Hidden America

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  —

  ON OCTOBER 9, 2010, the guys get their new tower, this time for real. The old tower blocks full view of the runways, and so plans are made to chop it down to four stories and use it for storage.

  Over the next six months, nine controllers across the country are caught falling asleep while on duty, including a tower supervisor, on his fourth midnight shift in a row, who nods off around midnight at Reagan National Airport. The pilots of two jetliners fail to reach the Reagan National controller by radio and have to land on their own.

  The FAA reviews a comprehensive set of “fatigue-prevention recommendations.” Scientists, NASA researchers, NATCA leaders, and some of the FAA’s own experts say brief naps during breaks are essential to enhance public safety. (Both Japan and Germany have dedicated sleeping space in their control towers.)

  “On my watch, controllers will not be paid to take naps,” says Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

  Nationwide, controller errors increase by 53 percent in 2010.

  The FAA continues to tweak its NextGen modernization program, “the biggest change in air traffic management since the introduction of radar in the 1950s.” Riddled with software glitches resulting in a cost overrun of $330 million so far, the system is supposed to allow planes to fly closer together, increasing the number of flights controllers handle by about two-thirds, and allowing airports to be busier than ever before.

  GUNS ‘R’ US

  Sprague’s Sports

  Yuma, Arizona

  OUT-OF-STATE RESIDENTS CAN PURCHASE FIREARMS IN ARIZONA! read the sign behind the counter at Sprague’s Sports in Yuma. ASK US HOW. I asked a clerk named Ron for details. He was short, packed solid as a ham, with a crew cut and a genial demeanor, and he was leaning on a glass case filled with hundreds of gleaming pistols. “Now, these are a separate story,” he said, explaining that if I wanted to buy a handgun, he’d have to ship it to my home state and I could take possession of it there. “That’s federal law, that’s not Arizona talking.” Then he pointed to the cavalcade of hunting rifles lined up on the long wall behind him. “Any of these you can get today—or these over here,” he said, leading me to a corner of the store where two young men in ball caps and a woman with a sparkly purse were admiring a selection of AK-47s.

  “You have to admit this is pretty bad-ass,” the one man was saying. He had a carbine shorty perched on his hip, Stallone style.

  “I don’t know,” the woman said. “To me, it looks mean.”

  “It’s supposed to look mean.”

  “They should make it in pink,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be cute?”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “They should make it in Hello Kitty!” she said. “I would totally buy it if it was Hello Kitty.”

  “Sweet holy crap,” the other man said. “That would be the worst possible death. Can you imagine? Shot dead by a Hello Kitty semiauto.”

  It was difficult to tell if Ron was listening in on any of this; both of us had our lips pulled back in pretend smiles. “Now, what can I show you?” he asked me while the one guy went on faking his bad death and the woman continued her torture with something about rainbow-colored bullets.

  I didn’t really want to buy an assault rifle, much less a handgun, but I was curious to know what buying a gun felt like, how the purchase worked, what all was involved. This was admittedly foreign turf. Back home, saying Hey, I’m thinking of buying a gun would be a conversation stopper, taken as either a joke or a cry for help. Nobody in my circle back east had guns, nobody wanted them, and if anybody talked about them at all, it was in cartoon terms: guns are bad things owned by bad people who want to do bad things. About the only time the people where I came from even thought about guns was when something terrible happened. A lunatic sprays into a crowd and we have the same conversation we always have: Those damn guns and those damn people who insist on having them.

  I had come to Arizona, the most gun-friendly state, to listen to the conversation the rest of America was apparently having. Forty-seven percent of Americans report owning at least one gun; the U.S. is the most heavily armed society in the world. If an armed citizenry is a piece of our national identity, how is it that I’d never even met it?

  In Arizona, anyone over eighteen can buy an assault rifle, at twenty-one you can get a pistol, and you can carry your gun, loaded or unloaded, concealed or openly, just about anywhere. The IHOP was said to be the only restaurant in Yuma with a sign prohibiting you from bringing your gun in with you to eat. “Needless to say, most of us won’t eat there,” Ron said. The assault rifles stood stupid as pool sticks on the rack behind him; they were black and blocky, with long and longer magazines protruding erotically this way and that, and to my untrained eye they looked like the sort of thing an assassin might purchase on the black market and not, as it was, at a store beside a Lowe’s home improvement center, across the street from Sears.

  “I’m kind of surprised you carry assault rifles,” I said to Ron.

  “There’s no such thing as an assault rifle,” he said. “These are ‘military-style rifles,’ or ‘modern sporting rifles.’”

  “But they’re assault rifles,” I noted. I knew that much from TV.

  “‘Assault’ is one of the worst things the media has ever done to us,” he said. “Have any of these rifles ever assaulted anyone?”

  He went on to say I could buy as many of them as I wanted and walk out with my arsenal today. “These guns have helped our industry tremendously,” he said. “They’ve attracted a whole new generation.” Sprague’s had earned a proud reputation for offering a wide selection of firearms some other stores didn’t even stock. “We specialize in many high-grade guns and the politically incorrect black guns with extended magazines,” the store website boasts. People from nearby California, one of seven states where assault weapons are banned, came in just to see them in person. “Is there one you want to see or try?” Ron asked. “We have a shooting range next door.”

  I asked him to help me pick.

  “It’s personal preference,” he said. “It depends on how formidable you want to be.”

  He brought down the Colt AR15-A3 tactical carbine, clicked this and clicked that to check that the chamber was empty, slammed an empty magazine into it, and handed it to me. It felt disappointingly fake, an awesome water pistol, perhaps, or a Halloween prop, and I handled it awkwardly, like a toddler trying to figure out what to do with a fork, and Ron could tell I was uncomfortable with it.

  “If you were more of a radical, militia-type person I would say yeah, an AR makes all the sense in the world,” he said, “but that’s not where you’re coming from.”

  I asked if I would need to tell him why I wanted to buy a gun like that, or tell him what I intended to do with it. He squinted and smiled and appeared politely speechless. “Would you have to do what, now?” he asked.

  “Well, why would I want one of those guns?” I asked. “What would be my reason?”

  “If anyone asks, you can say it’s your Second Amendment right, I guess, but beyond that . . .”

  It was hard for us to find a comfortable, common starting place, but the reach was certainly genuine.

  One of the things I wanted to talk to Ron and the people at Sprague’s about was Arizona’s infamous 2011 Tucson massacre, and I wondered when would be an appropriate time to bring it up; the massacre was, well, a massacre, and I feared it would dampen the mood.

  A small detail in the timeline of that horrific day always stuck with me. When Jared Loughner got into his dad’s car that morning to go shoot Gabby Giffords, he ran some errands first. He stopped at the Circle K on Ina Road to get something to eat. He went down to the Walgreens to pick up some photos he’d gotten developed. Then he went to the Walmart Supercenter at the Foothills Mall to get some ammo for his Glock. Something reportedly happened ther
e. A snag in the plan. The clerk at the register, who was never identified, and whom Walmart corporate officials refused to talk about, said no. He, or she, denied the sale to Loughner, who left and went to a different Walmart six miles away, where he bought enough ammunition to fill two fifteen-round magazines and the thirty-three-round extended magazine he would unload a few hours later into the crowd over at Safeway, killing six and injuring another thirteen, including Giffords.

  Why did the first Walmart clerk refuse the sale, and how? What did this person see in Loughner and where does a private citizen get the authority, or the gumption, to refuse to sell ammo to someone? These questions were never answered, if they were even asked by media providing day-and-night coverage in the bloody aftermath. The mysterious clerk at the Foothills Mall Walmart dropped out of the headlines almost as soon as he, or she, appeared. What may have lingered then for some, or at least it did for me, was a nagging sense of unfinished business. So these are the people who stand at the front line guarding America against its lunatic mass murderers? Clerks at Walmart. Clerks at sporting goods stores. Minimum-wage cashiers busily scanning soccer balls, fishing tackle, and boxes of Tide.

  —

  RON GREW UP IN YUMA and had worked at Sprague’s for twenty-seven years; several of his coworkers had put in at least twenty. All of the clerks milling about the store were clean-cut, dressed in crisp buttoned shirts with their names embroidered on the pockets, and the respect they showed the merchandise reminded me of department store shoe salesmen in the old days who wore suits and used shoehorns. The store was brightly lit and impeccably clean—no dust or cobwebs on the hundreds of bobcat, coyote, elk, and other taxidermy mounted on high—and no fingerprints or smudges on any of the cases. “You have to go fast, in circles—it’s all about friction and heat,” one clerk said to another, sharing tips on glass cleaner and shine. Stray scraps of paper were instantly swept up, Disneyland style, and the sheer number of clerks standing at the ready meant that no customer ever had to wait. The merchandise was arranged in boutique fashion: colorful boxes of ammo stacked like candy by the register, a library of gun books and magazines near the restrooms. There was a holster department, a gun safe department, and an optical equipment department—OVER 75 MODELS OF BINOCULARS IN STOCK! OVER 100 MODELS OF RIFLE SCOPES IN STOCK! There was a knife department under halogen lighting accentuating the dazzle of each blade, and a law enforcement department—handcuffs, thumb cuffs, leg irons, stun guns, Tasers—against a backdrop of stuffed sheep. Sleek flat screens ran silent footage of dramatic hunts in each corner of the store, and earnest country singers provided a storewide sound track of unrequited love, hard work, and whiskey.

  The guns were in the back of the store, and this is where most of the customers hung out.

  “I have six handguns—bought five of them here,” an old man said to me. I was waiting for Ron, who’d gone to the back room to find a gun he thought I might like. “I have five rifles, all of them here,” the man said. “I spend most of my time reloading shells. All my friends are dead.” He had thin white hair and a long, sagging face dotted with age spots. “Do you know what the biggest problem with divorce is? It’s the bedroom. And a lot of it’s the man’s fault. Like a damn rabbit, on and off.”

  It felt like we should have had rocking chairs, perhaps a set of checkers between us. This was one of the things I liked most about Sprague’s: the general-store feel. Groups would form, strangers becoming neighbors discussing one gun or another, sharing stories. “I lost my wife in November,” the man said. “Sixty years. Now my kids keep trying to get me to go live with them in California. My doctor said, ‘What’s your lifestyle?’ I told him guns. He said, ‘Stay in Yuma.’”

  Ron came back carrying two assault rifles. “Hey there,” he said, greeting the old man. “What brings you in today?”

  “Same as yesterday.”

  Gently, Ron placed the assault rifles on the counter. He told me one was a Smith & Wesson M&P15, and the other a Heckler & Koch 416. They looked every bit as formidable as the AR but these were .22s and Ron said they’d be easier to shoot.

  “So more like beginner assault rifles?” I asked.

  “There-is-no-such-thing-as-an-assault-rifle,” Ron said.

  The Smith M&P15 sold for $425 and had a bright orange cardboard wrapper on its fat barrel that said Kick Brass. The HK416, made in Germany, had white engraved lettering on it, probably a classier look, for $529. But the Smith was lighter, easier to carry, and the orange wrapper was exciting. “I’ll go with this one,” I said.

  “Okay, you’ll need to fill this out.” He handed me a six-page government-issued form, told me not to make any mistakes or else I’d have to start all over. “No cross-outs,” he said.

  Anyone in America who wants to buy a gun has to fill out ATF Form 4473, with thirty-six questions in all, and hand it in to the dealer selling the gun. The clerk takes the form and contacts NICS, the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (open every day of the year except Christmas), where an examiner runs your answers through a series of databases to make sure you haven’t lied, and within minutes tells the clerk what to do: proceed with the sale, deny it, or delay it for three days while NICS does some deeper digging and decides later.

  PLEASE PRINT.

  Are you a fugitive from justice?

  Have you ever been adjudicated mentally defective?

  Are you subject to a court order restraining you from harassing, stalking, or threatening your child or an intimate partner or child of such partner?

  Have you ever been convicted in any court for a felony, or any other crime, for which the judge could imprison you for more than one year, even if you received a shorter sentence including probation?

  I stood there puzzling through the form when a guy walked up, replacing the old man beside me, and he, too, struck up a conversation. He was a man of some heft in a red T-shirt and sunglasses wrapped behind his neck, as was the fashion in Yuma. “You say you’re just starting out?” he said. “You picked a good one. With the HK, you would have just been paying for extra steel you didn’t need.”

  “That’s sort of what I thought,” I lied.

  “I just got that same Smith for my kid,” he said.

  I looked at him. He appeared far too young to have a grown son.

  “Wait, how old is your kid?” I asked.

  “Six,” he said.

  —

  RICHARD SPRAGUE, the owner of Sprague’s Sports, is a slender man in his fifties with a tapered face and coarse graying hair, and he wears crisp, well-ironed outdoorsman attire. Other Arizona gun stores would not even entertain my request to visit and ask questions about selling guns and ammunition, but Richard without hesitation invited me to spend as much time as I wanted at Sprague’s—behind the counter, in the back room, at the shooting range, anywhere I wished. I thought it a somewhat courageous offer, especially given that a 2010 Washington Post investigation spectacularly put Sprague’s eleventh on a list of top U.S. stores that sold guns traced to crime scenes in Mexico. In response to the hoopla, Richard said that he and his employees were always on the lookout for straw purchasers: a person buying a gun for someone who hadn’t passed the background check. “Unfortunately,” he said, “some people do break the law once they leave our store.” The Mexican border was just eight miles away from Yuma, and so proximity, rather than reckless selling, was probably the truer though far less titillating explanation of the ranking. And the number crunching behind the headline was misleading: the actual number traced to Sprague’s was just fifty-five out of an impressive sixty thousand guns smuggled to Mexico.

  In his office overlooking the showroom, Richard had a poster-sized sepia photo of the old days, more than eighty years ago, when his grandfather came to Yuma and bought the godforsaken desert plot and put up a hotel where the store now sits with a crowded, aging suburbia having grown ar
ound it. Richard’s father added a gun store to the hotel in the 1950s, then moved the store into its own building, and over the years Richard expanded and expanded it, eventually putting up a whole new building in 2005, a superstore, with a ten-lane, 25-yard air-conditioned shooting range with café seating, a separate archery range, a classroom with desks and whiteboards, office space, an employee lounge, and a vast 5,300-square-foot showroom with sturdy iron benches out front where folks can rest and Scouts can come sell their raffle tickets and cookies.

  He was a busy man, with quick eyes, and he spoke of “firearms” and “the industry” in the dry, responsible way a man might discuss flood insurance. He talked more about his family than he did guns. He told me about his brother, who died an early heart-related death, and who worked in Hollywood teaching Stallone and Schwarzenegger and others how to not look like idiots when they handled those monster weapons. He spoke proudly of the long line of Spragues, and the raw weirdness of being the last of his generation left. He volunteered information about divorces and remarriages and his love for Allyson, the one who helped him get it right. He took me to his house to meet their Doberman puppy and toured me around Yuma, a cozy town of about ninety-three thousand people with a lovingly preserved adobe downtown with parks stretching along the river, where kids swam and families picnicked under the ironwood trees. This is fertile land, where the Gila River empties into the Colorado—green, sunny, warm, a winter home for snowbirds parking their bright white RVs in rows stretching miles and miles into the horizon.

  Richard and Allyson took me to the Yuma County Fair, where, in a little trailer for VIPs, Richard’s picture hung on the long wall of men who had served as president of the fair board. We ate pork and potatoes and corn outside with neighbors and tapped our feet to the Western Underground country band. When two fighter jets from the Yuma Marine Corps Air Station base zoomed loudly overhead, I instinctively ducked, and Richard looked into the sky and said, “The sound of freedom.”