Much of the law portion of this class was taken up with the consequences of shooting another person, which is what handguns are for, coyotes notwithstanding. It’s lawful to pull the trigger if someone has broken into your home or business or vehicle, or to prevent the commission of a serious crime. Like many states, Texas also has a “stand your ground” provision, which says that a person who is present in a place where he has a right to be also has the right to use deadly force if he reasonably believes it is necessary to protect himself or others. That was the defense in the acquittal of George Zimmerman in Florida after he killed the unarmed black high school student Trayvon Martin in 2012.
“Your life will change the moment you pull the trigger,” Cargill warned us. For one thing, you’ll be under arrest while the cops sort out whether or not to charge you, a process that can take several days. And there are personal consequences that are difficult to calculate. One of Cargill’s previous students did shoot an intruder in his home, a seventeen-year-old boy whose last words were “Would you call my mother?”
After we took a written exam, an ex-cop came into the class to sell us insurance for legal expenses in case we shot anybody. Several people signed up (I did not). Then we drove out to the firing range, an open pit behind the airport surrounded by mesquite trees and pin oaks. There was another class in the range next to us practicing some kind of tactical exercise, which consisted of loping along with a pistol and firing at metal targets—Ping! Ping! Ping!—then performing a barrel roll and grabbing a shotgun and blowing away a Bernie Sanders yard sign. That seemed politically off to me. Sanders was far more liberal on gun laws than any of his Democratic opponents in the presidential primary. All of my classmates arrived with their own weapons; I was the only one who had to rent one. Even the middle-aged women in the class brought along their Colts and Berettas and Smith & Wessons. When my turn to shoot came, Cargill handed me a 9mm Glock.
I hadn’t fired a handgun in fifty years, since I was in high school. For a while, there was a snub-nosed .38 in our house; it was the gun my uncle used to kill himself. I don’t know why my father brought it home. I took it out in the country with some friends and we tried shooting bottles off a fence post, but it was not made for target practice. After a while, the gun disappeared from the house. I never knew what happened to it.
I chatted with some of my fellow students at the firing range, curious as to what had brought them here. The mixed group included an old bearded hippie, an ex-cop, a physical therapist. One woman with a SIG Sauer P226, the kind of pistol that U.S. Navy SEAL teams use, said she “just wanted to get out of my comfort zone.” There was an Asian man in a button-down shirt who was continually checking his email as he waited to shoot. He said that he had bought his semiautomatic pistol several years ago but never really used it. “So why’d you buy it?” I asked him. “That was back when Obama was going to take away our guns,” he said, as he briefly glanced up from his phone. “I thought I’d better go ahead and get one while I could.” (Obama termed the notion that he was planning to take away Americans’ guns a conspiracy theory.)
There was one guy I was especially curious about. He was burly and bearded and had tattoos spilling down his right arm. He wore a black T-shirt that said Stop Terrorism—Shoot Back. The fear of domestic terrorism is overblown, but it has certainly empowered gun advocates. “Innocents like us will continue to be slaughtered in concert halls, sports stadiums, restaurants and airplanes,” Wayne LaPierre, the leader of the National Rifle Association, said shortly after the Paris terror attacks in 2015. “But when evil comes knocking on our door, Americans have a power no other people on the planet share”—i.e., the Second Amendment. Such fearmongering has been extremely effective. Whenever there’s another mass shooting in Whitman’s America, gun sales invariably rise. In the decade between 2005 and 2015, more than 300,000 Americans were killed by guns compared with 94 who died in domestic terror attacks.
The man in the Stop Terrorism T-shirt was hanging around with a young couple; it turned out they had all moved down from Chicago together. I asked them what made them choose Texas. “The weather,” they said unanimously. They told me they had been classmates at Northern Illinois University in 2008, when a graduate student named Steven Kazmierczak burst into Cole Hall. An oceanography class was under way in the auditorium. Like Whitman, Kazmierczak was toting an armory of weapons, and he had the students trapped. Police later recovered fifty-four bullet casings and shotgun shells. Twenty-one people were shot, and six died, including Kazmierczak, who killed himself before the police arrived. As it happened, the shooter was wearing a black T-shirt that said Terrorist.
I asked the three of them if the Texas gun laws were one of the reasons they had chosen my state. “Not entirely, but it was a plus,” one of them said.
I knew from the few times I went hunting as a boy with my dad that I was a good shot. I liked the feel of the gun in my hand and the little kick when it fired, like a horse cocking its head when you give him your heels. We were shooting at a blue silhouette with the bull’s-eye at mid-sternum. I scored 246 out of 250. I began to think about what it would be like to own my own handgun.
According to a study published by Injury Prevention, about 35 percent of Texans own guns, close to the national average. I still have my old Remington .22 from my Boy Scout days on the top shelf in the hall closet, so I guess I’m included in that number. Despite the controversy that rages on this issue now, the incidence of gun ownership in the United States has declined from more than half of all households in 1982 to a little more than a third currently—the lowest it has been in almost forty years. And yet the United States still has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world—88.8 guns per 100 residents—and gun purchases are also at historic highs. The statistics are skewed by the fact that gun owners are acquiring significant personal arsenals. My Stop Terrorism—Shoot Back informant told me he has nine guns; that’s one more than the average gun owner possesses, according to The Washington Post. Our instructor, Michael Cargill, told us he was carrying three concealed weapons while he was teaching class. I couldn’t spot any of them.
I was at a book club recently in Austin where one of the members recalled being in a restaurant in Houston when President George H. W. Bush and the first lady entered. The Secret Service set up a metal detector that the other diners had to pass through. “They had a big bowl for people to drop their guns in,” the woman recalled, “and there were all these big-haired Houston women pulling pistols out of their purses.” I’ve never seen anything similar in Texas, but the reputation for a high rate of gun possession does affect behavior; in my experience, Texans drive far more courteously than New Yorkers or, my God, Bostonians, where the consequences of being a jerk may not be fatal. Part of me longs to live in a place where people are assumed to be disarmed, like England, which has very few guns and also hardly any snakes. The English don’t even have poison ivy. In Texas, it sometimes seems that every living thing can bite or poke or sting or shoot you. You always have to be a little bit on guard.
Speaking of snakes, I was down at the capitol one wintry day and ran into a group of Jaycees from Sweetwater, a West Texas town famed for its annual rattlesnake roundup. To promote the event, the Jaycees had brought a dozen rattlers and dumped them out on the chilly outdoor rotunda. The Jaycees were striding around in Kevlar boots. They would prod the lethargic creatures with hooked poles every once in a while to stir them to life, and the snakes would hiss and rattle and then return to their somnolent state. “They get a little lazy,” one of the Jaycees said disparagingly. A few tourists and staffers ventured out onto the patio, but most people were standing at the windows with their mouths open.
The spokesman of the Jaycees was Rob McCann. “We’ve been doing the roundup for fifty-eight years,” he told me. They find about four to five thousand pounds of snakes a year; one year, they gathered fifteen thousand pounds, and yet the number of snakes in Swee
twater never seems to diminish. “We hunt the same dens year after year,” the first man said. “You want to hold one?”
“Not especially.”
That evening I called our daughter, Caroline, who was in Chicago finishing her MFA at the Art Institute. I asked her how she was getting along. She was living near a country-and-western bar so she wouldn’t feel so far from home, but it wasn’t the same. “People here can’t dance,” she complained.
I mentioned that I’d just been to the capitol and visited the snake handlers. “Oh, I love Texas!” she said with a lack of irony that is hard to convey.
* * *
A GOOD FRIEND OF MINE, John Burnett, is a reporter for NPR. He and Hawk Mendenhall, the station manager for KUT, our local NPR affiliate, literally embody FM Texas. They have been cycling across the state to raise money for charity. In 2015, they rode from Brownsville, at the very bottom of the horn-shaped tip of the state, to the Red River on the border of Oklahoma, logging 734 miles. That’s farther than from Charlotte, North Carolina, to New York. A year later, they pedaled from Sunland Park, New Mexico, just west of El Paso, to Merryville, Louisiana, just across the Sabine River, a total of 1,113 miles over seventeen days, mostly on two-lane back roads through the small towns of the state. West Texas was one long stretch of headwinds and road-killed jackrabbits, through counties that are larger than some New England states. Once they passed Navasota, the South began. “Suddenly, the waitresses began calling us ‘honey’ and ‘sweetheart.’ We saw a lot of Confederate flags,” John said. “The state hasn’t changed so much as it has become more like ‘Texas’—the stereotype—than it’s ever been. There are so many more barbecue joints, more gun shops and target ranges. But one thing that hasn’t changed is the deep, abiding friendliness.”
John and Hawk stopped to eat at the J and P Bar & Grill in Comstock, near the Mexican border. “A couple of cowboys walked in,” John recalled. He stiffened a bit when he saw them. “I could feel the cultural distance immediately.” The cowboys still had their spurs on. Their hair was matted in the shape of their hats, and they had the vivid tan lines of men who live outdoors. They were drinking Coors Light and shooting pool, but they obviously took note of John and Hawk, two gray-haired men in garish Spandex outfits like aging Spider-Men. One of the cowboys finally demanded to know what they were up to.
“We’re riding across Texas on our bikes,” John said.
“Why the hell would you do that?”
John explained that they were raising money to buy bicycles and books for schoolchildren in Kenya.
The cowboys returned to the pool table, but as John and Hawk were leaving, one of them stuffed two $20 bills in John’s pocket. “Give this to them kids in Africa,” he said.
Friendliness is a sort of mandate in the state. The state motto is Friendship. Highway signs enjoin us to Drive Friendly. And indeed, if you are traveling on a two-lane road and see a vehicle coming from the opposite direction, the protocol is to raise an index finger about an inch off the rim of the steering wheel in a laconic salute. Steve’s brother-in-law says he decided to move to Texas when he saw people thanking the bus driver as they disembarked.
Texas advertises itself in travel magazines as “a whole other country”—an echo of its decade of independence as a republic—and it still loves to think of itself as an independent entity. It is certainly big enough to stand alone. “Texas is more than five times the size of New York state,” John Bainbridge marveled in 1961, and “bigger than any country in Europe except Russia.” I still recall the gloom that settled over Texas in January 1959, when Alaska joined the Union. We had to change the lyrics of our kitschy state song:
Texas, Our Texas! All hail the mighty State!
Texas, Our Texas! So wonderful so great!
Largest and grandest, withstanding ev’ry test
O Empire wide and glorious, you stand supremely blest!
Suddenly, we weren’t the “largest” anymore, we were the “boldest.”
The Republic of Texas was far larger than the present entity, taking in half of New Mexico, portions of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and southern Wyoming. We have stopped mourning the loss of all those mountains and trout streams, but the imaginative lure of a distant Texan Camelot seems only to get stronger. “When we came into the nation in 1845, we were a republic,” Rick Perry informed a group of visitors when he was still governor. “And one of the deals was, we can leave any time we want. So, we’re kind of thinking about that again.” Every schoolchild learns in the seventh grade, while taking the mandatory Texas history class, that when Texas entered the Union it came with a prenuptial agreement: the possibility of splitting itself into five states—with ten senators!—any time it chooses. It does not have the right to secede, however.
Texas isn’t actually alone in its longing to break free of the federal grip. A 2014 Reuters poll found that nearly a fourth of all Americans would like to see their own state leave the Union, about the same as the number of Texans who feel that way. After the Trump victory, secession fever suddenly jumped to California. We recently learned that a lot of secessionist fever was being fanned by Russian trolls on Facebook. The largest secessionist page, “Heart of Texas,” was among the Russian propaganda sites that Facebook shut down; it had more followers than the official Texas Democrat and Texas Republican party Facebook pages combined.
And yet, it’s a strange, dysfunctional marriage between Texas and the United States. Texas is at once the most super-American of states and the most indigestible. A 2011 MyLife.com poll found that five of the ten most patriotic cities in America—measured by the percentage of the population in the armed forces, veteran spending, community and social service workers, and fireworks popularity on the Fourth of July—were in Texas. At the same time, there is a defiant sense of apartness and a grudging feeling of being bossed around. When our current governor, Greg Abbott, was the Texas attorney general, he described his job this way: “I go into the office in the morning, I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home.” As governor, under Trump, with even less to do, he advocates a constitutional convention to consider various amendments that would transfer power from the federal government to the states, which his predecessor Rick Perry once called the “lavatories of democracy.” A recent law would create the Texas Bullion Depository—“the first state-level facility of its kind in the nation,” Governor Abbott tweeted when he signed the bill, adding, “California may be the golden state, but Texans deserve to keep their gold in-state!”
The depository was seen as a step toward putting Texas on a gold standard if and when we divorce ourselves from the United States. Actually, most of the billion dollars in gold that the state believes belongs in Texas is owned by the University of Texas Investment Management Company ($861 million!), which has no interest in taking that out of an HSBC bank vault in New York City.
Sanford Levinson, a distinguished law professor at UT, compares Texas to Scotland—another formerly independent nation that has never entirely accepted the loss of its independence. The difference is that Scotland actually can secede, if its voters choose to; for Texas, that battle has long since been lost. The only way Texit might work is through a constitutional amendment that would allow American voters to say: Just go.
SEVEN
Big D
On July 7, 2016, hundreds of marchers on a hot summer night in Dallas were protesting the police slayings of black men in Minnesota and Louisiana. Two days before, a video had surfaced that showed two white cops in Baton Rouge shooting Alton Sterling, 37, who was already pinned to the ground when one of the officers cried out, “He’s got a gun!” They shot him six times. Sterling did have a loaded .38 in his pocket. Another video appeared the next day, streaming on Facebook Live. When the video begins, Philando Castile, 32, has already been shot. He had been pulled over by police in a suburb of St. Paul for a broken taillight. When he voluntarily disclosed, as required by law, that h
e had a license to carry a gun, and then reached for his wallet, one of the officers shot him four times.
Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, narrates the video as Castile, moaning and covered in blood, slumps against her. “He just shot his arm off,” she says of the cop, who is still pointing his weapon at the dying man. “I told him not to reach for it!” the officer cries in an agitated voice. “I told him to get his hand open!”
“You told him to get his ID, sir, his driver’s license,” she says.
Castile falls silent. “Please don’t tell me that my boyfriend went just like that,” Reynolds says. Her four-year-old daughter is in the backseat.
“Keep your hands where you are!” the cop says huskily.
“Yes, I will, sir, I’ll keep my hands where they are. Please don’t tell me this, Lord. Please, Jesus, don’t tell me that he’s gone.”
By now, a number of cops have raced to the scene. They are all holding weapons on Reynolds. They order her to get out of the car and walk backward toward them, then drop to her knees. They take the phone out of her hands and toss it on the ground, but it’s still recording, pointed at the sky and the electrical lines overhead, as she is handcuffed. “They threw my phone, Facebook,” Reynolds says, as an ambulance siren sounds in the background. A cop repeatedly screams, “Fuck! Fuck!” (The policeman who shot Castile, Jeronimo Yanez, was later acquitted of all charges against him.)
These two killings shook the country. A movement, Black Lives Matter, had sprung up in 2013, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch captain who killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, in a gated community in Central Florida. Other police shootings caused the movement to spread and passions to rise.
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