Keep in mind that this is about the unfortunate killing at a shooting range, and the NRA's role in setting up the preconditions for it, and the NRA's public reaction afterward. Not so much about your personal choices as a "shooter". The fetishization of guns ("power of the recoil, the crack of the report, the working of the action, the smell of powder and the hole in the target" is some pretty sensuous writing) doesn't obligate you to feel ashamed.

Though you might want to think about applying the term "shooter" to yourself. We're old enough to remember when the proper terms were "marksman" and "sports hunter". But "shooter" is the standard term in news accounts for a serial killer who uses a gun. And I'm pretty sure the term has its origins in the "first-person shooter" video games--simulated mass murder.

The widespread use of the term "shooter" is symptomatic of the high levels of violence, paranoia, fear, and militarization ("toy soldier" pathology) grafted on to what I agree was, once upon a time, something that could be called a "sport" with a straight face. But today? The NRA and its allies have turned your benign sport into probably the single most toxic political issue in the country.

So to a degree I do blame you and your fellow gun enthusiasts for buying into the NRA's poisonous rhetoric. Once upon a time I'd have urged you guys to start a rival organization, but jeez, somebody did that and we got Gun Owners of America, founded because the NRA just wasn't extreme enough. Lord, what kind of hell do you have to inhabit when Wayne La Pierre is not extreme enough for you?

I think there's room to dispute whether some things should properly be considered "fun". That article you linked to in turn linked to an online catalog for a company making targets, and some of their offerings were a bit creepy. Next to the traditional human silhouette were pictures of brightly-colored "self-healing jumping jacks" and cartoonish animal figures, in other words toys that were explicitly designed to attract the attention of children. Some of those targets are designed to bounce around the landscape at random, I guess like a running rabbit, encouraging "shooters" to start spraying bullets around while automatically trying to track that thing jumping around the landscape.

Kid shooters, being trained to shoot up toys and in the unmistakable message that guns too are toys.

Is teaching kids that guns are toys really consistent with that vaunted "responsible gun ownership" we hear so much about, but see so little of?

Ask that poor little nine year old girl whether guns are toys. Someday she may even be able to answer you.