Gun Guys (40 page)

Not true. I kept my handgun loaded in the bedroom, in a metal safe the size of a toaster that popped open the second I punched in a three-button
code. I bought it on eBay for twenty-five dollars. It solved both problems. The gun was secure, but instantly available to me alone. A lot of gun guys used such safes. They just didn’t want to be
ordered
to use them.

Neither did a lot of gun guys want to be ordered to report a stolen gun to the police. In 2012, the Judiciary Committee of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives voted to penalize any town that required gun owners to report stolen firearms to the police. Other states had likewise succumbed to pressure from gun guys, who considered it tyranny to have to tell the police anything about their guns. Only seven states and the District of Columbia made reporting a stolen gun mandatory.

The real question was: If gun guys were the paragons of civic virtue that they claimed to be, why did they have to be
ordered
to lock up their guns or report a gun theft to the police? Wouldn’t a responsible citizen have done so anyway? Gun guys were operating under a double standard. They wanted to be left alone to buy, use, and carry guns because, they said, they understood firearms better than any bureaucrat. But at the same time, enough of them behaved so carelessly that thousands of people were needlessly killed, injured, or victimized every year by guns left lying around.

Was a gun guy who kept his guns properly secured responsible for some knucklehead who didn’t? If the NRA was consistent in its logic, the answer was yes. Solidarity was a constant theme of the NRA, whose e-mails, mailings, and magazines exhorted members to support the community of gun owners by writing to their representatives about gun-related legislation, voting out anti-gun legislators, and voting in those who were pro-gun. But that’s where service to the community ended. For the NRA to have suggested that law-abiding gun owners take responsibility for the cads would have shattered the notion that “criminals” were a separate class. So while the NRA trained people in gun safety and published books about gun care, it—like every other gun-rights group—avoided drawing a connection between the carelessness of law-abiding gun owners and America’s still high rate of needless gun death.

What could the NRA and the community of responsible gun owners have done to reduce gun deaths without government intervention? They could have made irresponsible behavior socially unacceptable, just as it had become unthinkable, among most Americans, to smoke inside another person’s house, say words like “nigger,” or make lascivious comments about underage girls. It would have taken time, but it could have been done, and some were trying. Robert Farago, who wrote a funny
and popular gun blog called
The Truth About Guns
, ran a regular feature called “Irresponsible Gun Owner of the Day”—often a YouTube video of some young man acting stupid or a news item about a needless tragedy. After Arizona instituted “constitutional carry”—allowing any adult to carry a concealed gun with no training or permit—a group called
TrainMeAZ.com
organized to exhort citizens to get trained and to help them find trainers. Farago and TrainMeAZ, though, were lonely voices. The big dog, the NRA, had for decades run a monthly feature in its magazines called “The Armed Citizen,” about people successfully defending themselves with firearms. Had it called its members to a higher standard of responsibility with a complementary column called, say, “The Armed Bonehead,” it would have reached millions more people than either Farago or TrainMeAZ. Most of all, I enjoyed imagining how gun culture could have changed—and lives could have been saved—if, say, gun guys refused to hang out or go shooting with those who left loaded guns lying around their houses. “Sorry, dude. I’m not shooting with you until you clean up your act.” Or if gun guys refused to shop at a gun store that sold home-defense handguns without insisting that buyers also take electronic safes to keep them in. Little by little, shooters and gun stores would have gotten the message, and the problem of unsecured guns—the main source of gun tragedy—would have withered away. Government would have been out of the picture, so there would have been nothing to resent and nothing to fight about. Both sides would have gotten what they said they wanted.

Gun guys were right to object to government officials who proposed bans without understanding what they were banning. But until they took responsibility for the gun violence that continued to frighten and desolate their fellow Americans, they were setting themselves up for more of it. Taking collective responsibility for social problems is not the same thing as knuckling under to a tyrannical government. In fact, it’s the exact opposite.

It felt pretty weird talking to Peter Benoit, the bullet pock still visible on his throat, with a loaded revolver under my clothes. But then, as I’d discovered a few months earlier at Brandon’s funeral, everything about wearing a gun in New Orleans was complicated. I loved the city, but hideous things happened to people even in “good” parts of town. It was one of the
few places on my gun-guy walkabout where I was glad I was licensed to carry a gun.

At the same time, carrying made me feel guilty. Perhaps because of the violence in their streets and the levee disaster in their recent past, New Orleanians had developed a culture of sweetness and tenderness toward one another that was unlike anything I’d seen elsewhere. It was a kind of hippie aesthetic—the easygoing, huggy closeness of a big mourning family. A musician friend, Paul Sanchez, had painted on the front of his guitar
THIS MACHINE SURROUNDS SADNESS AND FORCES IT TO SURRENDER
. When I saw that, all I could think was: The machine under my jacket
creates
sadness. To be carrying around the device that had wreaked so much horror on the people of New Orleans felt like betrayal. Even if it made me feel safer, it made me lonely. The gun had lowered a screen between me and the people I loved. It made me careful how I hugged. It made it hard to take off my jacket in a hot restaurant. It made me feel like a traitor to all that New Orleanians were trying to accomplish. The thought of having to send more bullets whizzing through its fragrant, damp air was almost unbearable.

I left Peter Benoit in the early evening and wandered over to listen to the Jazz Vipers at the Spotted Cat. Standing outside with some friends was Tommy Malone, lead guitarist of the Subdudes. We talked awhile, and when I said I was headed to a bar in an especially rough neighborhood, Malone said, “Whoa. Got a pistol?”

“I do,” I replied, and everybody laughed.

I
’d been wearing either my Colt or my Smith & Wesson .38 everywhere I could legally do so, and the thrill was wearing off. I no longer felt like James Bond. For most of the day, the gun was an uncomfortable lump of metal jammed between my waistband and my love handle or a paperweight dragging on my right front pocket. Had I been spending more time in New Orleans, I might have seen it differently, but you feel pretty dumb walking around Minot, North Dakota, or Boulder, Colorado, armed to kill.

One aspect of the gun life still pleased me: The rituals of safety slowed me down. I couldn’t rush out of the house wearing a gun as I had when my only accessories were a cell phone and sunglasses. I enjoyed getting the gun out of the electronic safe, checking it to make sure it was loaded and functioning, and tucking it away. Out on the street, I felt vigilant, aloof from petty animosities: a modest equal to death. After practice at the range, I liked gingerly unloading the gun, laying the cartridges in a bowl, swabbing out the barrel and chambers, applying a thin sheen of oil. All that satisfaction, for the four-hundred-dollar price of a revolver.

But I was also increasingly aware of my inadequacies. I could punch holes in paper pretty well and handle a gun safely on the street as long as I didn’t actually need it. But in the event of a shoot-out with a bad guy, I was not likely to prevail. Could I draw and fire accurately into the flesh of
a fellow human being while ducking for cover from whizzing bullets? No way. And if not, why was I carrying?

When I complained to other gun carriers that the classes I’d attended to get the permit had been a joke, they urged me to get more training. The country was full of shooting instructors, from freelancers like Rick Ector, in Detroit, to the 2,000-acre Gunsite Academy, in Arizona, which Jeff Cooper founded and which advertised a fifteen-hundred-dollar, five-day pistol course and a chance to shoot more than a thousand rounds of ammunition at stationary and moving targets, indoors and out.

The company that I finally chose, American Shooters, was housed in a gigantic gray concrete cube of a building on Arville Street, in Las Vegas, about a mile west of the Strip. I signed up for a daylong course, “Defensive Pistol,” and showed up at 8:30 a.m. on a sparkling Tuesday.

The facility was a shooter’s heaven—not only lots of shooting lanes but a big store and a rental counter stocked with every pistol, rifle, shotgun, and submachine gun one would ever want to sample. The clerks, all dressed in identical golf shirts, showed me into a windowless cinder-block classroom, where two other pupils were already waiting.

I wasn’t wearing my gun. Nevada doesn’t honor a Colorado permit, and the instructors had asked me to bring it unloaded, in a bag. The other guys had their range bags out on their tiny school desks. I took a seat and introduced myself.

Reid, a professional baseball player, was slim and fit. Tom, a Mercedes dealer, was strong and stocky. Both were surprisingly taciturn. Like the people in my concealed-carry class, they seemed embarrassed to be there. “You actually going to carry?” I asked them.
Probably not
, they both said. “I want to know what I’m doing in case I do,” mumbled Reid. Tom dragged his eyes from his smartphone for a second. “I just bought it,” he said distractedly. “All I want is to know how to use it.”

The door banged open, and Jack Hawley strode in, trim and muscular, looking as though he was about to bust out in a dance number. He had icy-bright blue eyes, raptor features, and a shaven head under a beige ball cap. He was dressed for combat: desert combat boots, desert-camo cargo pants, a desert-tan T-shirt over his washboard belly, and a Beretta nine-millimeter semi-automatic in a black duty holster. Like those camp counselors who had terrified me when I was five, Hawley was all man, and it was our job to live up to him.

“This class is about
how
to use a pistol in a gunfight,” he announced.
“We assume you know the
when
—that you learned your legal, financial, ethical, and moral responsibilities in your concealed-carry class. Let me start by saying that the best way to win a gunfight—really the
only
way to win a gunfight—is not to be there when it happens. You got that? Your best move, always, is to retreat. Run away.” He raked us with those icy blue eyes. “This class is about what to do once you’ve decided you cannot retreat and you must take the gun from the holster and fire it.”

Hawley was now the third gun teacher to tell me that the best strategy in a life-or-death situation was retreat. Gun guys always said the same thing; even the bloggers did. Yet the gun community, led by the NRA, had pressed hard for “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine,” laws that said a person has no legal duty to retreat from a dangerous situation if he is in a place he is allowed to be. Almost half the states had some form of stand-your-ground law, including Illinois, the last state to forbid carry permits under any circumstances. Gun-guy logic, I suppose, was this: It’s a
good idea
to retreat, but the state has no business telling you that you must.
^*

Hawley planted his fists on his hips. “I am going to teach you how to fight with a gun. And it’s a
fight
. If you’re taking your gun from your holster, somebody is going to die. We don’t want it to be you.” He looked around, as though daring us to ask a question on
that
topic.

“The world is dangerous,” he said loudly. “Carry a gun; two is better. Carry extra ammo; more is better. Carry a light; two is better.”

I raised my hand. “That’s a lot of weight.”

“Less than a coffin,” he said.

“I can understand a policeman carrying two guns or extra ammunition. But do you really think people like us need to?”

Fixing me with those sky-blue eyes, he pulled his gun, pressed the magazine release, and caught the empty magazine in midair. “The magazine is the component of the firearm most likely to malfunction,” he said, holding it high. “You may not need the extra rounds, but if your magazine malfunctions and you don’t have a replacement, you will die.”

“I carry a revolver.”

“Five shots?”

“I’m told most gunfights are over in a second, with at most two or three shots fired.”

“That’s true,” he said, reholstering his gun. “
Most
gunfights. What if
your
gunfight isn’t that way? What if
your
gunfight goes on awhile and you run out of ammunition in the middle of it? I’ll tell you what happens: You die. You and the people you’re with.”

He smiled, his blue eyes changing from drill-sergeant tough to schoolteacher kind. He wasn’t a hard-ass; it was all an act. “I’m just sayin’ …” He snapped back into drill-sergeant mode.

“You perform differently under stress. You engage your five-million-year-old lizard brain when someone is trying to kill you. You dump adrenaline. The blood is gone from your hands, and they go numb. Your ears shut off. You get tunnel vision. And it all happens instantly.”

He led us down a hallway to a deserted indoor range. Directly in front of us were the shooting bays: little booths from which one shot toward a target. He opened a shooting bay—normally an alarming transgression—and led us through, down to where the bullets usually fly.

It was eerie walking down that gloomy cement cavern, looking back at where the shooters normally stand. We gathered at the end, and Jack repeated aloud the Five Cardinal Rules. “Treat every gun as though it’s loaded! Never let your muzzle cross anything you’re not willing to destroy and pay for! Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target and you’re ready to fire! Be sure of your target and what’s beyond it! Maintain control of your firearm!