & Koch MP5. Gordon, who's now with a software startup, said he's been hurt by the Microsoft decision. Yet he handed over the submachine gun, turning it on neither himself nor me in anger, and I was soon putting holes in my target's paper belly and head.

One station offered the Swedish K, a submachine gun first manufactured in Sweden and later in Egypt. To its left sat a British Sten gun, a popular World War II firearm. There were two H&Ks, the submachine gun of choice for America's law enforcement community. "It's the ultimate status symbol for police," noted Joseph Olson, a gun-toting professor from Minnesota's Hamline School of Law. "Many of them lie awake at night thinking about having one."

Irv Benzion, a National Rifle Association board member, was kind enough to bring out his .30 caliber Browning 1919, a lie-on-your-belly-and-shoot-em-up semiautomatic rifle, a version of a machine gun used in both World War II and Korea--and quite a kick to shoot.

But even this bundle of fun was upstaged by Professor Olson's...