Love guns? Hate guns? Worlds meet

A strange thing happens sometimes on PBS.
People from opposite worlds meet. They talk; often, they even like each other.
At least, that’s how it turns out in “America Outdoors With Baratunde Thurston,” at 8 p.m. Wednesdays. The Sept. 13 hour links:
— Kayle Browning (shown here), 31, a silver-medal Olympic sharp-shooter who grew up in small-town Arkansas. “My experience with firearms has only ever been positive,” she said, especially “the community that comes along with it, the career you can have with it.”
— Thurston, 46, who grew up in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, hating guns. “It was a war zone …. My father was essentially a casualty of that war. (He was) shot and killed.”
This could have been an impossible gap, but wasn’t. “He came to our place with nothing but open arms and an open mind,” Browning said.
Thurston was 8 when his dad was killed “very, very late in the night, and that’s how I found out. My mom told me. It’s very tragic news to share with your child, even though my father wasn’t even living with us at the time.”
He emerged as a cheerful person – a Harvard graduate who’s been a comedian, a tech guy, a speaker and now someone who visits people in the backroads.
For the Sept. 13 episode, he was in Arkansas for some heavy moments – the site of a 1919 massacre of Black sharecroppers – and many light ones.
That included going to Wooster (population 860), where Browning grew up and now has a shooting lodge. Her goal, she says, is to be “that voice that says, ‘It’s respected just like any other sport’ (and) that face in that sport for anyone who wants to try it.”
It’s a pleasant voice and an attractive face, perhaps making it easier to get converts. She credits her father – Tommy Lynn Browning, a former national clay-shooting champion, for avoiding gender stereotypes. “He was kind of my role model growing up to say, like, ‘Hey, this is a male-dominated sport, but you can do it.’”
She killed her first deer and duck at 8. When she decided to do trap-shooting, he adapted a training facility for her. She went on to win two junior championships and a national championship; she was an alternate in the 2016 Olympics and won a silver medal in 2021.
Browning also studied interior design at the nearby University of Central Arkansas, got a real estate license, did some buying and selling of houses and runs Cypress Creek Lodge.
That’s where Thurston visited and was impressed. “She’s so good,” he said, “She did trick shots, too.”
He shot some clay targets, but a tougher task was coming up. When he visited New Mexico (in an episode airing Sept. 20), people took him on a turkey hunt.
This was a bigger challenge, shooting at a living creature. “I’m just like, ‘Okay, I eat animals all the time. Where do they come from? Not the grocery store.”
Alas, no turkeys appeared. Still, Thurston says he liked learning from his fellow hunters – “the patience, the silence. I had never listened so closely in the outdoors …. I felt so much more alive.”