Gun Guys

by Dan Baum

  In any case, my sneering at Florida had been misplaced: Shall-issue may not have caused crime to drop, but neither had it uncorked rivers of blood. And let’s be honest—I found that a little thrilling. Because now I could get a concealed-carry permit of my own and start handling my gun every day without feeling as though I were contributing to a virulent social pathology.

  Colorado required people who wanted a carry permit to get trained, but it left the details up to county sheriffs. Mine, a jovial and popular Democrat named Joe Pelle, required only proof of training by an “NRA-approved” instructor. Knowing how Boulder’s pleasures tended toward qigong and Pilates, I expected to drive some distance to find a shooting school. So I was surprised to find in the phone book something called the Boulder Rifle Club, whose NRA-approved concealed-carry classes were booked an astonishing two months out. The number of carry permits Sheriff Pelle issued annually had risen eighteenfold in the previous decade. Nine hundred Boulderites applied every year. Maybe the aging hippies in Whole Foods hadn’t blinked at my gun because they were packing themselves.

  “There’s Brazilian music tonight at the Laughing Goat,” Margaret said one afternoon as we returned from yoga class. “Rosa and I are going.” She snapped her fingers theatrically. “Oh, that’s right. You have your gun thing tonight.”

  And off I slunk, to join the legion of the armed.

  Boulder can be an uncomfortably high-tone place—wealthy and possessed of a higher concentration of advanced degrees than any town in America. The club turned out, though, to be down-home in the extreme: naught but a couple of ranges bulldozed from the sagebrush, and a cement-floored, cinder-block-walled “clubhouse” that was about as elegant as a boiler room. I was glad; this was what a shooting place was supposed to look like. Red school lockers lined one wall, and a lone flickering fluorescent tube gave the room a sickly middle-school pallor. The bulletin board carried ads for gunsmithing, taxidermy services, guns, and car insurance. Posters taped to the wall, I was relieved to see, were all about gun safety; nothing in the room was political—no NRA posters.

  Three big thirtysomething guys dressed in identical black hoodies—hoods up—whispered and chuckled to each other like a band of Jawas en route to capture R2-D2. The rest of the students had already found seats at the cheap folding tables that would serve as desks: an elegantly dressed elderly gentleman, a middle-aged husband-and-wife team, and, at a table with an empty chair, one of Rosa’s teachers from middle school.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, taking a seat.

  His eyes didn’t quite meet mine; he seemed mortified to have been recognized. “I’ve never owned a gun,” he said softly. “I’ve hardly ever shot a gun.”

  “And now you want to carry a gun?”

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled, and busied himself with the paper handouts.

  The twelve-hour class was to be spread over four consecutive week-nights. This first night would be a general introduction to firearms and the social realities of carrying one. Night two: live firing. Night three: the legalities of self-defense. The last night would cover strategies for carrying.

  Our teachers called us to order. Dick was a big man in his sixties with a boxer’s nose and a Jersey City stevedore’s accent. Judy was short and sturdy, also in her sixties, with cropped auburn hair and a wry, tough-gal way of talking out of one side of her mouth. From the moment they started making Obama and illegal-immigrant jokes, they made it clear that they were not of Boulder’s dominant culture and that for the next four nights we were on their turf. They also made it clear that they were not bumpkins; Judy was a lawyer, and, while Dick didn’t tell us his profession, he let drop that he lived in an expensive part of town.

  So they weren’t teaching this class for the money, which was a good thing. Assuming the other seven people were paying a hundred dollars for the class, as I was, the Rifle Club was taking in eight hundred dollars. Divided by twelve hours and two teachers, that was a little more than thirty-three dollars an hour to stand in a cold, dimly lit cinder-block room for four nights running—and the Rifle Club was no doubt taking a cut. Dick and Judy were here because they believed in the cause. They wanted to help more citizens get licensed to carry guns.

  We went around the room introducing ourselves and saying why we’d come. Two said they weren’t sure they wanted to carry; they mostly wanted to learn how to live safely alongside a firearm. I said the same. The other five all said they wanted to carry—but not when they were on city streets, only when they were out in the woods.

  This was a new one for me; I’d always thought of concealed carry as an urban thing. I was accustomed to taking a gun along when car camping by the roadside, because one never knew who would be prowling the highways. And I’d carried a rifle or a shotgun in the Alaskan wilderness, because of the grizzlies. But Colorado trails were the last place I’d ever felt unsafe. Some people, apparently, are creeped out by the forest. “What happens if someone comes into camp to steal from us and takes my husband out?” the woman asked, and I wondered what she might have in a campsite that someone would be willing to kill for. A camp stove? A sleeping bag? Maybe she was imagining some sort of hideous Deliverance scenario. Which wasn’t completely unreasonable, I supposed, just different from my own ideas about when a concealed gun might be necessary.

  Dick started, in barely disguised boredom, describing the parts of a gun. “This is the trigger. This is the muzzle.” I looked at my watch. Two and a half hours to go, with three more nights to come. For people teaching a skill on which lives could depend, Dick and Judy seemed lackadaisical, drifting through prescribed material, turning pages lazily, often losing their train of thought. It wasn’t until two hours into the evening that Dick let drop why he seemed to care so little. “I don’t have a carry permit,” he told us casually. “I don’t believe I should have to ask the government’s permission to exercise my constitutional rights.”

  “So you carry illegally?” I asked.

  He said he did not. He kept a gun in the armrest of his pickup truck and several in his home, but he didn’t carry concealed, because he wanted neither to break the law nor approach the government on bended knee for permission to do something already guaranteed to him in the Constitution.

  “But you think we should.”

  “Really, it’s the only rational thing to do, given the way crime is these days.”

  “Out of control,” Judy said. “Absolutely out of control.”

  Say what? Just that day I’d been looking at the figures on America’s stunning drop in violent crime—one of the few pieces of unalloyed good news out of the previous two decades. I put up my hand, but the lights went out.

  Judy started a video produced by the NRA. It opened on a suburban street of landscaped McMansions, “a neighborhood probably not very different from yours,” according to the narrator, which made me wonder whether they showed this same film in, say, downtown Oakland. We watched as a white guy in chinos and a ski mask jimmied a window, let himself in, and, even though the woman in the negligee told him she had a gun and was calling the police, kicked open her bedroom door. She shot him twice. Then we watched another scenario: the same white guy in chinos and a ski mask threatening a businessman in the alley behind his store and suffering the same fate. I was convinced: Ban chinos.

  “The way crime is simply out of control, you can’t afford not to be prepared,” Judy said. Dick handed around a color police photo of a man slashed open with a knife. Both Dick and Judy insisted repeatedly that crime was “out of control.” I kept track; they used the words “out of control” nine times. The disconnect between their ironclad belief and the reality was so stark, it was disorienting.

  This first night, then, wasn’t about teaching us gun skills. It was about recruiting us into a culture animated by fear. Because until we bought in, the very idea of carrying a gun was ridiculous. I could understand the NRA and the firearms business wanting everybody convinced that crime was out of control; it was good
for membership, and good for business. But Dick and Judy?

  Maybe it wasn’t enough for them to say they liked guns and wanted to carry one around and handle it every day. Maybe they felt they needed more justification. I was always looking for a reason to have guns in my life; why wouldn’t they?

  During a break, I asked Dick if he wasn’t being a tad misanthropic. “I’m an optimist,” he said, “but we live in a world of assholes.”

  The first night was not, for the record, worthless. They taught us the eminently sensible Five Cardinal Rules† and made us repeat them back aloud. And Judy kept returning to what may have been her best piece of advice: “You can’t call back the bullet. You own everything the bullet touches. You have to ask yourself: ‘Can I afford to pull the trigger?’ ” Dick chimed in, “You have to let anger issues go. If you have anger issues, perhaps concealed carry isn’t for you.” Judy stepped around him, put her fists on her hips, and fixed us with that gun-moll squint. “You need to decide whether you’re willing to take a life. Make your decision in advance and review it often. Don’t wait until you’re in a situation. If you can’t do it—if you can’t take a life—don’t get a gun.”

  By eleven o’clock, my legs had frozen from the knees down from sitting with my feet on that frigid cement floor. As we stood, I expected to chat a bit with my fellow students. To my surprise, everybody put his head down and headed for his car in silence.

  On the second night, we were to bring our guns in bags, unloaded. I selected my Colt Detective Special, a snub-nosed .38 revolver that had starred in every black-and-white cops-and-gangsters movie since the silent era.

  A door at the front of the clubhouse stood open, leading to an indoor range. We each took a lane, about twenty feet from a man-silhouette target. In the lane beside me, one of the Jawas unpacked a huge Sig Sauer P226 semi-automatic with a bright nickel finish. In his hand, it looked as big and shiny as the bumper of a 1966 Buick, and I wondered how in the world he would be able to wear it concealed. I asked, but all he said was, “It’s the one Woody Harrelson carried in Zombieland.”

  Each of us was assigned a range officer, trained by the NRA and paid little or nothing; they served for the same reason Dick and Judy were teaching the class: because they believed in gun culture and wanted it to be safe. My range officer was a gentle anesthesiologist named Charlie who wore a gun every day to work. “It’s a habit,” he said with a shrug. “I don’t mind carrying it, and if I need it, I have it.”‡

  Charlie taught me the isosceles stance—arms straight ahead—and then the Weaver stance, in which the left edge of the body angles toward the target; the right hand pushes the gun forward while the left hand isometrically pulls it back. He discovered I was cross-eye dominant, meaning that although I was right handed, my left eye was stronger. Standing calmly shooting at targets, I’d learned to compensate. But in a sudden gunfight, Charlie taught me, my cross-eye dominance might throw off my shots, with fatal results. “Shoot with both eyes open,” he suggested, “or consider learning to shoot left-handed.”

  We dutifully punched holes in paper, as required by Sheriff Pelle. We didn’t practice anything that might come in handy during a gunfight, such as drawing our guns, shouting commands, finding cover, reloading, or—best of all—running away. But it was a reasonably useful evening; I hadn’t fired a handgun with an instructor at my shoulder in a long time.

  It reminded me, too, how deeply unpleasant target practice can be, especially in an indoor range with five or six other guns going off. Earplugs and oversize muffs didn’t cut it; I felt like I’d spent an hour with my head in a spaghetti pot while a two-year-old beat on it with a ladle. We scurried in stony silence to our cars, which was fine with me, since I was deaf.

  If I was really going to carry the thing, I wanted to be sure I didn’t end up in prison. So I most looked forward to the night with a police officer as our teacher. We drew a burly detective named Gary, from one of Denver’s far-flung suburbs. He had a straw-colored bristle mustache and looked like a young, fit Captain Kangaroo. “Any lawyers here?” was the first thing he said, and when no hands went up: “Cool.” He played a videotape—the Pillsbury doughboy farting. “Just a little humor to start,” he said.

  “The Supreme Court says that if you have time to reload, you have time to think, so any killing you do after that is premeditated,” he said. “That’s why I carry the FN Five-Seven; it holds twenty rounds.” He reached around behind him and came up with a bright orange plastic gun—an inert replica of an FN. Holding it out with both hands, he aimed, whispered “pshew,” faked the recoil, like an eight-year-old playing cops and robbers, and reholstered.

  Like Dick and Judy, Gary was an acolyte of the Church of Out-of-Control Violence. And as a policeman, he seemed oddly eager for us to partake of it. “If you’re in a place you’re legally allowed to be, you are not required to withdraw!” he barked. He’d rather we draw down and shoot it out if the alternative was backing away from a fight. Good people cowering from bad ones was a recipe for social decay. He drew his orange gun again, brought it to firing position, said “pshew,” and reholstered.

  “In Massachusetts,” he said, “you’re required to withdraw from your own home.”§ He shook his head and chuckled as he tucked the orange gun away—those wacky East Coast liberals. It seemed to me that dashing out the front door as a burglar came in the back was a pretty good strategy, if the alternative was a shoot-out. But it wasn’t question time.

  “Within twenty-one feet, an attacker with a knife can get to you within 1.5 seconds,” Gary said, and I could sense us all remembering that photo Dick had shown us of the disemboweled stabbing victim. “Remember that the next time you hear people bitching that a cop shot someone who ‘only’ had a knife.”

  One of the hooded Jawas asked whether he could legally shoot someone who came into his house. “There are some prohibitations about that,” Gary said as he drew, pointed, and reholstered his orange gun yet again. I wasn’t even sure he knew that he was doing it. “It could be bad if you shot a burglar who turned out to be unarmed. It would depend on the jury.”

  “What about if he’s, like, on the way out the door with my flat-panel TV,” the Jawa said.

  Gary chuckled. “I don’t think anybody here would let a guy walk out of their house with their forty-eight-inch flat-panel,” he said. “You can say ‘Stop!’ and if he sets it down and comes at you, you’re justified.”

  “And if he runs away?” the Jawa asked.

  “Now he knows you won’t shoot, and he’s going to come shopping at your house again.”

  I raised my hand. “So shoot him?”

  Gary chuckled again, drawing and reholstering, drawing and reholstering. “If your aim is good, you have time to get your story straight before I get there.”

  On the fourth and final night, Dick and Judy talked about various ways to carry guns. Dick had on cargo pants and a jacket, under which he said he was concealing thirteen of them. “These are unloaded, and there is never any live ammo in this room,” he said. He drew his guns, one by one, and laid them on a table in a kind of weird lethal striptease: five from his belt, inside and outside the waistband of his pants, two from his ankles, two from his front pockets, two from hidden pockets in a spandex undershirt designed for concealed carry, and two from a wide elastic band that wrapped around his midsection like a truss. It was like watching clowns tumbling out of a VW; it went on and on. “Really, though, I think two would suffice,” he said.

  For the benefit of the woman in the class, Judy used her .38 snub-nose to model various holsters made to fit the female body. She waved the gun around, showing it at her hip, at the small of her back, and in her purse, then stopped suddenly and peered closely at it. “Oh shit,” she said, her face reddening. She opened the revolver and dumped out five live cartridges.

  Into the appalled silence, Dick ventured: “Object lesson in rule number one: All guns are always loaded!” He grinned, as though they’d planned all along to have
Judy wave a loaded gun at us.

  Carrying a gun was only one component of the new lifestyle Dick and Judy wanted us to adopt. The world into which they had invited us required us to keep on our nightstand our gun, glasses, cell phone, and flashlight. If we didn’t like the idea of keeping an unsecured gun in the open, we could bolt to the wall beside the bed one of several available electronic safes that opened with a push-button code. “Every night before closing my eyes, I repeat the code aloud,” Dick said.

  “Make your house uninviting,” Judy said. “Put up good exterior lighting. Clear away shrubbery where someone could hide.”

  “But plant thorny bushes under the windows,” added Dick.

  I was conjuring an image of my house on a denuded lot, bathed in halogen light, with thornbushes bunched under every window like barbed wire, when Judy carried my imagination inside.

  “In your home you should know where your safe-fire zones are,” she said. “Figure out where you can stand and shoot without the bullet going outside or into the neighbor’s house.”

  “You men, if you sleep in the nude, might want to rethink that. Men aren’t comfortable fighting naked. It’s something to consider.”

  “Always expect the worst.”

  If there was a line here between preparing for something awful to happen and praying for something awful to happen, I was having a hard time finding it.

  But Dick and Judy left us with a piece of good advice: Concealed means concealed. You don’t show people your gun, you don’t tell people you’re carrying. If someone asks about it, you change the subject. “If someone goes to hug you,” Judy said, “make sure your arms are in the inside position so they don’t feel the hard lump on your hip. Guns make people react in unpredictable ways. If the wrong person learns you’re carrying a gun, he might whack you on the head to get it.” For the same reason, we were not to put up one of those PROTECTED BY SMITH & WESSON lawn signs or, on the car, the bumper sticker KEEP HONKING, I’M RELOADING. “A guy who sees one of those is likely to follow you to a parking lot,” Judy said, “and when you leave the car, smash the window to get your gun.”