The new president of the Gun Club at Microsoft is wearing a t-shirt that reads “Geek.” At the scruffy but comfortable shooting range in the mountains east of Microsoft’s suburban headquarters near Seattle, David Reed, 37, a senior program manager, hardly seems like a geek. Geeks don’t usually come with a Texas twang and a sleek new Remington 700P police special. “It’s designed to be a police sniper weapon,” he explains. Reed spent several years in law enforcement — he was a deputy constable in the Houston area. He says the experience helped form his taste in weapons.

As with many gun clubs, a lot of the Microsoft members develop their own particular interests when it comes to firearms. The high-IQ culture at Microsoft, watered with what was once a tradition of nice bonuses, grew a legacy of indulging in very special passions. There are managers with exquisite car collections, programmers who perfect beer and coffee brewing, and software engineers who spend hours assembling custom parts for exacting replicas of fictional space ships.

Guns are no different. “We’ve got all kinds,” says Reed. There are members with a military past, and of course the usual hunting enthusiasts. “If you want to take down a bear at 200 yards, you need to be very, very precise,” he says. “But precision is only one component of the survival skills you need in a worst-case, self-defense scenario.”

Caesar Samsi, another Microsoft program manager, club member, and fiend for accuracy, arrived with a custom-made GA Precision rifle and scope, and screwed a mount for them into a wooden table. He was testing various loadings of home-made ammunition he had brought in plastic baggies. He spent a long while adjusting the rifle’s angle, and attached special digital equipment to monitor velocity. He had his notebook ready to pencil in the results, looking to see how to tailor the ammunition for maximum accuracy.

He didn’t say how many thousands of dollars he had spent on his hobby, but the rifle alone ran about $3,500. Fortunately, home-made ammunition costs about half the price of store-bought. The sub-hobby of carefully loading spent brass shells, or casings, with propellant powder isn’t for everybody. “A lot of avid shooters find reloading to be mind-numbing,” Reed says.

Along with his wife, who practiced with her pistols, Samsi brought a priceless accessory: Chris Doll, a friend from work, who videotaped his efforts. Doll came with a small armory of his own: a Walther PPK/S (”this is what James Bond uses”) and a Kimber 1911A1, a replica of a .45 pistol that was in use during World War II. For this kind of enthusiast, experience with the actual weaponry used in old movies really enhances watching them.

Just about everybody relishes using such carefully-made equipment. Chris’ five-year-old daughter has been wanting to try shooting, but he says she’ll have to wait a few more years. For a birthday present, David Reed has already let his 10-year-old daughter pick out her first gun.

Reed sees his mission as more educational than anything else. His own mother is a nurse who wouldn’t allow guns in the house. “Like most little boys, I had a fascination with all things military,” he recalls. After the shock of Katrina, he found many women, including his mother, “realize they are woefully unprepared to deal with large male predators.” He wants to reach out to “the people who go out and get a handgun and a permit, and they don’t know what to do when the time comes.”

He says the club will continue to avoid outright involvement in politics. There’s always an undercurrent, though. “There’s a larger and larger number of people watching the federal reaction to disasters.” If confidence in the government grows, will guns become less of a necessity? “Every democracy in history has succumbed,” Reed warns. “Ours just lasted a little longer than the others.”