Greetings and hopes you’re having a good Memorial Day. Please take a moment to pause and think about what today is supposed to commemorate before you fire up the grill and crack open one of Milwaukee’s finest products.
Remember when shooting used to be simple? You’d grab a brick of rimfire, walk out the back door, and spend an afternoon perforating tin cans until your thumb was black with bullet lube.
Today, unless you own a few hundred acres or have an uncle with a farm, going shooting feels like booking an international flight on a budget airline. First, you have to call the indoor range days in advance to secure a reservation. If you’re five minutes late, your slot is gone. When you arrive, you’re treated like a suspect in an ongoing investigation. You have to sign a stack of liability waivers, buy their marked-up targets and shoot only their proprietary, gold-plated ammunition. And god forbid you show up alone—many urban ranges won’t even let solo shooters through the door anymore because their lawyers are terrified of liability.
It’s expensive, it’s clinical, and frankly, it drains all the joy out of the sport. No wonder a novice shooter who buys their first defensive handgun leaves it in the box, unfired, sitting in a nightstand drawer. The barrier to entry isn’t the price of the gun; it’s the absolute headache of finding a place to pull the trigger.
But there’s a cheap, quietly brilliant loophole sitting right under our noses: the air rifle.
Now, before the tactical crowd snorts and goes back to adjusting the laser-enabled-flashlight-cup-holder on their modular carbine, sorry, “Personal Defensive Weapon,” hear me out. Sight picture is sight picture. Trigger press is trigger press. A pellet gun fired in your basement or garage at fifteen feet will teach you more about grip consistency, front sight focus, and trigger control than a hundred rapid-fire magazine dumps into a dirt berm at a public range.
My podcast co-host, Roy Huntington, keeps a high-quality air pistol in his workshop. The shop is about sixty feet corner-to-corner. Whenever he’s out there working and needs to rest his brain, he walks to one end, takes three or four careful, deliberate shots at a self-contained target trap and focuses entirely on the mechanics of the shot. No ears required, no drive time, no range fees.
We recently received a brilliant comment from a listener that perfectly captures this dynamic. He wrote that when he teaches concealed carry classes, he holds up a double-action revolver and tells his students, ‘This is writing in cursive.’ Then he holds up a polymer-framed Glock and says, ‘This is texting with autocorrect. One will teach you; the other will spoil you.’
He’s dead on. The modern shooting world has become obsessed with autocorrect. We buy handguns with three-pound match triggers and red dot optics, slap so many accessories on our rails that our guns look like a toddler’s first attempt at a Mr. Potato Head kit, and call ourselves marksmen. But if you can’t cleanly break a shot with a heavy double-action trigger—or a spring-piston air gun with a slightly creepy factory pull—you aren’t actually steering the bullet. You’re just letting the technology cover up your bad habits.
Of course, air guns have their own set of rules. For starters, do not treat them like toys. If you’re using a break-barrel spring rifle, that steel barrel is under immense tension. If you lose your grip while cocking it or pull the trigger prematurely, that barrel will snap back with enough force to literally smash your face in.
But if you respect the tool, a basic pellet rifle or CO2 pistol is the ultimate training cheat code. It bypasses the range-day bureaucracy, costs pennies per shot, and lets you build real, lasting muscle memory in your own backyard.
At the end of the day, ‘gun’ and ‘fun’ are only one letter apart. If we spend all our time worrying about being high-speed, low-drag tactical operators, we lose the plot. There is immense joy in being a self-proclaimed, proud member of the ‘low-speed, high-drag’ club. Grab a tin of pellets, set up a cardboard box stuffed with old newspapers in your garage and go have some actual shooting fun.