Shots Fired in Terminal 2

by William Hazelgrove

  This thought is on people's faces, and the thousand-yard stare is there. Americans do not have a fountain of knowledge to pull from for events like these. We have not been invaded since the War of 1812, when the British burned Washington, DC. Our oceans have generally kept us safe.

  Most Americans in the twenty-first century live in urban and suburban areas and don't have guns. One-third and falling is the statistic of gun ownership that is batted around.5 The gun culture has been in decline for some time. The NRA will point to the increase in gun sales, but these guns are bought by the same one-third who are stocking up against a possible war with the government.6 This was accelerated under the Obama administration when many thought the Second Amendment was in danger of being repealed. Gun owners could not buy enough guns and ammunition. They could not dig enough shelters, stock up on enough water and canned goods, or buy enough ammo.

  The general populace is not composed of hunters or gun owners, and most have no acquaintance with the hunting-gun culture that goes all the way back to the pioneers. The NASCAR-watching, beer-drinking, pickup-driving image of the gun owner with a Confederate flag waving in the back is the stereotype many urbanites have of those who own guns. It is as false as the latte-drinking liberals who want more gun control. There are some who do fit these descriptions, but people have a nasty habit of jumping out of assumed groups.

  The truth is that most Americans are too busy raising their kids, paying their mortgages, sending their kids to college, and trying to squirrel away something for retirement to worry about guns or gun control. Most people live in suburbs around large economic centers or major cities and plug into that economic grid to make a living. Having a gun or not having a gun does not come up in conversation. If you want to have a gun then have one. If you don't, that is fine, too. Most people are not joining the NRA because they believe the Second Amendment is under siege and most people are not signing petitions to control guns. Getting to a son's ballgame or a daughter's play and keeping food on the table occupies three-quarters of Americans.

  So when a shooting occurs, we are in alien territory. The thought that one could be shot at any minute is impossible to square with our day-to-day lives. Hearing shots is terrifying and foreign. Seeing bodies is horrifying and unreal. Seeing SWAT teams dressed up like combat-ready soldiers makes no sense. Why am I caught up in this? Maybe I am closer to the one-in-three-hundred-and-fifteen odds that I will be shot with a firearm.7 But none of this helps. Our psyche is not equipped, and PTSD will affect all involved to some degree or another.

  I am still walking through the swirling lights of police cars, ambulances, and firetrucks when I see Terminal 1. I recognize two women I saw in the terminal before the shots. I see a man in bright red coveralls with long gray hair, a beard, and a dog. He was there, too, and I wonder then about the man sleeping behind the benches we were sitting on. I have already blotted out parts of what happened and I wonder if this is the brain's way of dealing with what is too horrible. The two women are standing outside the door.

  “Are they letting anyone in?” I ask, looking into the terminal.

  Both women have gray hair cut short, and they remind me of many teachers I had in grade school.

  “No,” one replies. “It's full of soldiers.”

  I stare and see SWAT teams with dogs walking inside the terminal. There is a beefy SWAT member standing guard at the door with his automatic weapon at the ready.

  “Everything we had with us is in there,” the other woman says.

  I am still sweating and I step back and try and see over to where we were standing with our luggage. I turn back to the women.

  “You heard the shots?”

  They both nod.

  “Of course. There were four of them,” the one with reading glasses replies.

  I nod slowly and look around. People are milling about and some are still hunkered down behind barriers or poles. I then see the woman who wanted to get in the car with her baby. I walk toward her. She is pretty with red hair.

  “You tried to get in a car…I was there,” I say loudly, feeling like we are veterans of some sort of past battle.

  She stares and then smiles. Her blouse is practically open and I don't know if it was torn or whether she just wears it that way. My own clothes are torn and dirty and sweat soaked.

  “Oh, yeah. Can you believe that asshole wouldn't let me in?”

  I shake my head and it seems what we are talking about occurred days ago. All sense of time has gone out the window. There was only this moment now, and it will be impossible to access what has happened to all of us until we are out of the airport and away from the danger. The woman leans over her baby again.

  “Did you hear the shots?”

  She shakes her head. “I didn't…I was just running because everyone said there was a shooter.”

  We talk some more and then we part. We have been together in a terrifically dangerous moment, but that is long gone now. She is trying to find a way out of the airport as am I. We are still both trying to survive, and survival is preeminent in this moment. I look back into Terminal 1 and it is as if I hear the shots again. There are explosions, concussions, and then I am running again This is not actually happening but I have been reliving the moment all day and seeing Terminal 1 brings it home.

  I start back toward the media trucks where my wife and two daughters are waiting in a car and my son is sitting behind a thick concrete pole. More SWAT teams jog down the arrival lanes, and I remember reading somewhere that when SWAT teams arrive they have operational control. It makes sense. They have all the gear and short of bringing in the army they are the closest thing we have to soldiers.

  I feel the weight of my backpack again. During all of this I have had my backpack on, filled with my computer and books. Never once have I taken it off and it has adhered to my back from perspiration. In all the television interviews I am there in my black Brooklyn T-shirt and backpack—the writer caught up in the extraordinary situation. Already my phone is blowing up with people who saw me on Fox News. People I have not spoken with for ten years are calling me, and this feels strange. I have crossed the Rubicon into the other world where tragedy befalls people, and I am on the other side of the television and unable to get out. We are all caught up in a drama we can't escape, and I wonder if this will be the fork in the road of my life. Will bad things continue to happen? Will bad luck plague me now? Being in a mass shooting is the worst kind of bad luck. You are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and the roulette wheel in the sky has deemed this might be your final moment. It is terrifying if you think about it too much.

  Two weeks ago, we were celebrating Christmas in the Midwest. One week ago, we were on a cruise bringing in the New Year. Now we are at an airport with five dead people inside a terminal and a shooter who could pop up anywhere and at any time. And the worst thing is that we can't leave. You think there is a grand plan in these shootings, with the police running the show. But the truth is that chaos and violence go hand in hand and no one has anything under control. The airport is closed and there are ten thousand people stuck in it and there are men with guns everywhere and there still might be a bullet out there with your name on it. These are the incredible thoughts that go through my mind as I weave my way back through the military junta of third-world America and head for Terminal 2 again. Guns are everywhere, and you have to wonder, were we always like this? But I know the answer, because I have been around guns all my life.

  We all have.

  It started all the way back with Charles Dickens, who was fascinated with American gun culture, so much so that in 1844 he wrote Martin Chuzzlewit based on his visit to America. In the book, Hannibal Chollop, an American, carries “a brace of revolving pistols in his coat pocket,” and says, “It ain't long since I shot a man down with that sir.”1 Dickens's Chuzzlewit exclaims, “What an extraordinary people you are…. Are pistols…and such things Institutions on which you pride yourself? Are bloody duels, brutal combats, sava
ge assaults, shootings down, and stabbing in the streets your Institutions?” The answer would seem to be a resounding yes.

  The United States is the only industrialized nation that maintains a gun culture. It began early in rural America with a boy being given his first gun usually before he turned twelve; the passage to manhood was equated with the ownership of a weapon. America was born with a rifle in its hand but the truth is the early colonists did not have many guns. Author and historian Garry Wills, reviewing Michael A. Bellesiles's book Arming America, wrote, “A Colonial historian at Emory University, [Bellesiles]…while searching through over a thousand probate records from the frontier sections of New England and Pennsylvania for 1763 to 1790…found that only 14 percent of the men owned guns, and over half of those guns were unusable.”2 The guns were not reliable and the musket was ill-equipped for hunting, being inaccurate and scaring away game. It was the native-born Americans who fomented the gun culture.

  The long gun put food on the table and defended the pioneers and later settlers against wild animals and in their wars with Native Americans. Frederick Jackson Turner's famous frontier thesis of ever-expanding Westward boundaries was backed up by the armed frontiersman.3 We had different needs than the Europeans from the beginning. The colonists in Massachusetts and elsewhere needed smooth bore, lightweight weapons with high accuracy. The musket would not do because of its inaccuracy. The Pennsylvania rifle was born around 1720 and would make its mark later in the Revolution when the British would comment on the deadly accuracy of the “American rifle.”4

  History being what it is, the Pennsylvania rifle was turned into the Kentucky rifle by Daniel Boone, who made it famous in his exploits while exploring Kentucky. When Americans headed out onto the plains, however, the rifle showed its deficiencies. It was a single loader and this would not do in the wide-open plateaus where a buffalo could charge or escape while reloading or worse an Indian could attack while the pioneer jammed a bullet down the barrel. The buffalo didn't have a chance when gun manufacturers produced the Winchester, the Henry, the Sharps, the Spencer, and the Hawken. There were sixty million buffalo in the early 1800s. By the 1880s the buffalo were practically extinct. People from trains mowed them down. Professional hunters mowed them down. The telegraph companies shot them because they knocked over the telegraph poles. By the time Theodore Roosevelt went on his famous Buffalo hunt in 1883, he had to search for a week to find one buffalo to shoot.5

  The introduction of the Winchester meant the beginning of the end for the Native Americans. This repeating high-caliber weapon could easily be carried and fired on horseback, destroying the Indian strategy of waiting for a solider to fire before releasing an enfilade of arrows.

  In the 1850s the derringer was the gun of choice for many Americans in rapidly developing urban environments. It was the gun that John Wilkes Booth would use to kill Abraham Lincoln. The gun was “light and palm size…it was the tiniest handgun yet made.”6 The derringer was the Saturday night special of its day, being accurate and deadly at short range as well as easily concealed.

  But the Colt revolver would push the derringer aside and become the most famous gun of all in American history. There is not an American boy who does not carry some trace of the gun that “won the West” in manner, dress, or just cultural shadow. The .45 caliber six-shooter did not have to be reloaded after every shot like the derringer. Samuel Colt invented the first six-shooter in 1830 and improved on it with each passing year. The Colt is really the first modern handgun that “brought convenient ultimate violence within everyone's reach by supplying a dependable easy-to-carry, ever-ready destructive device.”7

  Too big and clunky for urban environments, the Colt was ready-made for the West. The heavy .45 caliber “peacemaker” on the thigh of any man in the West made him the equal of any other man. The cowboy had his gun and outlaws abounded—from Billy the Kid to the James Brothers—with men pulling their pistols on each other with little provocation. The West had few lawmen and so the law depended on whoever drew first. Writers of dime novels back in the East and later moviemakers in Hollywood had their greatest setting, and the gun-dominated Wild West would live on long after the frontier was declared closed in 1890.

  Gun culture was preserved through the cultural bonanza of selling the West, something that had been going on since 1865. I recently published a book on Teddy Roosevelt, in which I concentrated on the time he spent out West. Roosevelt managed to squeak in three years in the Wild West before it was declared settled in 1890. Historian Fredrick Jackson Turner made this declaration based on census data that, to him at least, showed that the West had been mostly settled.8 More importantly, Turner came up with the Frontier Thesis, which said that American democracy came from having a wide-open frontier that allowed people to go out and find democracy in great expanses bereft of churches, government, and law. It was here that the American traits of rugged individualism and liberty grew, nourished by the availability of free land and a spacious frontier that allowed people to continue migrating to the West and creating communities based on democratic ideals, backing up the word of law with the gun. American violence came from the West, where people were armed and settled disputes with bullets and six-shooters. Turner believed the American penchant for violence began out on the frontier.9

  When Teddy Roosevelt went out to find his bit of the West in 1883, he adopted the cowboy ethos for his own and faced down a few men, risking being shot himself. Teddy's identity at this time was wrapped up with an ability to kill with a gun. He proved himself time and again, shooting buffalo, grizzly bears, and just about anything that moved. He would not actually kill another human until the Spanish American War but his reaction was the same as killing an animal. He felt the glory and the victory over the dead creature at his feet. Shooting animals or men was honorable and proved one's manhood in the late nineteen and early twentieth centuries.

  Another early-twentieth-century writer, Ernest Hemingway, would stretch the gun ethos into literature, with characters who fought in wars and killed many animals on hunts. The gun and the man were intertwined in Hemingway's personal life, with a father who was known to have incredible vision and who could pick out the eye of a squirrel at five hundred yards.10 Hemingway's early short stories have him hunting with his father or cleaning a shotgun, and his later stories of loss in war and on safari would have the gun become the final solution for a man in decline. Hemingway would kill himself with a shotgun blast from a prized weapon.11

  After the Civil War ended, writers discovered that people in the East could not get enough of cowboys and Indians and guns. The Great Train Robbery was filmed in 1903 and was probably one of the original Westerns. It was shot in New Jersey, but Hollywood would not let go, and classic Westerns such as Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Red River, The Gunfighter, High Noon, and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral set the bar. Not to be outdone, the East created its own form of Westerns with gangster films, which were really just Westerns with urban characters. The 1920 gang wars during Prohibition gave Hollywood another gift, and Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson gave boys another gun-swaggering character to emulate. Television cemented gun culture and introduced American children to violence. Guns have been made for children for more than 150 years, as toys and as training tools for boys who would follow their fathers into hunting.12

  Even though my family never had a “real” gun in our house doesn't mean I didn't come from a gun culture. All boys in America are steeped in gun culture, as are many girls. In the pre-videogame era it began when I was given cap guns and blank guns. My friends and I would blast away at each other, choosing who would be a cowboy and who would be an Indian. My first BB gun was given to me when I was in sixth grade. It was a Daisy BB gun, and to this day I can remember the feel of the stock and the oiled smell of the steel BBs. Hitting cans and bottles in the backyard was something my dad and I could do together. We bought paper BB targets with bullseyes, and I remember vividly running to get the target a
nd counting the perforations from the BBs.

  My first Daisy was replaced with a larger BB gun modeled after a Winchester. This gun could shoot farther and didn't require the repeated cocking that would pressure the spring in the gun. This BB gun was a single action in which you would cock the gun once and then squeeze the trigger to hurl the BB toward the target. One day I was home by myself after my mother had called me in sick from school. I took out my BB gun and pointed it toward a car parked by the curb. My thinking was that it would make a small hole in the window. Really I wasn't quite sure what it would do, but I wanted to find out. I stayed low in a crouched sniper position and aimed the rifle at the center of the driver's side window. I fired and saw the BB arc through the afternoon light and strike the window dead center.

  There was a crash, and in horror I watched the window shatter into tiny squares of safety glass. What I didn't know was that car windows are designed to shatter at impact into these small squares to lessen the chance of someone being cut to ribbons. This didn't matter to me. I ran up to the attic and hid my BB gun behind some Christmas boxes. I then pulled down the shade and saw police detectives examining the window and turning to my window as they examined the trajectory. I spent the next week in cold fear and never took out my BB gun again. We were living in the city and I rarely had a chance to shoot it anyway. I ended my gun collection with a pellet rifle that had more power and could perforate a can or shatter a bottle. But sports and girls and school supplanted any continuation of my journey into the land of guns, and my pellet and BB guns mysteriously disappeared.