Gun Guys (9 page)

Dick and Judy needn’t have hectored us to remain in Condition Yellow; there was no way to lapse into Condition White when armed. Carrying a gun is uncomfortable; my fat little revolver, with its bulging six-shot cylinder, felt, by day’s end, like a baseball digging into my love handle. More than that, its phenomenal lethality made it unignorable.

I didn’t tell anybody that I was embarked upon an experiment in going armed. “Concealed means
concealed
.” One afternoon during that first week of carrying, I ran into a friend downtown. As we stood and talked, the gun on my hip felt as big as a toaster oven. She told a long, complicated story about her teenage son; I tried to follow it, but all I could think about was how freaked out she’d be if she knew the gun was there.

I was fine with the strict secrecy rule, because in the world I inhabited, carrying a gun would have made me a social outcast. Most of my friends would have kept their distance or felt it necessary to tell me that a gun wasn’t welcome in their house. For reasons I had a hard time identifying, I felt a particular need not to let on to any of Rosa’s male friends—or the sons of any of our friends, whatever their age—that I was living alongside a gun.
What a weenie
, shouted one side of my brain.
Guns are a natural part of a young man’s education, and you should be proud to be a responsible role model
. But the other side shouted,
Of course you don’t want to be a gun-carrying role model for young men. They’re the ones who do most of the killing with guns and are most often killed by them
. I didn’t have to go far to learn about the nation’s conflicted attitude toward guns. I could just tour the inside of my own skull.

Whatever I was doing, during those first months, the Colt on my hip seemed to occupy half my brain. In supermarkets, I had to be conscious of keeping the gun covered up when reaching for the high shelf or stooping for the low one. On the street, I looked people over in a whole new way.
Where are his hands? What does his face tell me about his intentions? The gun kept me in my own little movie, glancing at the door when a person walked in, evaluating, in a microsecond, whether a threat had appeared, and weighing my options for response—roll left and take cover behind that pillar? Some nights, I dreamed gunfight scenarios over and over and woke up bushed.

Carrying the gun even changed my relationship with Margaret and Rosa. Although they’d known in a general way that I’d been planning to get a carry permit, I hadn’t kept them up on specifics, and I certainly hadn’t told tell them that my experiment had begun. Getting ready to go out with them, I’d make for the little electronic safe stowed on a closet shelf behind my stack of sweaters and punch in a three-button code. The safe’s door would pop open, I’d slip the loaded gun inside my waistband, and off we’d go, with nobody the wiser. If Margaret put her arm around me while we were walking, I’d shift so her hand wouldn’t fall on the business. In a family accustomed to keeping no secrets, going armed became a perpetual sin of omission.

My instructors’ crime paranoia wasn’t my style, but the weight on my hip left me no choice. It was hard not to see attackers everywhere, or at least in the places they might be hiding—like
behind that Dumpster!
Not that I thought Boulder had become Dodge City, but the darkness at the center of my vision was hard to shake. My fellow man had become a threat. I didn’t like it. Nor did I like my new relationship with Death; now that I was equipped to do his bidding, I couldn’t help feeling that I’d joined his payroll.

But wearing the gun and staying in Condition Yellow also had positive effects. It made me more organized. I stopped doing stupid things like leaving credit cards on store counters or sunglasses on restaurant tables. I got better about remembering to lock the house at night. (If I was equipping myself to shoot an intruder, locking the door seemed a reasonable first step.) I became a more astute driver. I seemed to be more punctual, as though I’d subtly rearranged my life so that I was a little less frazzled, a little farther in front of the eight ball. Wearing the gun, I was Mr. Together. There was no room for screwing up when I was equipped to kill. Existential catastrophe lurked as close as the time it would take to draw.

A couple of weeks after getting my carry permit—and three months to the day after I sent in the silencer paperwork—Oliver called to say that my federal tax stamp had arrived and the silencer was legally mine.

The silencer’s impending arrival had forced me to buy a new gun, because, Hollywood be damned, there was no way to silence a revolver: The gap between the cylinder and the barrel made it impossible to seal. (The Nagant M1895 revolver was the sole exception. Pulling the trigger both rotated the cylinder and pushed it against the end of the barrel, making a seal.) My silencer, then, was not for the Colt Detective Special. On
GunBroker.com
—the eBay of firearms
^‖
—I had bought an Argentine Bersa .22 semi-automatic pistol with a threaded barrel. At Walmart, I’d bought some subsonic .22 cartridges. After picking up the silencer at Oliver’s, I drove up Left Hand Canyon to a spot in the national forest that people had turned into an informal shooting range.

Because Boulder was culturally hostile to guns, it hadn’t created a proper county-owned range. What it had instead, for those who didn’t belong to the Rifle Club, was a miserable arroyo strewn with broken bottles, shot-up cardboard boxes, flattened shotgun shells, and mountains of expended brass—an environmental disaster that would have offended most Boulderites’ sensibilities if they’d ever deigned to visit. The arroyo was narrow—it didn’t allow for a shot of more than about twenty-five yards—and it was all rock, which made it dangerously prone to ricochet.

It was one of those eerily warm days Boulder gets in February, and, in the middle of a workday, two groups of people were banging away with their guns. One group consisted of three tattooed men and two women, and they were a fine advertisement for gun control, drunkenly whooping and hollering as they threw glass bottles into the air and smashed them with shotguns. Farther along, a group of young men speaking Spanish snapped off rounds from semi-automatic handguns. I walked behind both groups, carefully, up to the end of the arroyo, to be as far away from the shooting as possible. Still, I was unpacking my guns when someone caromed a bullet off a rock; there was a terrifying whine, like a finger
sliding up a guitar string, and a
whack
as the bullet smacked into a patch of snow about six feet from me. Such was the nature of this wretched, informal range. In its aversion to guns, Boulder had created conditions that made guns more dangerous.

I drew a black spot on a cardboard box and set it up about thirty feet away. Picking up the Bersa, I experienced the sensual thrill—part cinematic and part onanistic—of screwing the black cylinder to the muzzle. When I pulled the trigger, about all I heard was the pistol’s slide reciprocating. I kept firing—
phut, phut, phut
—and realized I was hearing something else: my bullets hitting the cardboard box. This was new. Hearing the bullets strike the target connected me afresh to what I was shooting at, which made me a lot more aware of the power of what I was doing. And the silencer did more than reduce the noise. It funneled the concussion downrange and weighted the muzzle, which reduced recoil. Noise, concussion, and recoil: The silencer had removed everything unpleasant about shooting, and it may have made me a safer shooter, because I was more cognizant of what I was throwing downrange.

I wasn’t wearing big acoustic earmuffs, so I could hear the Hispanic guys talking. I could hear people’s footsteps. Another thing that makes gun ranges dangerous is that a bad guy who wants a gun knows he can find one there. Shooters’ lore is full of stories of people murdered at ranges for their guns. This very spot had, in 1990, been the setting for such a tragedy. People who were focused downrange and deafened to their surroundings by hearing protectors were especially vulnerable. Shooting unmuffed, I was safer.

I had no plans to mix the silencer with carrying concealed. Although it was technically legal, it would be awfully difficult explaining
that
to a jury. But for ordinary sport shooting, using the silencer was so pleasant for me, and presumably for the people around me, that it suddenly seemed crazy to put up with the racket of
unsilenced
firearms. It was the twenty-first century, for heaven’s sake; why should anybody—shooter or bystander—have to be annoyed by, or risk hearing loss from, the eight-hundred-year-old sound of exploding gunpowder? If we were a little less hysterical and polarized about firearms, we could have had such a discussion, and perhaps made silencers a matter of etiquette—if not law—for those who like to shoot, the way they were in Europe. For a while, I thought of getting all the required licenses and opening a business in yoga-centric Boulder—Namaste Guns: Fine Silent Firearms. Margaret thought it was funny. To a point.

F
ully armed, the car loaded with ammunition and camping gear, I was ready to set off in search of gun-guy America. Boulder felt as though it had been swept under a rug of clouds the day I pulled out of town. I drove south toward Arizona, planning a short stop in Colorado Springs, not to visit a gun store this time but to see a city councilman. The relationship between Boulder and Colorado Springs illustrated the depth of my ignorance about American politics. A child of the Great Society, raised by New Dealers, I’d grown up with the bedtime story that Democrats were the party of the workingman, while Republicans carried the cudgel for the rich. That, of course, was outdated wisdom. Boulder, for example, was simultaneously among the richest cities in the nation and the bluest imaginable stronghold, while Colorado Springs, a hard-luck town with more tattoo parlors than latte shops, was nationally known as a red-meat conservative redoubt and home to Focus on the Family. The GOP’s capture of working-class America was a thirty-year-old story by the time I got on the road with my Colt, but it never failed to surprise me when I encountered it. Guns were part of the story of that shift, and on my way through Colorado Springs, I wanted to meet Bernie Herpin, who had made a name for himself after the Columbine High School massacre, in 1999. Coloradans had responded to the tragedy by approving a ballot initiative to “close the gun-show loophole,” requiring at gun shows the same kind of computerized background checks that were mandated
at gun stores. The new law probably wouldn’t have changed anything at Columbine—where a law-abiding adult had bought the guns for the teenage shooters—but still, it sounded good to many in the traumatized state. Herpin was among those who’d taken an unpopular position against it.

I also looked forward to meeting Herpin because it was thanks to him that Colorado Springs was one of the few cities in America where I could carry a gun into City Hall. Keeping Americans from being armed in the places where their laws were made was un-American, he’d argued. He’d won that one, so I was surprised to find a metal detector standing between me and the elevators in the City Hall lobby. I walked through, and it warbled like a canary.

“Empty your pockets, please,” said the female security guard. She wore the uniform of a private security company and a holstered .357 Magnum. I put my keys and watch in the plastic dish and walked through again.
Beeeep!

“Anything else in your pockets?” she asked. I patted them.