Jeff Wineland was a boy of six the first time he laid his hands on a weapon.

“My dad bought me a Daisy BB rifle. I remember him telling me, ‘you can use it when we move to Arkansas.’ He monitored me for a good while, told me what I could shoot at, and that I could not shoot at songbirds. I remember that specifically.”

Wineland now lives near the Austin area, but he’s good friends with one of the managers at the Jefferson County Sportsmen’s Association shooting range, so he visits Port Townsend regularly, bringing his 9mm Sig with him.

“This place means a lot to me, it really does. There’s not a place like this in Texas, not in my area anyway, where I can do this,” he told The Leader in a recent interview. He’s one of a number of marksmen from other states, and around Washington, that come to the range. That includes Paula Wood, who was there from Puyallup with her dog Sophie during a recent visit.

“It’s a fantastic facility and the safety factor, the organization of it and the camaraderie, is unmatched,” said Wineland, who spent a career flying attack helicopters for the Army. “I’ve spent a lot of time with mostly 25- to 35-year-old men, training them. So I know a s*** show when I see it, and this is the opposite.”

Preparing to stage a photograph, he checked his gun’s chamber — empty, then he checked the magazine — empty, then he checked them both again.

“I do this for a number of reasons. It’s exciting, there’s a sense of accomplishment, and I do like the self defense element of it, and the mind set. There’s an awareness and respect that you’re going to get here that’s very hard to find.”

Wineland said he believes his time in the first operational Apache Unit in 1986 laid the groundwork for his current passion.

“I’m used to the regimen and I like sequence and timing and detail — that’s what makes me so comfortable here. I like the challenge of it, you can always improve, you can get better at 67 — I really only started using handguns a few years ago and I honed my skills over the past five,” he said.

Wineland said he believes that guns have been greatly misunderstood, mostly by people who have never owned one.

“You see that on their face. I think I come back to my instructor days and ask questions: Have you ever held one? Have you fired one? Has anyone ever shown you one, up close?

“Are they dangerous? A hundred percent, they shoot a projectile that can damage but compare that to an automobile — a three- or four-thousand pound vehicle driving down the highway at 70 or 80 miles per hour. Talk about danger.”

Wineland said the right to bear arms comes with a commensurate responsibility.

“The Second Amendment is about we the people being able to protect ourselves, not just from an invading force but from a tyrannical government. Not that I’m a ‘prepper,’ but in every country that has tyranny guess what? They don’t have a Second Amendment.”

“There’s this push against guns, as if they don’t have a human on the other end of it. There are more guns in the U.S. than people and short of going house to house, engaging the military, well, that’s not going to change. If a human wants to hurt someone they’re going to find a way.”

Safety is paramount, and goggles and hearing muffs to protect eyes and ears — including for dogs — is just the start. There are only a couple of rules, Wineland said, that will keep a person one hundred percent safe around firearms.

“Always treat it like it’s loaded. Never, ever point the muzzle at anything you don’t want to shoot. And me and my wife, we always double-check everything. The ARs (ArmaLite Rifle), they are not significantly different from other semi-automatics. They might be lighter, easier to clean because of the military necessity. They don’t have any magic ability to kill people more than anything else.”

Hunting, he admits, was not a big part of his history with weapons and his first real rifle was used, “mostly for plinkin’.”

“My dad also gave me a .22 bolt-action, Springfield Meteor that belonged to his grandfather. I still own that gun and if my son had a gun safe, I would pass it on to him.”

As did his father, Wineland gifted his own son, Daniel, a Daisy BB rifle.

“And it was the same kind of thing, ‘you can shoot at these targets in the back yard but never towards the house, never towards people, never towards anything you don’t want to injure.

“And I think I gave him a much better briefing than my dad gave me. But he wasn’t trained in weapons.”