Emergency

by Neil Strauss

  And so I added the first item to my survival to-do list: learn to shoot.

  I heard the voice of Spencer Booth gloating in my head as I wrote those three words down. I had crossed over to the other side.

  I need to make two stops,” I told the cab driver. “First I have to go to Gun World on Magnolia. Then I’m going to the Burbank airport.”

  As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized I sounded like a madman. I tried to think of some way to explain this sequence of stops rationally—that I wasn’t planning to spray gunfire in the airport but actually picking up a pistol so I could fly to a place called Gunsite in Arizona and learn to shoot. But that sounded just as dubious.

  Though I didn’t think I’d be allowed to fly with a gun, when I called Southwest Airlines earlier that week I was surprised to discover it was fine, as long as I declared it and kept it unloaded in a locked case in my checked luggage.

  The taxi driver, a bald, frowning Armenian in a sweat-stained white polo shirt, took me wordlessly to Gun World, checking me out in the rearview mirror every few minutes. Just in case he drove away, worried that I’d kill him or hold him hostage when I returned with my gun, I brought my suitcase into the store.

  I’d first visited Gun World with Katie ten days earlier to buy a Springfield XD nine-millimeter, which Justin Gunn had recommended as a beginner’s pistol.

  At the counter, a man with black hair, black glasses, a goatee, and a gun thrust down the back of his pants gave me an application that needed to be approved by the Justice Department. It asked typical security questions about whether I’d ever been in a mental institution or had any restraining orders against me. Oddly, it also asked, “Have you ever renounced your American citizenship?”

  It seemed strange that this would disqualify someone from owning a gun, as if it were a sign of violent tendencies like a restraining order. Fortunately, it didn’t ask if I’d applied for any new citizenships lately. Even stranger, though providing my social security number was optional, the application required me to state my race. It seemed kind of, well, racist.

  Next to me, two Polish guys in matching basketball jerseys were looking at .44 Magnums. They’d just turned twenty-one—the legal age for owning a handgun in California. One of them pointed the gun at the mirror, admired himself holding the weapon, then said, “Stick ’em up,” and mimed blowing away his victim.

  Petrified by this pantomime, Katie asked the man at the counter, “Don’t you feel weird selling guns to people? I don’t think people should have guns.”

  “It’s in the Constitution, you know.”

  “They should just be totally illegal. I think only violent people would want to shoot guns.”

  It was difficult to tell whether the clerk was amused or annoyed.

  After I completed the Justice Department form, he explained that due to California state law, I’d have to wait ten days before I could pick up the gun. Then he slid me another piece of paper to fill out. It appeared to be some sort of test.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “You have to pass a handgun safety test first.”

  I hadn’t taken a test in years. “Shouldn’t I study or something?”

  By this point, it was clear that Katie and I were the stupidest people in the store. “Even if you were blind, you’d probably pass,” he said.

  And he was right:

  While packing for Gunsite ten days later, I dug through my closet to find practical clothing for shooting in the hot desert sun all day and under the cold desert sky at night. I came up nearly empty-handed. For most of my life, I’d bought clothes with the intention of being fashionable and hopefully attracting women. My jeans weren’t rugged and durable but slim-legged and waxy, and I wore accoutrements like wrist cuffs and wallet chains, which had no practical use to me—I didn’t even carry a wallet. I had the clothing of an urban café dweller, not a survivalist.

  Katie tried to stop me as I left for Gunsite that morning. “I just don’t picture you holding a gun, babe.” She knew me well. “What if you get shot there? Or your gun blows up in your face?”

  Those were the same questions I’d been asking myself. “I’ll be okay,” I said, as much to convince myself as her. “Why are you always so scared of everything, anyway?” I’d always wanted to ask her that.

  “I think I watched too many movies as a kid. And I have a good memory, so I remembered all the scary things I saw. It’s a big world out there, and I’m a little person, you know.”

  Though Katie was reluctant to admit it, movies weren’t the only source of her insecurities. Her stepfather used to punish her by making her kneel for an hour holding a box over her head and beat her if she dropped it. Once, on her birthday, he yelled at her for opening her presents carelessly, sent her to her room, and confiscated her gifts. And he constantly told Katie she’d grow up to be ugly, which is probably what led to her inability to leave the house without fixing herself up for an hour in the bathroom.

  “When you grow up like that, you spend the rest of your life trying to avoid things that are dangerous,” Katie continued, “like dark alleys and cheerleading.”

  “Why cheerleading?”

  “I don’t want to end up on the top of the pyramid and fall off and break my bones,” she explained as I listened incredulously. “I don’t want to be on the bottom, because my back could break. And I don’t want to be in the middle, because someone could fall on me.” She paused and thought about it a little more. “There’s really no safe place in that pyramid, babe.”

  “But what about bigger threats like terrorism and the economy?”

  “I try not to think about those things.”

  My fears, I realized, were different from Katie’s. Mine were forcing me out of my comfort zone; hers were making her retreat. And though it may be tempting to write off her fears as irrational, I later learned that roughly 66 percent of all severe sports-related injuries to female high school and college students are due to cheerleading accidents. And the main cause of those injuries is actually pyramids.

  Nonetheless, I needed to find a way to make Katie face her anxieties, because they were holding her back from life and making her too dependent on others to take care of her. Before I could help her with her fears, though, I needed to do something about my own.

  After picking up my gun, I resumed my taxi ride to the airport with the nervous Armenian driver.

  Fifteen minutes later, with my heart in my throat, prepared at any moment for security to wrestle me to the ground, I walked to the airline counter and repeated the exact words the clerk at Gun World had told me to say: “I’ll be checking in a firearm. It’s in my duffel, and it’s in a locked case and unloaded.”

  “I’ll need to see it,” said the ticket agent, a pasty blond woman dotted with moles. She eyed me suspiciously. Maybe I was too nervous.

  I repositioned my body in an attempt to block the view of the passengers in line behind me, and removed the case from my duffel. Then I placed it on the scale, unlocked it, and pulled this out:

  Nobody panicked, nobody screamed, nobody tackled me. At that moment, if I’d wanted, I could have sprayed bullets all over the airport. But that would have made me an idiot, and the point of the gun was to protect myself from idiots like myself.

  After telling me to remove the magazine, the mole lady asked me to put the gun back in the case and then taped this label to it:

  “As a precaution,” she added after giving me a boarding pass, “you may want to wait near that door for ten minutes in case TSA has any questions.”

  When no one appeared after fifteen minutes, I headed through security and to the gate, on my way to Arizona to learn how to kill.

  Although a gun can’t do much harm in a locked box in a plane’s cargo hold, I had no idea it was this easy to fly with a firearm. It was the first time since I began this journey that I discovered a freedom I didn’t know I had, rather than a new restriction.

  Make no mistake about what we do here,”
snarled Ed Head, the operations manager of Gunsite. “This is a fighting school.” Sitting in front of him were forty gun-wielding students: soldiers, sheriffs, corrections officers, and me.

  “This will be a life-changing experience,” he continued. “Most of you are going to leave on Friday a different person. You’re going to be better trained than ninety-five percent of all law enforcement officers in the United States.” He waited to let the fact sink in. “And you’ll develop a different kind of confidence that comes from the ability to take care of yourself.”

  His last words—“the ability to take care of yourself”—were just what I needed to hear, especially after signing six pages of waivers promising not to sue them if I was accidentally shot in the head.

  For the next two hours, the rangemasters, Charlie McNeese and Ken Campbell, indoctrinated us into the mental spirit of battle. “You don’t rise to the occasion,” McNeese lectured. “You default to your level of training. When the stress hits, you will only be half as good as your best day of recent training.”

  McNeese appeared to be in his late fifties. With his gray beard, genial Southern accent, and toothy smile, he looked like a dangerous Colonel Sanders. “Excitement won’t kill you,” he concluded, “but surprise will.”

  This was the kind of knowledge I needed. It seemed more useful and exciting than knowing the inflation rate and the price of gold and most of what they taught at the Sovereign Society—perhaps because McNeese’s words were meant for fighters, not runners, and I still knew nothing about fighting.

  After the lecture, we picked up a thousand rounds of ammunition and drove down a dirt road to an outdoor gun range. A sign posted in a shed there read in big black letters, I’D RATHER BE WHACKING TANGOS.

  I asked another student, a squat police officer who seemed physically unable to change the shape of his mouth into anything other than a straight line, what a Tango was. “A terrorist,” he replied, as if it were obvious (which perhaps it was). He didn’t speak another word to me for the rest of the week. I soon earned the derision of the rest of the class by asking the instructor to help me put on my gun belt. It was clear I would be the slowest student there.

  I may have had book smarts, but I was sorely lacking in motor skills, practical knowledge, and common sense. In a survival situation, every other person here would most likely outlast me. Perhaps the reason I was so worried about the draft when I was a teenager was that I knew I’d die. If I was on patrol and someone yelled “duck,” my head would be the last to go down and the first to get shot.

  The only other person struggling with the class was a tank of a woman named Stephanie, a navy officer who was being deployed to Iraq the following month. Her problem was the Beretta nine-millimeter pistol she was using. Not only did it seem to under-perform against every other weapon in class, but it was constantly jamming and misfiring.

  When I asked why she was using the Beretta, she explained that it’s the gun the government issues to most of the U.S. military. In fact, she complained, the government had just bought 25,000 more Beretta M9s. Every time her pistol jammed in class after that, I imagined it happening in an actual gunfight in Iraq.

  Other than Stephanie, I was the only other student with a nine-millimeter gun. Everyone else had larger, more powerful .45s, mostly 1911 Colts, which were favored by the late Colonel Jeff Cooper, the severe, charismatic shooting star who founded Gunsite in 1976.

  “Why do we carry forty-fives?” McNeese replied when I asked about the gun. “Because they don’t make forty-sixes.”

  At Gunsite, we didn’t just learn how to draw a pistol, shoot rapid-fire, quickly clear gun malfunctions, speed-reload, and hit targets at night. We learned the science of killing.

  Here, there were no such things as bullet holes. They were called leak points. As McNeese taught us, “The bigger the bullet, the more fluid goes out and the more air comes in.”

  As Campbell taught us, “When a guy hits the ground, the fight isn’t over. He’s dropping because the hole in him is causing his blood pressure to drop. But when he’s down, his blood pressure will rise again and this means he could still be a threat.”

  As an instructor named Mike taught us, “If you shoot him in the skull, the skull is a hard thing—the bullet could just deflect and he’ll still be standing. You actually want to get him in the eye”.

  While Mike lectured, I looked around and realized that many of the people there had either killed before or were preparing to kill—and without remorse. In their world, there seemed to be two kinds of people: good guys and bad guys. Good guys should have guns; bad guys shouldn’t. And they were the good guys.

  It wasn’t too difficult to figure this out. One student, a former Green Beret named Evan, was wearing a shirt that read I’M THE GOOD GUY.

  Personally, I don’t believe in good guys and bad guys, as compelling as those stories may be to children. There are no bad guys—just people who do bad things. Most of them aren’t trying to be bad. They think they’re the good guys; got stuck in a bad situation and lost control; or have something wrong with their heads that’s a product of the way they were raised, the drugs they’re using, or the chemistry in their brains. Most of them think they’re a hero to someone. And, sadly, they’re right—just as every good guy is a villain to someone.

  In a Fliesian world, there is no black and white—only gray.

  Midway through the week, we were taken to a shoot house. It was a building with multiple rooms filled with human replicas. Some were armed criminals, others innocent civilians. The instructors taught us how to open doors, look around corners, and move through a house where armed intruders are present. Then they sent us into the building one by one to take out the bad guys.

  Though it was a simulation, my adrenaline kicked in instantly. I pushed the front door open, then quickly backed away with my gun in the ready position. I saw a man in the corridor in a leather jacket, holding something shiny and menacing in his right hand. I gave him what they called the Gunsite salute: two bullets aimed at the heart, one at the head. When I entered the corridor, though, I discovered that what was in his hands wasn’t actually a gun—it was a beer bottle.

  For the rest of the exercise, I was shaken. All I could think was, if this had been real life, I would have just killed an innocent person. I suppose that was one of my problems with guns.

  “You know what your problem is?” McNeese asked afterward.

  “Target identification?”

  “Nope.” He touched the tip of his index finger to the middle joint of his thumb to make a small circle. I stared at it a second, wondering what it was supposed to symbolize.

  “Your sphincter,” he informed me.

  “My what?”

  “Your sphincter. Every time you shoot, it gets like this.” He narrowed the circle formed by his thumb and index finger. “It gets tight and itty-bitty. And when your sphincter gets tight, do you know what happens?”

  “I can’t shoot?”

  “You can’t even think. When your sphincter gets that tight, it cuts off the blood to your brain. And that cuts off the circulation to your muscles. So your shooting is all over the place.” He gave me a friendly smack on the shoulder, hard enough to throw me off balance, as if to prove a point. “If you have a more relaxed muscle, body, and mind, you’re going to perform at a higher level than when you’re extremely uptight. So you got to learn to relax, son. The sphincter will mess you up.”

  I watched as the next student entered the shoot house. Since he was a police officer, I figured he’d do better than me. But he shot the innocent man as well.

  “You just got yourself a lawsuit,” McNeese told him.

  “Not if I fix it in the report,” the officer joked.

  As a journalist, I’d spent most of my adult life interviewing individuals these people considered the bad guys. This was the first time I’d been on the other side of the law—with those whose job it was to uphold it. From what I saw, though, there was little difference betwe
en the two groups. It seemed to reaffirm one of my Fliesian beliefs: that people will get away with what they can.

  In the evenings, I took an extra class that would earn me a permit to carry a concealed weapon in thirteen states. According to the teacher, a grizzled shooter with a missing finger, courts had affirmed that neither the state nor the police have a duty to protect citizens. “As individuals,” he told us, “we have a duty to protect ourselves.”

  His words echoed the epiphany about being responsible for my own safety that I’d had during the blackout in St. Kitts. Shihan Clayton had definitely sent me to the right place.

  Of course, the instructor went a little further, as most people tend to do. After teaching us how to keep from incriminating ourselves after shooting an intruder (hang up immediately after giving the 911 operator your address and don’t say a word to police officers without an attorney present), he concluded: “If I kill someone, you won’t find me sitting there in my lounge chair with my gun, smiling and telling myself that I done good. I’ll be shaking, I’ll squeeze a tear out of my eye, and at my age I’ll say I have chest pains. The smile will be on the inside.”

  While listening to him field questions from students about where they were allowed to bring their concealed weapons, I realized most of the people here, even though they seemed tough on the surface, actually lived in fear. They owned guns because they were scared—of gangs in the streets, of robbers in the convenience stores, of burglars in their homes. In their minds, lurking just outside their lives, waiting for the right moment to attack them, were all kinds of men, women, and even animals belonging to a rampant, growing subspecies known as the bad guys.

  One of the reasons they preferred .45s was because they were worried a bad guy who was high on PCP might not be stopped by a smaller nine-millimeter bullet. They didn’t like being prohibited from carrying guns on planes, in case they were held hostage by hijackers. And they didn’t like gun restrictions in national parks, because that left them open to attacks from bears. In short, they hated any business or law that regulated firearms—because without their firearms, they believed, they weren’t safe.