Hidden America

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  In 2009, NICS did not flag Jared Loughner’s application to buy a gun: he’d never been legally declared mentally ill, and so there was no official record of his lunacy.

  Nor did NICS object to the paperwork submitted by Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter. He had been ordered by a court to receive outpatient treatment in 2005, and yet there was not an official record of his lunacy, either. The Commonweath of Virginia didn’t report it to NICS because Virginia, unlike other states, says only inpatient treatment needs to be flagged, and anyway, nobody really has to report anything to anybody because NICS is a voluntary system. Agencies are under no mandate to supply information.

  The system is only as good as its databases. Critics say the databases suck.

  I spent the better part of the day with Sergio, offering him the stool, him giving it back, both of us sharing sore-feet stories. I saw a guy checking out an AK-47 who had a tattoo that said, There is only one god and his name is death, and I wondered if I should say something.

  Later, when I got up to stretch my legs, a guy walked up to me. He had a military haircut and a wrestler’s build and he showed me the SIG Sauer P226 9mm, an aluminum tactical semiauto he was buying. “Finally,” he said. “Do you know how long I’ve been wanting a good practice gun?” He brought the gun up to his eye and aimed it at the wall behind me and shut one eye.

  “I don’t know if you ever heard of the term ‘pressure cooker’?” he said. “I’m one of those people. I help everyone else. Never help myself. I don’t know why I do that, because then I get mad at everyone.” He put the gun down, and I could feel myself exhale, and then he went on to recall a time when he got handcuffed in a hospital after hurling a nurse who had tried to sedate him. “But the SIG is just for practice,” he said. “I have a .380 auto at home. That’s a sexy gun. I wanted a body stopper, so I got a Smith & Wesson 1911 .45 caliber. I’m a pretty good shot. I can empty an entire clip into six inches. Consecutively. Head, throat, heart, gut. If you’re within fifty feet of me, I’m going to take you out.”

  He gave me a little salute and then he went up to the front register to pay for his new SIG, and he was out the door.

  —

  I HAD TO GO HOME for a little while, and I took my assault rifle with me, and I looked forward to getting my Glock. Ron sold me a big black case for the rifle, and he prompted me on what to say to the US Airways representative who would need to inspect it and check it in.

  “You say, ‘I have a firearm to declare,’” he said.

  “And then she’ll open the case, right?”

  “Probably.”

  “Well, what am I going to say then?”

  “You don’t have to say anything.”

  “I promise you, she will want to know what the hell I’m doing with an assault rifle,” I said.

  “You tell her there’s no such thing as an assault rifle,” he said.

  I flashed him a bored expression.

  “You say, ‘It’s my Second Amendment right,’” he said.

  “I am not going to say that—”

  “Just tell her it’s for recreation.”

  Got it. Here-to-declare-a-firearm. It’s-for-recreation. I practiced during the four-hour drive to the Phoenix airport. The case was in the backseat, splayed out long as a napping teenager. When I got to the Avis car rental return place, I pulled it out. It was so . . . long, and when I finally got it all the way out, the Avis man with the little handheld receipt printer looked at it. I looked at it. We looked at each other. Words tumbled out of me without warning. “It’s a saxophone,” I said.

  I should have said trombone, I thought, the whole way to the restroom, where I had to try to fit the damn thing with me into the stall. It was weird to pee with an assault rifle wedged up against your shoulder—it just was—and to roll with it out in front of all the hand washers watching was unpleasant.

  Owning an assault rifle is embarrassing. The closer I got back to my real world, the worse it got. (The US Airways representative, for her part, was professional.) I did not talk about my assault rifle when I got home. I stuck it in the basement with many locks securing it in the case. It felt like a dumb souvenir you got in some exotic place, some Zulu headdress that seemed fetching at the time.

  The Glock was different. I received it within days of my return, got my conceal / carry permit, and put it in my purse. I went food shopping with it. I took it to the bookstore. At first it simply felt dangerous to have it there beside me, like a secret, but in a vaguely delicious way, like having pot in your back pocket in algebra class. But this was a gun. It was heavy. It was inside a little nylon holster and it bounced around the bottom of my purse, where I got spearmint gum on it. I worried constantly about losing it or someone stealing it from me. I became unduly attached to my purse. I brought guacamole to a potluck and had conversations with parents and tried to pay attention, but all I could think was Jesus Christ, I have a gun in my purse. Everything got complicated. Was I supposed to tell my kids about it? The only thing I’d ever told them about guns was guns were bad and people shouldn’t solve problems with violence and guns were bad, bad, bad. Now I had one in my purse. “Do not touch Mommy’s purse, there’s a gun in it.” I could not bring myself to say that, so I didn’t, and instead kept my purse locked in the car at night until I got a gun safe: the “biometric” lock opens only at the command of the fingerprints you program into it. I lugged the gun around town and to the community pool. You can’t swim if you have a gun in your purse. You can’t leave your purse on the lounge chair and you can’t ask the neighbor’s kid to watch it for you. I worried constantly about not knowing how to use it, not being a good enough shot. I looked up shooting ranges in my area; the hours conflicted with work, and piano lessons, and dinner. I needed to buy practice ammo, and body-stopping ammo, and, according to my gun owner’s manual, I would have to empty and reload the extra magazine that came with it and switch it out every few months—something about the springs losing their spring if I failed to comply.

  At the university where I work, I park in an underground lot that is nearly abandoned by the time I’m walking through it at night. More than once over the years, I have thought about carrying Mace. It was back-to-school season and now I had a gun. I could keep my hand on it while I walked and be ready for the worst. I thought about whether or not I could really shoot an attacker: Was I capable? I decided I could, although maybe just in the leg or the foot, and that one threat alone—walking through a scary parking lot—justified my decision to carry a gun. “I’ll have it with me at night after class,” I said, defending my decision to a friend.

  “Class?” he said. “You’re taking a gun to class?”

  Yeah, that didn’t sound right, so I checked.

  No guns allowed in school. It turned out if I took my gun to the one place where I felt it made sense to have it, I would be breaking the law. Utah is the only state in America that explicitly allows guns on college campuses, although legislation to permit them has been debated in at least eighteen states since 2007—ever since Seung-Hui Cho went on that shooting spree at Virginia Tech. Armed teachers and students could prevent that sort of massacre, some say.

  —

  ON MY SECOND TRIP TO YUMA, I got into a productive discussion with some clerks and customers about shooting sprees. We were gathered in the middle of the store on a quiet Thursday, chatting beneath the $4,500 Barrett Model 99 “Big Shot” sniper rifle, while Clint Black sang about being back home in heaven. The Barrett was the most powerful gun in the store, capable of firing .50-caliber armor-piercing rounds—gigantic bullets as long as a human hand that were packed with enough firepower to penetrate solid walls and pick off a target one mile in the distance. (There was also a semiauto version for $10,000, but these were on back order.) The gun was perched on a display stand high above the others so you could walk all the way around and admire it, like a
ny work of art.

  “So how about the Tucson shootings?” I asked our little group, two clerks and four shoppers, all male. “I imagine that was a difficult day around here,” I said. I thought it an obvious statement that translated roughly to: Surely Loughner’s killing spree must have given you pause, forced, as you were, to face the dark side of an America that allows for its citizens to own guns. But that’s not what anybody heard.

  “The lines were out the door.”

  “Well, not out the door, but I remember this place was packed.”

  “Not as bad as the day after the election, though.”

  “Oh, God, no!”

  “Ha, ha, ha!”

  “Ha, ha, ha!”

  In fact, one-day sales of handguns in Arizona jumped 60 percent on the day after the Tucson shootings. It was not a time to reevaluate a blithe attitude toward anything, but rather time to hurry and stock up in case the government made its next move to take privately owned firearms away, leaving law-abiding citizens defenseless against the criminals and the lunatics.

  “Mostly it was people wanting Glocks. The 9, like Loughner had, but really all the Glocks.”

  “It’s so ridiculous. It’s sad really.”

  “A story like that just gives the liberals more fuel.”

  “It’s so scary.”

  Everyone in the group agreed on these points in the most casual and obvious way, sort of like people at a grocery store railing about the rising price of beef. I asked them, then, about a more recent event, right there in Yuma, when Carey Dyess, seventy-three, drove his silver Mazda to the home of Linda Claton, his ex-wife’s best friend, and shot her in the face. Then he killed Theresa Sigurdson, his ex-wife. Then he drove over to some other houses and shot more of her friends: Cindy and Henry Scott Finney, and James Simpson, all of them dead. Then he drove into downtown Yuma, where he walked into the office of Jerrold Shelley, the attorney who had represented Sigurdson in the divorce. He shot Shelley dead, then drove off to the desert and killed himself.

  “Oh, man, that guy was running around and I didn’t even have a gun in my shop!” one in our group said. “I got so scared I went home and got my Judge. A .410 pistol. It was all so unexpected. He didn’t announce himself. Walked in, shot people, walked out. He must have had tiny bullets—did you see her neck?”

  “Had to be a .380.”

  “We saw a lot of snowbirds come in for pistols after that. Old women who had never even touched a gun before.”

  “Then did you hear the other day some guy back east shot up a pharmacy? That’s probably why I want one of these little shorty shotguns for my truck. He just wanted pharmacy stuff. He wanted his drugs.”

  “For his wife. She needed pain drugs.”

  “Something like that. I think it was in New York. Right where they have gun control. He killed, like, four people.”

  “The problem is, liberals are more feel than think. They don’t understand logic and so what the hell can you even do with that?”

  “It’s just so scary.”

  I was surprised to hear them use the word “scary” to describe those who, back home, tend to describe gun-toting people as “scary.”

  Nobody talked about the victims of the Tucson shooting, and the only mention of the neighbors shot by Dyess was the size of the bullet holes in a woman’s neck. If there were any victims at all to be singled out in the discussion, it was these people here, threatened by tighter gun laws and a government determined to impose them.

  “The anti-gun nuts say the motivation is to combat crime. That’s what they tell you. But I don’t believe that. Put it this way: How do you control people?”

  “Despots, tyrants, dictators. Someone who has control over other people is one of those. I do not believe any of them are naïve. Have you read any Marx?”

  “It’s not gun control. It’s people control. If you can control firearms, you’re not going to have people rising up in revolution.”

  I thought about the 13 million hunters rising up to defend America against an invader, a concept that seemed almost charming and heroic now that I was imagining an America under attack by its own government.

  “So the military comes in and what are you going to do? Go after them with sticks?”

  “Everywhere now, it’s all an anti-gun maneuver. These liberals think, ‘Well, if we get all the guns away there will be no crime, no one will get shot, everybody will live in harmony.’ That’s how stupid they are.”

  The conversation was interrupted when a young guy in Bermuda shorts walked up and said he was interested in looking at the Barrett.

  “The Barrett!” one of the clerks said, while the rest fell silent as if to take in the sound of the words, and we all looked up at the magnificent black sniper rifle.

  —

  I WENT OVER TO THE RANGE to blow off some steam and to release my mind from the endless loop of stupid-scary.

  The range was like a bowling alley, only instead of renting shoes you rented a gun. You had to have a friend with you. This was a precaution against suicide, the thinking being a friend would talk you out of it. You could also bring your own gun, no friend required. Whole families came to shoot together, Friday night was ladies’ night, and people had birthday parties here.

  A young guy came out of the lanes, carrying the target he had just shot up. “Ahhh, that feels better,” he said, taking off his ear and eye protection. “Whew! Re-lax-ing!” He had sweat on his brow and he grinned up at the zombie targets hanging on the wall that I was quietly admiring. You could buy one of those targets to shoot at instead of the same old boring concentric circles or classic bad-guy silhouettes.

  “Oh, God, aren’t those awesome?” the guy said. “Me and my boys came and shot the hell out of the Paris Hilton zombie.” She was wearing big white sunglasses and a pink miniskirt and she was carrying a zombie Chihuahua. “My one boy shot out her cell phone,” the guy went on. “And he’s, like, ‘Well, she can’t call for help now!’ We just have fun with it. Shoot out her earrings. Take out her dog. Me and my boys having a good time on a Saturday night.”

  “Boys?” I said. “You have boys?” He did not look old enough to have any sons at all, and I was not prepared to handle the image of one more armed six-year-old.

  “My boys!” he said. “My friends.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said.

  I kept thinking about neighbors. You have this crazy family living next door. One day you go over with a pie, figuring if you just confront the crazy, you’ll understand it and find acceptance. Then you discover all this time they think you’re the crazy family. The more you try to explain yourself, the crazier you sound, and if you stay there long enough, you probably will be.

  These were burdensome thoughts, and I wanted to get rid of them. I rented an Uzi, fully automatic, a machine gun. I chose the male zombie. I think it was supposed to be a lawyer. He had a briefcase. I aimed for his left eyeball and pulled the trigger. The patter of thirty-two bullets lasted maybe three seconds, and then the eyeball was gone. The release felt like one gorgeous, fantastic sneeze, and the satisfaction reminded me of cold beer.

  BEEF

  R.A. Brown Ranch

  Throckmorton, Texas

  There once was a bull, an astonishing bull with a handsome wide muzzle, stunning scrotal circumference, and a square frame solid as a sycamore. He was the son of Cherokee Canyon, the grandson of Make My Day—a noble pedigree. The cowboy who designed him—who chose the semen, selected the dam, prepared and inseminated the uterus—named him Revelation. “We don’t intend to present this bull as divine,” the cowboy would write in his 2005 sale catalog, “but we do count it as a blessing to have raised him.” The cowboy, although a salesman by nature, was nevertheless not one to speak in hyperbole. He believed in his heart that Revelation, just a year and a half old, could beco
me the most storied bull in the history of the Red Angus breed. Finally, after decades of tinkering, might this be the masterpiece?

  Once a year, in October, the ranch welcomes buyers. People come from all over the U.S. to Throckmorton, Texas, in the north-central part of the state, where the R.A. Brown Ranch has been selling breeding cattle for more than a century, and where as many as eight hundred head will go at auction in a single day. Fathers, sons, grandsons—the ranch has passed through five generations, cowboy to cowboy. Donnell Brown, forty-one, is the current cowboy in charge, and at the 2005 R.A. Brown Ranch Bull, Female & Quarter Horse Sale, he sold Revelation to a Houston businessman with a weekend ranch for $12,000.

  In time, the bull could turn out to be worth more, much more. Top breeding bulls—once their semen is proven to produce prime calves—can go for well over $100,000. Donnell retained the rights to half of Revelation’s semen. In the breeding business, the buyer gets the animal, but the seller typically retains an interest in the genetics—the true treasure. It would be two years before anyone would know the quality of Revelation’s progeny, still just embryos in the bodies of select cows.

  Donnell Brown wears ironed creases on his Wranglers, a starched plaid shirt with long sleeves, and a white hat with the brim cupped obediently up—not some floppy, haphazard shape like East Texas cowboys wear (cowboys who, sadly, don’t seem to know any better). The spurs on his boots bear his initials, but he does not wear jingle bobs—those dangling silver beads Arizona cowboys wear (cowboys who are embarrassingly all flash and pizzazz). No, cowboys in Throckmorton consider themselves West Texas cowboys: starched and ironed just like cowboys are supposed to be. Donnell is tall, slim, with a quarterback’s build and the deep-blue determined eyes of a man who is hanging on with all his might for the ride. No sin. No pride. No giving up on the four life goals he set for himself at age twenty-three: Get to heaven; be the best possible husband and father; be healthy and happy; produce the most efficient beef cattle in the entire world by converting God’s forage into safe, nutritious, delicious food for His people. He wears a clean, straight mustache above a constant intelligent smile.