I like guns. Well, I like certain kinds of guns, the old-fashioned kind with burnished wooden stocks and blue steel barrels, the kind that fire one round at a time and require a reload or at least a smart snap of the bolt-action or the barrel pump to put the round in the chamber before you can blow another hole in an old coffee can.

I own one firearm, a Winchester .22 pump-action rifle, mass-produced more than a century ago, a popular kid’s squirrel gun and now a common item in the antique gun market, fetching as much as $2,000 for the finest examples. Mine is very plain but it’s beautiful to me. I bought it for $200 from the strange right-wing gun nut who used to be the plumber for my place in Vermont until he fired me because I used a competitor to clean the furnace one year.

He brought around a reproduction antique flintlock pistol after I’d bought the rifle, thinking I might want to buy it. I thought that was a little creepy but I humored him and took a shot with it. Loud and sloppy, it seemed to me. And fake. Why bother?

I still think about the brace of fine shotguns my hunter-fisherman grandfather Jack Arrowsmith left behind. My grandmother gave them for safe keeping to my mother and, as a little kid, I’d take them out of the closet now and then and handle them reverently. There were no shells in the house so no danger I’d do something stupid. In one of her mad cleaning binges, my mother got rid of them after I went away to boarding school. I’m no hunter — I hate to kill anything, including the trout I rarely hook in Vermont — but I’d love to handle those beauties again and maybe shoot a little skeet with them.

When my brother was old enough, maybe 12, my father gave him a modern bolt-action .22 rifle. My brother had a rack on the wall over his bed where he displayed it. He took it down to clean it a lot but fired it only once or twice, when we went up to my father’s father’s place in Vermont. It was sold soon after our grandfather’s death but there was still my step-grandfather’s "farm" down the same road. He had a real gun collection, as did many country gentlemen in Manchester, and I remember target shooting with a pistol for the first time there with my step-brother and step-father. Of course it was fun but pistols didn’t do it for me. I liked the look and feel of a rifle.

Like a lot of kids, including my brother, I learned to handle a .22 at camp, target shooting at the rifle range. I remember the call the counselor would make as we prepared to shoot: “Load … aim … Ready on the right? Ready on the left? Ready on the firing line? Commence firing, fire at will!”

There was a ritual to it, the sole purpose of which was to teach respect for firearms and for other people you might hurt if you mishandled your weapon. At the weekly award ceremony, I collected my marksman certificates and medals as summer went along, all bearing the initials “NRA” and the full name of the organization in fancy script that told the world I had qualified as a marksman or marksman first class.

It was only after my wife and I had bought our own little place in Vermont nearly 20 years ago that I bought a rifle of my own, that pretty Winchester my plumber was peddling.

At a dinner party not long after I bought it, I was telling a New Yorker about the rifle. Her eyes widened and she stared at me in horrified disbelief: “You have a gun?” she gasped.

“Yes, sure, it’s just an old squirrel gun. Everybody in Vermont has guns. I grew up with guns, sort of,” I said, letting drop the technical correction I wanted to make and ignored at the top of this column: a rifle is not a gun.

The wall she had instantly thrown up did not crack. “I can’t believe you have a gun!” she said, looking at me with a mixture of shock and contempt. End of conversation.

By then, the NRA had turned into the most dreaded lobby on Capitol Hill, morphed from a sportsman’s organization that promoted firearm safety into a front for the firearms industry that cynically stirred up mass hysteria over gun rights to keep itself in control, line its pockets and promote its clients’ agendas.

I was with my dinner party friend on the politics of gun control and the danger to democracy of lobby powerhouses like the NRA.

But I didn’t like that look on her face. She, I realized, was exactly what gun-toting Red Staters imagine when they picture the enemy: one of those New York or Left Coast iberals who know nothing about firearms and have no clue of their legitimate place in the culture. She didn’t care that my .22 was no Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle.

There are a lot of people out there who want their Bushmasters so they can blow away agents of the federal government when the revolution comes. They’ve always been out there but there are a lot more of them now and they all have access to the internet, which empowers them. So does a fragmented, frightened media.

That and corporate-style marketing by the NRA and others have legitimized these nut jobs and increased their numbers (especially across the old Confederacy, which is rearing its ugly head these days more threateningly than ever. Guess the Civil War didn't quite settle things about federalism and the Union after all). These people used to be the John Birch Society fringe. Now they set the agenda and drive the Republican Party.

What a mess.

When I hold my Winchester and feel the smooth stock and admire its sturdy, simple action, I can connect to simpler and better days, before our common bonds were broken by self-interest and greed. It was a time when fathers gave their boys a .22, expecting them to find a sense in it not of defiance and entitlement but of reverence and respect.