Having lived in the USSR for 14 years, I appreciate guns. In talking to the sheeple, we can always make the analogy to medicine. A few will die from malpractice or accidents, but millions will be saved. Same with personal weapons.
Below is my first draft of fiction meant to teach the use of firearms through anecdotale evidence...
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The rays of afternoon sun were warm on his skin. Toli lay still, enjoying the quiet. His aching muscles needed the rest. He felt drowsy but he resolved to stay awake awhile longer. In the tundra, warm and sunny weather did not come often, and this February thaw would not last past the sunset.
Sparse, wiry greens poked from under the snow. He reached out for a frozen granberry and chewed slowly. Somewhere in the distance a dog started to bark. The young man felt in his bag and extracted a crushed sandwich, a ragged slice of ham on dry crumbling bread. It was the first decent food he has seen in a while, but he was no longer hungry. For the first time in his adult life he felt unrushed.
Toli’s myopic eyes could not see much past the pale moss under his outstretched hand. Past the soft lines of the moss was a blur. He tried to remember what happened to his glasses. His left cheek still bore a scar from the fist that broke the lens and sent the wire frame flying into the fluffy snow.
When he got picked up late one night, a mad dash away from the three men was his first thought. A Nagant barrel shoved painfully into his back dissuaded him from trying. He still had not quite comprehended what happened until after a train bearing him and some hundred sixty others pulled up to a tiny cement platform in the middle of nowhere.
When he tried to ask where they were, a tired-looking guard hit him in the face, just like that. There was no malice in it, just an impersonal and efficient termination of small-talk. It was lucky that the other newcomers were as demoralized as he was: no one kicked him while he groped, futilely for the lost glasses. The guard that hit him herded everybody into a damp windowless barrack and locked them in.
During the months that followed, he learned much about cold, hunger and pain. In a camp of some two thousand , the thirty or so vokhri, armed guards, had somehow found time to mistreat everyone of them. By spring at least a third of them would probably be dead.
Toli has learned early on that he could not escape the beatings and tried to survive them the best he could. Ironically, while the loss of his glasses made him more vulnerable, it kept the guards from singling him out. The brutes equated glasses with education, and that they hated passionately. A blow that would be shrugged off by a healthy man would knock down any of the prisoners. However, with no fat or muscle left on their bones, they bruised easily and their tormentors were usually content with that.
No one knew where they where. The lax security certainly indicated lack of any populated areas nearby. While the six perimeter towers and two rows of wire kept the camp itself tight, the work details were only slightly supervised. A team of thirty or so prisoners, weak and without hope, was handled by two men. They knew that their herd had no place to run and the few who tried to walk off into the tundra could be shot at leisure. The flat ground for miles around offered neither cover nor shelter.
In hindsight, Toli thought absently, he should have made a run for it at the start. These days, always cold and hungry, and limping from a dog bite, he could not hope to get far. He has long since resigned to the idea of dying, but refused to commit suicide by climbing on the wire or mouthing off to a guard. His barrack was populated mostly by people like him, intellectuals torn from their comfy lives. They were mostly interested in he same thing he was, keeping low and staying alive.
This morning, the bitter cold that held every since he was taken in eased up. The sleepy two guards brought his detail out the underbrush where the road ended. Today they would add twenty meters of hard, packed dirt to it. With temperatures above freezing, life seemed almost tolerable for a change. The thin, bent figures with dull, heavy shovels spread out and went through the motions. They did not know or care where the road was going. They traded painfully inefficient labor for a starvation ration and another day of life.
Toli worked at the end of the line, with one of the guards leaning on one of the few trees in that land. Around noon, the man stood straight and started walking into the brush, tugging at his belt as he went. His rifle remained leaning against the tree trunk. He had no reason to worry: the starved, cowered zombies working behind him had never defied him or any other vokhr.
Toli did not think about his actions. He picked up the rifle and racked the bolt the way he has seen the guards do. A shiny brass cartridge arched out of the breech and another went in its place as the bolt returned home. He did not know enough to check the safety, but he got lucky. The long, awkward gun rested unsteadily in his arms when he saw the returning vokhr. Seeing a pale, scruffy prisoner with his rifle, the guard walked straight at him, one hand stretched out to seize the weapon.
Toli raised the gun to his shoulder and tugged on the trigger. The muzzle jerked up and the stock hammered savagely on the bony shoulder. Only the weight of the rifle kept Toli, deafened and stunned by the recoil from falling over backwards. He lowered the barrel and stared in front of him.
However ignorant of musketry, even he could not miss at two paces. The guard lay face down and a black stain on his padded jacket indicated where the bullet tore its way out. Amazingly, the other prisoners kept working, not even looking up. A gunshot usually meant a dead prisoner, an event unremarkable to survivors and other guards alike.
Toli thought of walking off into the undergrowth and trying to get lost. Deep down, he knew that would not work. The camp dogs were too good at tracking those few fugitives that managed to slip away from the guards and out of the range of the menacing perimeter towers. He turned and walked down the road, past the people working, toward the second guard.
While the shot failed to rouse the vokhr, the sight of a gangly, scruffy prisoner with a rifle did. Toli had not reloaded, but the guard declined to stick around long enough to learn that. He bolted, heading for the camp gate. Toli's poor eyesight had not picked out the guard till he started moving. He was surprised to see his adversary flee, as it did not even occur to him to shoot again. Without eyeglasses, that would have been an unprofitable exercise.
The young man sat down on the moss by the side of the half-finished road. He let the rifle fall away and reached into the guard's khaki knapsack. He was idly curious about possessions of someone who, for months, has had absolute power over him. The first item was prosaic enough, a crusty ham sandwich wrapped in wax paper. Then out came two heavy metal tins, unpleasantly oily to the touch. It was not until his eyes traversed to the submachine gun abandoned by the vokhr that he understood what these drums were.
Toli stuffed everything back into the knapsack and got up, barely able to support the weight of his trophy. Then a siren started off at the camp. He started slowly into the tundra. For now the gray bare branches and low evergreens offered some cover, but soon he would have to walk in the open. Behind him, prisoners never stopped poking at the frozen ground.
"Alex must be in an orphanage now," he thought irrelevantly. "They probably got Mila the same day."
Suddenly, it seemed pointless to even try to get back, had it even been possible. The winded barking was getting closer. Toli sat awkwardly into the snow. He could see faint shapes behind the branches, could hear the dogs and the angry men hunting him. Most clearly, with his eyes perpetually focused up close, he could see the dark metal of the gun he had dragged along. He pulled the bolt handle back as he had with the rifle. It stayed back and would not budge.
The few runaways who were not shot at once died slowly. He did not want to die that way. Standing up with this weapon would surely draw mercifully efficient fire. When Toli tried to get up, he could not. What little strength he had, was all used up. He rested the drum on his knees, pointing in the general direction of the camp, and waited, sunlight warming his pallid skin. Somewhere in the back of his mind was a timid regret that he would not enjoy this for long.
The party of five followed their dog to his hideout. When they saw their prey, mere ten paces separated them. Toli straightened up without rising and tried to look menacing. Something snapped under his right hand and a loud report issued from the gun. The recoil was so slight that he was not, at first, aware of having fired. One of the pursuers fell, the rest rushed for cover. The German Shepherd tried to rush him but dropped a few steps shy of its goal, as he tracked it deliberately with the vibrating muzzle.
In the brush ahead a revolver barked. He pointed at the sound and squeezed the trigger, seeing empty cases move rapidly up and to the right, branches in front gently falling. His ears were ringing, but he could still sense receding footsteps. The gun in his hands kept shaking a second longer and then stopped. He let it go and heard the hiss of vaporizing snow.
Another attempt to walk came to naught, as his knees were now weak with fear. Before he could wonder why he no longer felt resigned, one of the guard towers opened up blindly, long rays of tracers stabbing into the bleak landscape. A little less loud and faster, submachine guns joined in from closer range. They could not see him but did have ammunition to spare. Sharp pain in his side showed that the approach worked. Warmth spread immediately, followed by feeling of weakness, worse than anything before. This is where he would have to die, in a shallow depression in the snow, like a shot-up hare .
The short day was coming to an end. In the waning light, Toli tried to make his gun work again. He figured out how to change the drum just as the guards advanced again, a thin skittish line of people used to bullying but not to combat. The warm stain on his side has long since grown cold and even more painful than before. No, he was not going anywhere.
Just as he had thought, they did not expect him to stick around. The search party planned to form a skirmish line later, when they caught up with the fugitive. They did not expect an ambush. This time he emptied an entire drum without stopping, feeling the pleasant warmth spreading from the metal. When darkness fell, the land was awash in flashes, soldiers shooting blindly while Toli , drifting in and out of consciousness, was saving his last drum.
They did not come for him that night. The next day, which was bitterly cold, the tower fired long, aimless bursts at the tundra and fell quiet again. The drifting snow covered up the footprints and spent brass, as if nothing had happened.
