Authors: Dan Baum
A door at the front of the clubhouse stood open, leading to an indoor range. We each took a lane, about twenty feet from a man-silhouette target. In the lane beside me, one of the Jawas unpacked a huge Sig Sauer P226 semi-automatic with a bright nickel finish. In his hand, it looked as big and shiny as the bumper of a 1966 Buick, and I wondered how in the world he would be able to wear it concealed. I asked, but all he said was, “It’s the one Woody Harrelson carried in
Zombieland
.”
Each of us was assigned a range officer, trained by the NRA and paid little or nothing; they served for the same reason Dick and Judy were teaching the class: because they believed in gun culture and wanted it to be safe. My range officer was a gentle anesthesiologist named Charlie who wore a gun every day to work. “It’s a habit,” he said with a shrug. “I don’t mind carrying it, and if I need it, I have it.”
‡
Charlie taught me the isosceles stance—arms straight ahead—and
then the Weaver stance, in which the left edge of the body angles toward the target; the right hand pushes the gun forward while the left hand isometrically pulls it back. He discovered I was cross-eye dominant, meaning that although I was right handed, my left eye was stronger. Standing calmly shooting at targets, I’d learned to compensate. But in a sudden gunfight, Charlie taught me, my cross-eye dominance might throw off my shots, with fatal results. “Shoot with both eyes open,” he suggested, “or consider learning to shoot left-handed.”
We dutifully punched holes in paper, as required by Sheriff Pelle. We didn’t practice anything that might come in handy during a gunfight, such as drawing our guns, shouting commands, finding cover, reloading, or—best of all—running away. But it was a reasonably useful evening; I hadn’t fired a handgun with an instructor at my shoulder in a long time.
It reminded me, too, how deeply unpleasant target practice can be, especially in an indoor range with five or six other guns going off. Earplugs and oversize muffs didn’t cut it; I felt like I’d spent an hour with my head in a spaghetti pot while a two-year-old beat on it with a ladle. We scurried in stony silence to our cars, which was fine with me, since I was deaf.
If I was really going to carry the thing, I wanted to be sure I didn’t end up in prison. So I most looked forward to the night with a police officer as our teacher. We drew a burly detective named Gary, from one of Denver’s far-flung suburbs. He had a straw-colored bristle mustache and looked like a young, fit Captain Kangaroo. “Any lawyers here?” was the first thing he said, and when no hands went up: “Cool.” He played a videotape—the Pillsbury doughboy farting. “Just a little humor to start,” he said.
“The Supreme Court says that if you have time to reload, you have time to think, so any killing you do after that is premeditated,” he said. “That’s why I carry the FN Five-Seven; it holds twenty rounds.” He reached around behind him and came up with a bright orange plastic gun—an inert replica of an FN. Holding it out with both hands, he aimed, whispered
“pshew,”
faked the recoil, like an eight-year-old playing cops and robbers, and reholstered.
Like Dick and Judy, Gary was an acolyte of the Church of Out-of-Control Violence. And as a policeman, he seemed oddly eager for us to
partake of it. “If you’re in a place you’re legally allowed to be, you are
not
required to withdraw!” he barked. He’d rather we draw down and shoot it out if the alternative was backing away from a fight. Good people cowering from bad ones was a recipe for social decay. He drew his orange gun again, brought it to firing position, said
“pshew,”
and reholstered.
“In Massachusetts,” he said, “you’re required to withdraw
from your own home
.”
§
He shook his head and chuckled as he tucked the orange gun away—those wacky East Coast liberals. It seemed to me that dashing out the front door as a burglar came in the back was a pretty good strategy, if the alternative was a shoot-out. But it wasn’t question time.
“Within twenty-one feet, an attacker with a knife can get to you within 1.5 seconds,” Gary said, and I could sense us all remembering that photo Dick had shown us of the disemboweled stabbing victim. “Remember that the next time you hear people bitching that a cop shot someone who ‘only’ had a knife.”
One of the hooded Jawas asked whether he could legally shoot someone who came into his house. “There are some prohibitations about that,” Gary said as he drew, pointed, and reholstered his orange gun yet again. I wasn’t even sure he knew that he was doing it. “It could be bad if you shot a burglar who turned out to be unarmed. It would depend on the jury.”
“What about if he’s, like, on the way out the door with my flat-panel TV,” the Jawa said.
Gary chuckled. “I don’t think anybody here would let a guy walk out of their house with their forty-eight-inch flat-panel,” he said. “You can say ‘Stop!’ and if he sets it down and comes at you, you’re justified.”
“And if he runs away?” the Jawa asked.
“Now he knows you won’t shoot, and he’s going to come shopping at your house again.”
I raised my hand. “So shoot him?”
Gary chuckled again, drawing and reholstering, drawing and reholstering. “If your aim is good, you have time to get your story straight before I get there.”
On the fourth and final night, Dick and Judy talked about various ways to carry guns. Dick had on cargo pants and a jacket, under which he said
he was concealing thirteen of them. “These are unloaded, and there is
never
any live ammo in this room,” he said. He drew his guns, one by one, and laid them on a table in a kind of weird lethal striptease: five from his belt, inside and outside the waistband of his pants, two from his ankles, two from his front pockets, two from hidden pockets in a spandex undershirt designed for concealed carry, and two from a wide elastic band that wrapped around his midsection like a truss. It was like watching clowns tumbling out of a VW; it went on and on. “Really, though, I think two would suffice,” he said.
For the benefit of the woman in the class, Judy used her .38 snub-nose to model various holsters made to fit the female body. She waved the gun around, showing it at her hip, at the small of her back, and in her purse, then stopped suddenly and peered closely at it. “Oh shit,” she said, her face reddening. She opened the revolver and dumped out five live cartridges.
Into the appalled silence, Dick ventured: “Object lesson in rule number one: All guns are always loaded!” He grinned, as though they’d planned all along to have Judy wave a loaded gun at us.
Carrying a gun was only one component of the new lifestyle Dick and Judy wanted us to adopt. The world into which they had invited us required us to keep on our nightstand our gun, glasses, cell phone, and flashlight. If we didn’t like the idea of keeping an unsecured gun in the open, we could bolt to the wall beside the bed one of several available electronic safes that opened with a push-button code. “Every night before closing my eyes, I repeat the code aloud,” Dick said.
“Make your house uninviting,” Judy said. “Put up good exterior lighting. Clear away shrubbery where someone could hide.”
“But plant thorny bushes under the windows,” added Dick.
I was conjuring an image of my house on a denuded lot, bathed in halogen light, with thornbushes bunched under every window like barbed wire, when Judy carried my imagination inside.
“In your home you should know where your safe-fire zones are,” she said. “Figure out where you can stand and shoot without the bullet going outside or into the neighbor’s house.”
“You men, if you sleep in the nude, might want to rethink that. Men aren’t comfortable fighting naked. It’s something to consider.”
“Always expect the worst.”
If there was a line here between preparing for something awful to happen and praying for something awful to happen, I was having a hard time finding it.
But Dick and Judy left us with a piece of good advice: Concealed means
concealed
. You don’t show people your gun, you don’t tell people you’re carrying. If someone asks about it, you change the subject. “If someone goes to hug you,” Judy said, “make sure your arms are in the inside position so they don’t feel the hard lump on your hip. Guns make people react in unpredictable ways. If the wrong person learns you’re carrying a gun, he might whack you on the head to get it.” For the same reason, we were not to put up one of those
PROTECTED BY SMITH
&
WESSON
lawn signs or, on the car, the bumper sticker
KEEP HONKING, I
’
M RELOADING
. “A guy who sees one of those is likely to follow you to a parking lot,” Judy said, “and when you leave the car, smash the window to get your gun.”
As we were getting ready to pack up at the end of class, Dick handed around a card with what I first took to be a Transportation Security Administration threat assessment. It was, in fact, a way of thinking about readiness when carrying a gun. Condition White was total ignorance of one’s surroundings on the street—sleeping, being drunk or stoned, losing oneself in conversation or—the ultimate in modern oblivion—texting while listening to an iPod. Condition Yellow was being aware of, and taking an interest in, one’s surroundings. This was akin to the mental state we were encouraged to achieve while driving: keeping our eyes moving, checking the mirrors, being careful not to let the radio drown out the sounds around us. Condition Orange was awareness of a possible threat. Condition Red was responding to one.
“You should be in Condition Yellow whenever you’re on the street, whether armed or not,” Dick said, “but especially if you are wearing your gun. When you’re in Condition White, you’re a victim. You’re a sheep.”
The role Dick wanted us to play when out in public was that of “sheepdog”—alert, on guard, not aggressive but prepared to do battle on behalf of the defenseless. A handout from the American Tactical Shooting Association noted that the only time to be in Condition White was “when in your own home, with the doors locked, the alarm system on, and your dog at your feet.… The instant you leave your home, you escalate one level, to Condition Yellow.” The instant? Really? Like if I’m riding to the store in the morning for the paper and a carton of milk? Or on my way to a PTA meeting in the middle of the afternoon? And what’s this about alarms?
It turned out I was the kind of person who was contributing to a dangerous softening of society. Just as the Red Cross would have liked everybody to be qualified in cardiopulmonary resuscitation, gun carriers
wanted everybody prepared to confront violence—not only by being armed but by maintaining Condition Yellow. “I believe that in my afterlife I will be judged,” Dick said solemnly. “Part of the judgment will be: Did this guy look after himself? It’s a minimum responsibility.”
I submitted my certificate of instruction to Sheriff Pelle, allowed a deputy to take my fingerprints, and settled in for a wait that could last, under Colorado law, as long as ninety days. “Due to the high volume of concealed-carry-license applications,” a recording on the sheriff’s phone line said, “do not expect your license before ninety days and do not call this office to inquire.” In Boulder!
While waiting for the permit, I went shopping for a holster in which to carry the Detective Special. Colt stopped making my particular model in 1972, so a holster wasn’t something I could order from Amazon. I figured I’d find heaps of old holsters at the monthly Tanner Gun Show, at the Denver Merchandise Mart, and drove down one snowy Saturday to rummage the offerings.
I never got inside. As I approached the desk to pay my entry fee, a young woman handed me a piece of paper and said, “Concealed-carry class beginning
right now
!” I looked at the paper. A company called Equip 2 Conceal was offering a class right here at the gun show that would qualify pupils to get a Colorado concealed-carry permit—in three hours. This I had to see.
She directed me across the parking lot to the Aspen Room of the Comfort Inn, where tables had been lined up classroom style and a dozen people sat filling out forms. “Before we begin, I’ll tell you right off that I’m an NRA recruiter,” said a dark-haired young man named Rob, in an Equip 2 Conceal golf shirt. “My job is to get as many people into the NRA as possible, because we really need it now. They’re doing a lot of things to protect our rights.” He motioned to a pretty young woman in a company shirt, who put a membership form in front of me.
Rob used the first hour to run through the “This is the trigger, this is the muzzle” drill. What he really wanted to talk about, though, was something he called “home invasion”—people coming into your home not to steal things but for the sheer maniacal pleasure of torturing you to death. “They”—white guys in ski masks and chinos, presumably—“have been watching what time you come home, what time do you get up to go
to the bathroom. They know where your bedroom is, and they’re there to kill you. Make sure you have your gun loaded. I live alone, and I always have my gun near me. I carry 24/7. I’m ready.”
The Aspen Room had Wi-Fi. By going to several websites and juxtaposing numbers, it took me about ninety seconds, while Rob was talking, to discover that Rob wasn’t entirely paranoid. Robberies in peoples’ homes had increased by almost half from 2004 to 2008—one of the few crime stats that was growing worse. Seventy-two thousand American households had been struck, or about one in sixteen hundred. On the other hand, only eighty-seven Americans had been murdered in such incidents in 2008. I was literally more likely to be struck by lightning.
The young woman was passing out another set of forms. “In addition to your Colorado permit, you can get a nonresident carry permit in the state of Florida,” Rob said. “That’s right: Florida will issue you a carry permit even though you don’t live there. Why do you want one? For one thing, three states—Washington, Virginia, and West Virginia—honor a Florida permit but not your Colorado permit. So that’s three extra states where you can exercise your constitutional rights. Second, let’s say you lose your Colorado permit. You couldn’t carry here, because Colorado doesn’t recognize a nonresident Florida permit, but you’d still be able to carry in thirty states.”