by Erik Larson
Her choice of brand was no accident. Quigley received a monthly stipend from Smith & Wesson, as well as a supply of guns, in return for giving talks to gun groups, visiting gun dealerships to advise women on the guns they ought to buy, and of course helping to staff the Smith & Wesson booth at the annual SHOT Show, a huge trade show for licensed firearms dealers. She loaned me an expensive Smith & Wesson .357 revolver, black, with an elegant wood grip and red-dot sight. “Of course. What am I going to do, give you a lousy gun?” she told me later. “I want you to do well.”
After a series of loading and unloading drills, Quigley sketched the upper torso of a man. She circled the broad area between the sternum and shoulders known to combat shooters as the “center of mass,” the area where a bullet is most likely to cause enough destruction of tissue and bone and such catastrophic neural shock as to stop an assailant before he can complete his attack. This is a nice way of telling the women to shoot to kill.
“We’re also going to practice some head shots,” Quigley said. “It’s hard to shoot someone in the face because we think of the face as the person, as the soul—I hate to talk like this, but if you shoot someone in the face, you have a very good chance of stopping him.”
She led the class down to one of the Cherokee Gun Club’s outdoor ranges. Everyone wore safety glasses. Quigley carried a bullhorn so she would be heard through the earplugs and pistol earmuffs everyone wore as protection against the damaging roar of the guns. “To those of you who’ve never shot before,” Quigley said, a warm smile playing across her face, “welcome. You’ll have a wonderful time.”
Many of Quigley’s former students report that the act of firing a gun for the first time triggered a revolution in their lives. Michelle Sullivan, of South Pasadena, California, took her fifth course from Quigley in January 1993. She took her first early in 1992. “The first time I stood there with a loaded gun, I wanted to cry,” she told me. “I thought, is this what my life has come to—I’m standing here holding a loaded gun?”
Sullivan hit the target on her first shot. “It was like I walked up to a psychological barrier, crossed it, and everything was fine. It was a complete turnaround in thinking. Complete.”
Each of twenty targets was papered with the black silhouette of a man’s upper body. Clear plastic bags draped the silhouettes to protect them from the rain. Half the class stood along the firing line seven feet away.
The distance may seem absurdly close, but armed encounters often occur at that range, according to police firearms experts. Quigley had an additional motive for putting everyone so close, however. She wanted her students to hit the targets as often as possible to bolster morale. Aiming and shooting a handgun is not the easy matter TV cops and robbers make it out to be. Even at seven feet, many of the women taking the course missed the silhouette portion of the target and struck only the background.
After a few basic shooting drills, Quigley moved on to more advanced exercises, including one she called Mozambique—two shots to the body, one to the head.
“It’s awfully fun to do this,” she said.
She issued the command to begin shooting. There was a wild, prolonged crackle of gunfire. Sharp puffs of air from my neighbor’s gun tapped at my temple. Georgia clay erupted from the hillside beyond the targets.
“I hope we all got some good head shots in there,” Quigley said heartily, “because that’s what’s gonna stop him.”
She checked the targets to see how well everyone was doing. A few wildly spaced holes led her to suspect some students had been jerking the trigger instead of squeezing it.
“Squeeze smoothly,” she told the class, a sly grin again playing across her face as she moved along the firing line. “It’s really kind of a sexy move. I always say be sexy about it. Squeeeeeeze,” she murmured, “squeeeeeeze. Okay? That’ll kind of get your mind into it.”
We shot our guns one-handed, first with our dominant hands, then our weak hands. We shot while lying on our backs, an exercise intended to simulate firing while still in bed. One woman, supine on a muddy ground cloth, hit the target in the face with the first shot.
“Ooh,” another said in admiring disgust. “Right where it counts!”
More exercises followed. Empowerment was in the air.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?” Quigley exhorted. “You feel the power!”
When the class at last returned to the meeting room, Quigley asked her students one by one to tell their reactions to the course. The room took on the feel of a revivalist camp meeting. “Lisa,” Quigley said to Lisa Hilliard, an Atlanta bank executive who had never shot a gun before. “When you first walked in, I said, ‘Oh, God, she’s scared.’ ”
Quigley turned to the other students. “I could see it on her face. She was scared.”
Then back to Lisa. “How do you feel now, Lisa?”
Hilliard considered. “Great. I can’t believe how much fun it was. I mean, I just wanted to get through it; I didn’t expect to enjoy it.”
Quigley pointed to another woman. “Ginger?”
She was Ginger Icenhour, manager of a computer store in Tucker, Georgia. She too had never shot before but now professed to be ready to take on an assailant. “If he walks through that door, he’ll be surprised because I’m gonna shoot him.”
It is a tantalizing fantasy. Who among us hasn’t imagined walking down a dark street, being accosted by a bad guy, and reveling in his surprise as we draw our Dirty Harry Model 29s and blow him away? The myth of self-defense depicts the gun as a foolproof talisman capable of warding off trouble and restoring peace of mind.
But armed self-defense is a far more problematic venture than Quigley and the gun culture would have us all believe.
The NRA’s 911 tape, played by Quigley, was indeed powerful, so compelling the NRA played it at its 1993 annual meeting in Nashville. There is another tape, however, that Quigley could have played just as readily. It is the 911 recording of a ten-year-old Florida boy, Sean Smith, who called the emergency line just after shooting his eight-year-old sister. At first his voice is soft; he pleads for understanding. He could be any little boy trying to explain a breach of household rules.
“I didn’t know my dad’s gun was loaded,” he says.
“Okay,” the operator says.
“And I shot her.” The boy’s voice wavers. “I didn’t mean to. She’s dead.”
Even the dispatcher is startled. He snaps, “She’s dead?”
The boy loses all composure now. “Yes,” he cries, “please, get my mom and dad. Oh my God!”
The act of owning a gun for self-defense forces the gun owner to confront a paradox central to such ownership: to be truly useful for self-defense, a gun must be kept loaded and readily accessible at all times. “In other words,” Quigley wrote in her book, “an unloaded gun that is perfectly safe is perfectly useless.”
But a gun that is accessible to the parent is, by definition, just as accessible to the parent’s children or anyone else who visits the home, be it a jealous boyfriend or drunken spouse. Researchers fear the gun industry’s strategy of pitching handguns to women, particularly professional women and single mothers, will only heighten the risk to children. Even Quigley argues that certain households should not have guns, in particular those with a member who is alcoholic, takes antidepression drugs, or is prone to extreme bursts of temper—a sizable portion of the U.S. population. “If you have children at home,” she warned the Gainesville class, “really think about whether you should have a gun.”
Inherent in this last warning was the notion that women who did not have children should feel free to buy a gun. The warning, however, ignores the potential for collateral disaster that always exists in the presence of a gun. Women who live alone may have nieces, nephews, and grandchildren; their neighbors, friends, and lovers may have kids; the women may teach grade school, operate day-care centers, or baby-sit for friends, sisters, cousins, and colleagues. A study of accidental shooting deaths of children in California
highlighted how a momentary lapse of vigilance by gun owners could quickly lead to tragedy, even in households that treated guns with exemplary care. In one case, the study reported, a six-year-old boy shot himself in the head with a handgun he found “in the purse of a houseguest.”
It is widely thought that Sarah Brady, chairperson of Handgun Control Inc., began her crusade against guns immediately after her husband, Jim Brady, was permanently injured in John Hinckley’s attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan. In fact, she told a writer for the New York Times Magazine, the pivotal moment came later, in 1985, when her five-year-old son found a .22 handgun in a pickup owned by a family friend and pointed it at her. At first Brady thought it was a toy, then saw it was real and loaded.
Parents, however, seem all too willing to ignore the risks and to assume that their own kids are responsible enough to recognize the harm guns can do and to learn to “respect” them. A June 1993 Louis Harris survey, also conducted for the Harvard University School of Public Health, found that only 43 percent of parents who owned guns kept those guns under lock and key. Another study found that 10 percent of America’s armed parents openly admitted they kept their guns not only loaded but also unlocked and “within reach of children.” The mere fact that a full 10 percent of respondents actually admitted courting tragedy in this way should itself give us pause. It raises the suspicion that many other parents do likewise but are unwilling to confess to a practice many gun owners would find reprehensible.
Debbie Collins, a sixth-grade teacher who took Paxton Quigley’s course at the Cherokee Gun Club, has a daughter and a Smith & Wesson revolver (she doesn’t know the caliber). When we spoke late in 1992, her daughter was one and a half years old. Collins had been carrying a gun for about five years. During the workweek she locked her revolver in the glove compartment of her car in the school parking lot. While at home, she stored it loaded on top of the refrigerator. Her husband kept a loaded handgun at their bedside during the night.
Keeping her daughter safe from the family’s guns, Collins said, “is a real fear for me.” But Quigley’s course, she added, made her more confident. “I’m more aware now of where [the gun] is all the time. And making sure it’s in a safe place all the time.”
But would she always know exactly where it was?
“I’m sure gonna try. I can’t say that I’ll always, but since that course I’ve been very aware of it. I like to feel like I’ll always be aware of it.” Once, however, she left the gun in her car, with the car unlocked but in the garage. “That kind of frightened me.”
When her daughter is older, Collins said, “we’re going to take her out, show her how it works and what it can cause, and that way make her less curious about it—I think that’s why a lot of children use them, out of curiosity.” She thought she might follow Paxton Quigley’s suggestion of bringing along a melon to demonstrate the damage a handgun can do to the human head, an idea that evokes the practice sessions of the would-be assassin in Frederick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal. In Armed & Female Quigley wrote, “Once a child understands how a gun operates and has heard the sound of a gunshot and witnessed the potential damage, he or she will have a different view of a gun and will gain respect for it.”
Dr. Kellermann, the Emory University researcher, called this idea “well-intended but hopelessly naive.” Parents overestimate the good sense of their children and their ability to resist outside pressures, he said. “Teaching a child respect for a gun doesn’t change the child’s willingness to use it if he’s depressed, if he just failed a test that he felt the rest of his life depended on, or just broke up with his girlfriend or he’s mad at his best friend. Tragedies of this kind are played out in this country on almost a daily basis.”
Others, however, including the NRA and Quigley, argue that the low annual death toll from accidental shootings proves how safe gun ownership is in America. A 1991 study by the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that in 1988 there were 1,501 unintentional shooting deaths; 277 of the victims were children fifteen years old or younger. This is tragic, the gun camp concedes, but not a bad showing considering that half of America’s households are thought to possess one or more guns.
Proponents of this view neglect to mention the number of nonfatal injuries that occur in accidental shootings. The GAO began studying firearms accidents in order to gauge how many lives could be saved each year if guns were required by law to include loading indicators, magazine safeties, and other safety devices currently not routinely installed on guns. (A loading indicator provides a visual warning that a cartridge is positioned in front of the firing pin and ready to fire. A magazine safety disables an auto-loading pistol the moment you pull the ammunition magazine from the base of the grip. Mechanical logic might lead you to assume that when you remove the magazine from a pistol, you unload the gun and render it safe; in fact, a cartridge may be left in the chamber.) Faced with the dearth of information on nonfatal gunshot injuries, the GAO’s investigators did some primary research of their own. They discovered that police typically do not keep such records. Nonetheless, they managed to find ten major police departments that did. Using the records from these departments, the GAO investigators studied 532 accidental shootings that occurred in 1988 and 1989 and found that only five had resulted in death, for an injury-to-death ratio of 105 to 1. The survey sample included records from the Dallas police department, which had recorded only one accidental shooting death but 248 injuries.
The GAO report cautioned that the survey sample, limited by the lack of available injury data, was hardly representative; the 105-to-1 ratio could not be projected to the country as a whole. The report noted, however, that this ratio fell in line with others reported by the National Safety Council. The overall ratio of injuries to deaths for all accidents of all kinds in America was 94 to 1; for household accidents, 151 to 1. If the 105-to-1 ratio were indeed accurate, it would indicate that 157,600 accidental, nonfatal gunshot injuries occur each year. Even if one excludes Dallas as a statistical outlier, the ratio comes out to seventy injuries for every death, or 105,070 nonfatal gunshot injuries each year.
A gun is an ego pump. It can give a fifteen-year-old mugger absolute power over anyone he encounters except perhaps another armed teenager. Likewise, police fear, a gun may impart a false sense of security to anyone who keeps one for self-defense, especially anyone who carries it outside the home. “There’s just so many what-ifs,” said Officer Joanne Welsh of the San Francisco police. The mother of a four-year-old, she won’t bring her service weapon into her house. “A weapon is really only good if that perfect situation you may have envisioned occurs.”
Guns certainly don’t make police officers feel safe, despite weeks of training and drilling in combat-shooting tactics. They know that just hanging on to a gun in an armed encounter can be difficult. From 1980 through 1989, 735 police officers nationwide were shot dead in the line of duty; 120 were killed with their own guns.
“The typical NRA line is, you can’t rape a .38,” said Col. Leonard Supenski, a Baltimore County firearms expert, who testified in a landmark civil suit arising from Nicholas Elliot’s shooting spree. “Well, that’s absolutely false. If the guy’s got his gun out first, you’re gonna lose. If you’ve got a .38 in your purse and the guy gets to it first, you’re gonna lose. If a guy attacks you from behind in the dark with the element of surprise, you’re gonna lose.”
Armed encounters involve a daunting array of split-second decisions. The self-defense shooter must first identify the target. Next, he must gauge the degree of threat. Does the intruder or assailant really pose a mortal danger? In broad daylight, these questions may have ready answers. But a self-defense shooting is most likely to take place under less than optimal conditions, with fear complicating the decision process.
Analysis of police shootings shows that a wild surge of adrenaline quickly impairs fine motor control, Supenski said. “You have tunnel vision, your eyes tend to focus on the threat, you see nothing else around you.
Your auditory senses are diminished. It’s called auditory exclusion. You hear only what’s in front of you.”
One of the absurd myths of gunplay nurtured by television and Hollywood is the idea that during a gunfight one can actually count the number of bullets the other guy fired and thus know whether or not his gun remained loaded. Police officers involved in shootings often report never hearing the sound of gunfire.
Amid the confusion of sleep and the distortions of fear, an armed homeowner has yet one more crucial question to answer: What’s behind the target? A bullet that misses its target, or even one that strikes its target dead on, can continue traveling with enough momentum to pass through interior walls into adjacent bedrooms, even exterior walls into neighboring homes. A miss is likely. In gunfights, Baltimore County police officers miss with seven of ten shots fired, Supenski said. “If the cops miss—and these are the guys who had the training, the retraining, and the recertification—how much more so does somebody who buys a gun and sticks it in the drawer?”
Gun magazines feed America’s gun owners a steady diet of advice on how to behave during a gunfight, much of it written by police officers from small-town departments no one has ever heard of and where gun battles are few and far between. Typically, these stories fail to discuss the emotional aftermath of an armed confrontation. Big-city police departments know the psychic toll can be devastating. In Boston, for example, the police department established a “Shoot Team,” composed of officers who have survived shoot-outs, which gathers after each new incident to help the officers involved come to grips with the terror they felt during the confrontation and the emotional upheaval they experienced afterward.
One of its members, who asked not to be identified by name, lived through two shoot-outs. In the first, he and his partner—for narrative purposes, I’ll call them Nolan and Dougherty—wound up in high-speed pursuit of a stolen Lincoln, chasing it up one-way streets against oncoming traffic. “It was like something out of the movies,” Nolan recalled. “I remember my heart was pounding out of my chest.”