Gun Guys (5 page)

Clicking around the gun-guy websites one day, I blundered into a conversation about something called “open carry”—the practice of wearing a pistol in plain sight. In almost all states, no permit was needed to carry a gun that was holstered and visible. It took me awhile to get my head around that, but once I did, it seemed a spectacular solution to my problem.

The thinking, which went back to the Old West, was that if you could see a man’s gun, he had less chance of doing mischief with it. Open carry was the new front in the nation’s perpetual war over gun rights. Activists were holding armed picnics, video-recording encounters with police
(“Hey, bud, what’s with the gun?”
“I know my rights!”
), and wearing guns openly to Starbucks in hopes of being refused service or, better still, arrested. (Starbucks refused to take the bait, serving the gun toters with a smile.) A few gun wearers had even shown up outside of rallies in New Hampshire and Arizona attended by President Obama. If they’d hoped to martyr themselves and file false-arrest lawsuits, they were disappointed: The Secret Service, knowing perfectly well that open carry was legal, left them alone.

Mike Stollenwerk, the retired Army lieutenant colonel who ran
OpenCarry.org
—“A Right Unexercised is a Right Lost!”—told me when I called him that he thought displaying a gun at a presidential event was for “Tea Party nutties.” He wanted more people showing guns not at political events but in supermarkets and at kids’ soccer games, because “we want everybody to have that right.” Wearing guns openly so that you could wear guns openly sounded to me like the old Firesign Theatre joke about the mural depicting the historic struggle of the people to finish the mural. Open carry was already legal almost everywhere. But Stollenwerk said the movement was more about changing culture than about changing the law. “We’re trying to normalize gun ownership by openly carrying properly holstered handguns in daily life,” he said.
Good luck with that
, I thought. My guess was that Stollenwerk’s strategy would backfire—that, instead of acclimating people, the open-carry movement would frighten them, and they would eventually ask their legislators to put a stop to it.
^*

Regardless of what it did for the gun-rights movement, open carry, I figured, could be the answer to my camouflage problem. NRA caps were nice, but nothing said “gun guy” like a gun. A loaded revolver on my hip would make my bona fides beyond question. I took from the safe the biggest, most ostentatious handgun I owned—a 1917 Smith & Wesson .45 revolver—slid it into its holster, hung it on my belt, and checked my look in the mirror. Unironed blue oxford shirt, thrift-store wool pants, crewneck sweater with snowflakes, and an antique Army pistol the size of a trumpet. The muzzle almost reached my knee.

Colorado law may have been fine with me walking around with a hog-leg on my hip, but I answered to a higher authority: Margaret. We had been married since 1987, and she was a boy’s pal—willing to camp in the snow, hitchhike across Tanzania, and swim naked at inappropriate places and times. She was devoid of material cravings, could hold her liquor, and
deployed her brain to devastating conversational effect. She was, above all, as willing as I was to risk a tenuous fortune on a harebrained scheme. I couldn’t have asked for a more supportive partner—as long as my proposals weren’t extravagantly stupid or potentially catastrophic. Strutting about displaying a loaded gun, I worried, might qualify.

It’s safe to say that my gun thing was not the quality that Margaret found most attractive in me. Born of deep peacenik, Northern California stock, she had an instinctive aversion to firearms. She was willing to shoot with me on occasion and even hunt, but the less she had to see and acknowledge my guns, the better. Also, we lived in Boulder, a university town so achingly liberal that its city council once argued for three days over whether people were “owners” or “guardians” of their pets. (Guardians won.) The thought of me strolling around Boulder with a loaded handgun as plumage did not go over well with Her Majesty.

“For Christ’s sake,” she said as I headed for the door, strapped.

“Gotta try it,” I said.

“Don’t get killed. Don’t get arrested. Don’t cause a riot.”

“Keep your phone on in case I need bail money.”

I rode my bike first to Home Depot, a manly place where I figured my gun was least likely to scatter people in panic. I removed my coat, draped it over my left arm to make my right side completely visible, and strode through every aisle: tools, electrical, housewares, plumbing. Bracing to be tackled by the burly guys in lumber, I got no reaction at all. People walked by me, chatting to each other, paying no mind. Maybe the big leather holster looked too much like a carpenter’s belt. After twenty uneventful minutes, I pedaled over to Target, which was full of women and children, and got the same nonreaction. I watched people’s faces. If they even noticed the enormous pistol hitched over my thigh, they didn’t let on. It was getting a little frustrating. I planted myself in front of a uniformed security guard by the cash registers and fumbled around in the bargain bins. He had to have seen the gun, but he said nothing. Apparently a balding, middle-aged man in scratchy pants and glasses rummaging through Post-it notes and leftover Halloween decorations with a tired old gun on his hip was not a particularly threatening sight. Maybe he figured I was some kind of cop or a ranger from the city’s vast open-space parks system.

I tried the Apple Store next, where young clerks in rectangular-framed glasses and identical blue T-shirts stood right beside me as I played with an iPad for half an hour. It wasn’t possible that they didn’t see the big handgun. My guess is that it simply didn’t interest them. A World War I
revolver is pretty dull technology compared with a touch-screen device running a 1GHz A4 chip and 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi.

Finally, I steeled myself for the toughest test of the day: Whole Foods. If I couldn’t get a rise out of that crowd, I might need to try a rifle on my back. I drifted slowly through the entire store, from the six-dollar pints of açai berries to the salmon-and-scallop sausages, and reached high—gun hip facing flamboyantly outward—for a bag of muesli. I sat for half an hour on a high stool sipping an Odwalla Mango Tango Smoothie, gun hip out. Men in bicycle-racing Lycra, women in yoga pants, children with flickering lights on their shoes came and went. I watched their eyes. If anybody noticed the gun, I missed it. Nobody said anything, or stared, or alerted store management. I felt like a ghost. Perhaps their eyes saw the pistol but their brains discounted it:
This is Boulder; that can’t be a gun
.

Fed up, I headed home to ponder the odd results. On the way, I stopped at a gritty little Mexican grocery to buy some tortillas and
crema
. As I locked my bike, a chubby boy ran up and asked, in breathless Spanish, if my gun was real. I assured him it was. Inside the store, everybody swiveled toward the scrawny gringo with the gun. They peered at it, whispered to each other, took their children by the hand. I tried to relax, breathing in the mingled aromas of meat, onions, and votive candles that constitute the Mexican national fragrance. But I couldn’t relax any more than they could.
“¿Por qué la pistola?”
a man in line for the register finally asked.
“¿Por qué no?”
I answered. He shrugged and turned away, shaking his head—not as if I was dangerous, but more to say,
gabacho
fool.

Maybe the Hispanics in the grocery were simply more candid than the Anglo Boulderites, and more socially relaxed. Maybe they figured I was an agent of
la migra
. Or maybe they tuned in to the handgun because in Mexico almost nobody gets a license to own one, let alone wear one.

I did not repeat the experiment. I don’t know how many Whole Foods shoppers had started down the overpriced-cheese aisle, only to spot the gun and reverse course toward the overpriced tea, but I’d made people in at least one store anxious. Wearing a visible gun made me feel obnoxious.

To say nothing of unsafe. The idea that wearing a gun in plain view was a smart precaution now felt completely crazy. I’d worried the whole time that someone would knock me on the back of the head and steal it, or that a nutcase would challenge me to a draw. And that was in genteel, urbane Boulder. I couldn’t imagine carrying openly in places like Phoenix or Detroit.

Which brought me, inevitably, to the place where, all along, I’d secretly hoped to arrive: concealed carry.

Gun guys don’t talk about it much, because we don’t want to seem weird, but a huge part of the attraction of guns is the sensual pleasure of handling them, whether shooting them or not. They are exquisitely designed and beautifully made, like clocks or cameras. To manipulate a gun’s moving parts—its “action”—is deeply satisfying to hand and ear. Guys like machines, and guns are machines elevated to high, lethal art.

Most of us, though, seldom enjoy the pleasure of handling them—perhaps only when we take them from the safe for hunting season, plus a few sessions of target practice. The rest of the time, we read about them, think about them, and watch movies full of them. But we don’t handle them. Imagine a musician who got to touch a guitar for one week a year. Short of joining a police department, shipping out to a combat zone with the Marines, or being willing to carry openly, about the only way to live the quotidian gun life was to go through the trouble of getting licensed to carry one concealed.

For most of American history, that was hard to do. Laws requiring a license to carry a concealed weapon go back to the early nineteenth century in places like New York City. And right up to the end of the twentieth century, almost every jurisdiction in the country made people prove a need for carrying a hidden gun. Merchants in rough neighborhoods and the well-connected could usually manage that; everybody else went unarmed or carried illegally.

Then came the
Miami Vice
days of the mid-1980s. The crack cocaine epidemic was heating up, and crime was on the rise. Miami was the worst of the worst—which is why the era’s emblematic hyperviolent cop show was set there. Most places ravaged by gun violence reacted by passing increasingly strict gun laws, on the theory that making it harder for law-abiding residents to get guns would make it harder for criminals, too. Florida, though—suffering a murder rate almost half again higher than the national average—went the other way. Bad guys would always be able to get guns, the legislators figured, so law-abiding citizens should have the means to defend themselves.

In 1987, Florida created a state agency to issue carry permits to any
adult who wanted one, provided there was no good reason to deny it. The Florida law was nicknamed “shall issue”—as in, state officials shall issue the permit and not apply their own discretion. I was living in Atlanta at the time and sneered at the bumpkins to the south.
Oh, that’s a
good
idea
, I thought.
Let’s put
more
guns in circulation. That’ll stop the killing
. There was a whiff of Wild West machismo to Florida’s move, like handing out guns to a posse. I predicted that every Florida fender bender would turn into a gunfight.

The majority of Americans, though, saw it differently. Or, perhaps more accurately, a majority of the people who cared one way or the other about it saw it differently and made a lot of noise. From Maine to Arizona, they clamored for the right to defend themselves. Or maybe they clamored for an opportunity to live the gun life, to handle a gun every day. Whatever the case, once gun guys heard about what Florida had done, they asked their legislatures to follow suit. And, one after another, they did.

It was a big moment in the history of gun politics. The gun-rights movement had won just about every battle it had engaged since coalescing in the late 1960s, but most had been defensive battles against new gun-control laws. Reversing the burden of proof on carry permits
expanded
gun rights. For the first time, the movement was on offense.

By the time I was embarrassing myself by carrying a blunderbuss down the aisles of Whole Foods, thirty-seven states had gone shall-issue—including my home state of Colorado. Many recognized the permits of other states. So I had an alternative to displaying my firepower. I could carry discreetly and show the gun only when I needed to—like flashing a Masonic pin or giving the secret handshake.

I still faced, of course, the Margaret hurdle. She never said no to anything, but she had infinite power to make me feel like an idiot and a weenie. She would surely do so when I mentioned a carry permit. The responsibilities of literature, however, were great.

“You want to wear a concealed
gun
,” she said when I brought it up one night at dinner. Across the table, our sixteen-year-old daughter, Rosa, put down her fork and said, “Dad.”

I explained that I needed to look like a gun guy. I explained that I needed to get into the gun-guy mind-set. I explained, and I explained. Margaret and Rosa looked at each other in a way that no woman ever
looks at a man. It was a look that said,
We have to share the planet with men; let’s make the best of it until we find a use for them
.

By this time it was no longer necessary to speculate, as I had in Atlanta, as to what kind of mayhem widespread concealed carry might unleash. We had two decades of experience demonstrating that the short answer was: None. The national murder rate had fallen to about half what it had been when Florida started the shall-issue revolution; rape, robbery, and aggravated assault had also fallen sharply. Not only were “bad guy” murders way down—those committed in the course of other felonies—but so were the kind of spur-of-the-moment shootings that turned law-abiding people into murderers. Depending on how you did the math, 1989 to 2010 may have seen the fastest and steepest drop in crime ever recorded in the United States. To ice the cake, most kinds of gun
accidents
had also decreased. Maybe the country had simply been lucky.

The theories as to why crime rates were falling ranged from data-conscious policing to stricter sentencing. The authors of
Freakonomics
went so far as to suggest that the drop in crime was a by-product of legalizing abortion in the 1970s: Fewer unwanted, underparented babies yielded fewer desperate young men. Whatever the cause, the decrease in crime had brought a new twist to gun politics.