Sanity Checks on the Gun Range
a creative writing post (#41)
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This post may be triggering to anyone with trauma from gun violence, depression, or suicide. Reader discretion strongly advised. My essay about suicide, “How to Keep Breathing, No Matter How Much Things Suck” is here.
In coding, there’s a wonderful, marvelous little thing called a sanity check.
You think you’ve done something.
Then you make sure.
For example, if I think I’ve imported a dataset (as df, short for dataframe) that contains a list of dates, stores, dollar amounts, and categories (for example: November 6, 2024; Amazon; $27.41, Christmas gift) then a good sanity check is the following code block (which may not show up correctly in the app or on a phone, so bear with me):
#sanity check 1
df.head()I would expect that to return the first 5 rows.
If I was nervous, I could also do:
#sanity check 2
df.tail()That would return the last 5 rows.
I could also include a number other than 5 to get a different number of rows:
#sanity check 3
df.head(25)Or get a random sample, instead of the first or last rows:
#sanity check 4
df.sample(n=25)Any of these could help me spot a problem and make sure that I’ve actually imported the data that I intended to, and that it looked the way I think it should.
Personally, I’ve never once had a problem because I was too reliant on too many sanity checks. And I’ve spent many hundreds of the hours of my one and only life solving problems that could’ve been prevented by more sanity checks, executed earlier.
I love sanity checks.
Brown M&Ms As Sanity Check
The rock band Van Halen used to include a rider in their contract that required M&Ms backstage, with all the brown ones removed.
This story became famous as an example of rock ‘n’ roll pretension and stars acting as prima donnas.
But it was actually something much more than that: a quick way to make sure that the venue had read the entire contract.
When you travel with equipment that produces pyrotechnics on stage, and doing something wrong could mean a terrible accident, such a simple sanity check is potentially lifesaving.
Sanity Checks on the Gun Range
As I wrote about recently, I bought my first gun a couple of weeks ago.
I recently had my first lesson, with a certified instructor and a friend of his, who is studying to become a certified instructor.
This is one of those posts where I’m writing to figure out what I think—where my own thoughts are not clear to me at all as I sit down.
That’s normal for me, writing to clarify my thoughts.
But this time, I’m also not sure how I feel. That’s a lot rarer.
Every time this happens, I always feel like I should say “I’m writing to clarify my feelings as well as my thoughts, and if you’re reading this, I decided to publish them,” because I typically have to promise myself over and over that nobody else will see it to get past my anxiety enough to figure out my feelings.
But that seems kind of dramatic, does it not?
This is one of those things that’s a personal earthquake, nothing more.
I’m only publishing this because of all the times that reading about someone else’s personal earthquake has helped me regain my own footing and sense of terra firma.
So…here’s the story of my first shooting lesson.
It was surprising—though it shouldn’t have been—that the only place on earth where people are more polite than they are in my previous number one spot, a fundamentalist church in rural Mississippi on Easter Sunday, is a gun range.
This was particularly true of the men. When I walked around a bit to get my bearings, I have never before—ever—had men consistently do the same thing. Each would stand slightly farther away than is normal for greetings, look me directly in the eyes (and nowhere else), smile, and sincerely offer to answer any questions I may have or help me in any way.
I’m sure that I emanated “terrified newbie,” and the collective understanding seemed to be that the correct standing point between “too pushy/scare her more” and “not caring enough” was on direct greetings and offers to help, at a slight, peformatively-non-threatening distance.
A gun range may also be the place on earth with the highest level of safety concern around guns, both for the obvious reason and for a not-so-obvious reason.
Extra space to allow for the “unlock one post free” option that Substack offers.