by Dan Baum
As we were getting ready to pack up at the end of class, Dick handed around a card with what I first took to be a Transportation Security Administration threat assessment. It was, in fact, a way of thinking about readiness when carrying a gun. Condition White was total ignorance of one’s surroundings on the street—sleeping, being drunk or stoned, losing oneself in conversation or—the ultimate in modern oblivion—texting while listening to an iPod. Condition Yellow was being aware of, and taking an interest in, one’s surroundings. This was akin to the mental state we were encouraged to achieve while driving: keeping our eyes moving, checking the mirrors, being careful not to let the radio drown out the sounds around us. Condition Orange was awareness of a possible threat. Condition Red was responding to one.
“You should be in Condition Yellow whenever you’re on the street, whether armed or not,” Dick said, “but especially if you are wearing your gun. When you’re in Condition White, you’re a victim. You’re a sheep.”
The role Dick wanted us to play when out in public was that of “sheepdog”—alert, on guard, not aggressive but prepared to do battle on behalf of the defenseless. A handout from the American Tactical Shooting Association noted that the only time to be in Condition White was “when in your own home, with the doors locked, the alarm system on, and your dog at your feet.… The instant you leave your home, you escalate one level, to Condition Yellow.” The instant? Really? Like if I’m riding to the store in the morning for the paper and a carton of milk? Or on my way to a PTA meeting in the middle of the afternoon? And what’s this about alarms?
It turned out I was the kind of person who was contributing to a dangerous softening of society. Just as the Red Cross would have liked everybody to be qualified in cardiopulmonary resuscitation, gun carriers wanted everybody prepared to confront violence—not only by being armed but by maintaining Condition Yellow. “I believe that in my afterlife I will be judged,” Dick said solemnly. “Part of the judgment will be: Did this guy look after himself? It’s a minimum responsibility.”
I submitted my certificate of instruction to Sheriff Pelle, allowed a deputy to take my fingerprints, and settled in for a wait that could last, under Colorado law, as long as ninety days. “Due to the high volume of concealed-carry-license applications,” a recording on the sheriff’s phone line said, “do not expect your license before ninety days and do not call this office to inquire.” In Boulder!
While waiting for the permit, I went shopping for a holster in which to carry the Detective Special. Colt stopped making my particular model in 1972, so a holster wasn’t something I could order from Amazon. I figured I’d find heaps of old holsters at the monthly Tanner Gun Show, at the Denver Merchandise Mart, and drove down one snowy Saturday to rummage the offerings.
I never got inside. As I approached the desk to pay my entry fee, a young woman handed me a piece of paper and said, “Concealed-carry class beginning right now!” I looked at the paper. A company called Equip 2 Conceal was offering a class right here at the gun show that would qualify pupils to get a Colorado concealed-carry permit—in three hours. This I had to see.
She directed me across the parking lot to the Aspen Room of the Comfort Inn, where tables had been lined up classroom style and a dozen people sat filling out forms. “Before we begin, I’ll tell you right off that I’m an NRA recruiter,” said a dark-haired young man named Rob, in an Equip 2 Conceal golf shirt. “My job is to get as many people into the NRA as possible, because we really need it now. They’re doing a lot of things to protect our rights.” He motioned to a pretty young woman in a company shirt, who put a membership form in front of me.
Rob used the first hour to run through the “This is the trigger, this is the muzzle” drill. What he really wanted to talk about, though, was something he called “home invasion”—people coming into your home not to steal things but for the sheer maniacal pleasure of torturing you to death. “They”—white guys in ski masks and chinos, presumably—“have been watching what time you come home, what time do you get up to go to the bathroom. They know where your bedroom is, and they’re there to kill you. Make sure you have your gun loaded. I live alone, and I always have my gun near me. I carry 24/7. I’m ready.”
The Aspen Room had Wi-Fi. By going to several websites and juxtaposing numbers, it took me about ninety seconds, while Rob was talking, to discover that Rob wasn’t entirely paranoid. Robberies in peoples’ homes had increased by almost half from 2004 to 2008—one of the few crime stats that was growing worse. Seventy-two thousand American households had been struck, or about one in sixteen hundred. On the other hand, only eighty-seven Americans had been murdered in such incidents in 2008. I was literally more likely to be struck by lightning.
The young woman was passing out another set of forms. “In addition to your Colorado permit, you can get a nonresident carry permit in the state of Florida,” Rob said. “That’s right: Florida will issue you a carry permit even though you don’t live there. Why do you want one? For one thing, three states—Washington, Virginia, and West Virginia—honor a Florida permit but not your Colorado permit. So that’s three extra states where you can exercise your constitutional rights. Second, let’s say you lose your Colorado permit. You couldn’t carry here, because Colorado doesn’t recognize a nonresident Florida permit, but you’d still be able to carry in thirty states.”
The only reason I would “lose” a Colorado permit would be if, say, I committed a violent felony or beat up Margaret and had a restraining order placed on me. Florida was willing, even then, to step in and allow me to continue to carry a gun.
For the live-fire portion of the class, we got into our own cars and followed Rob across metro Denver—thirty minutes of our three hours—to a grimy shooting range in a shopping center. Five of the six lanes were taken up by young black guys teaching their girlfriends to shoot, with lots of whooping and laughing amid deafening blasts of nine-millimeters and .45s. My classmates and I filed to the sixth lane and, one by one, snapped off twenty shots from a long-barreled .22 target pistol. As preparation for defending ourselves with a gun, it was about as useful as learning to cook an omelet. We emerged, heads ringing from the concussions of the nine-millimeters and .45s, and Rob was there to hand us a certificate, xeroxed onto faux parchment.
“You can’t possibly believe this class has prepared me to carry a gun,” I said.
“This class has met the legal requirement to carry a gun,” he said. “There’s a difference. I strongly recommend more training.”
The shooting portions of the classes had reminded me why I rarely took my guns to the range. I hated the noise. So, in for a penny, in for a pound: As long as I was going to carry a gun, I decided to look into getting a silencer for it.
The first silencer I ever saw was the one Oddjob used to dispatch Solo—before having him crushed inside a Lincoln Continental—in Goldfinger. I was eight years old. The elegance of that long tube protruding from the muzzle of the pistol, and the deep thud the shot made, moved me the way the first slick-click of Hank Hilliard’s Mossberg .22 rifle had. For years I saw silencers in every cylindrical object I found—toilet paper rolls, Magic Markers, apple corers—and affixed them to every toy gun I had. I know how that sounds, but to paraphrase Freud: Sometimes a silencer is just a silencer. When it was time to put away childish things, I tried making real ones by duct-taping two-liter soda bottles over the muzzle of a .22 pistol. They worked, sort of. A crude silencer is naught but a chamber in which exploding gases depressurize before escaping. In a commercial silencer, baffles—which look like a stack of washers separated by tiny spaces—tamp the sound even more. My homemade ones were nowhere near as cool as screw-on silencers. They made it impossible to aim and often flew off with the first shot. But they did give the gun more of a snap sound than a reverberating bang.
They were also felonious. The first federal gun law, in 1934, required people who wanted a silencer to apply for a permit, submit to a background check, and pay a two-hundred-doll
ar federal tax—big money at a time when the average farmworker earned less than a dollar an hour. The same rules applied to machine guns and sawed-off shotguns, which, when Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker, and the Barrow Gang were tearing up the country, were the era’s weapons of mass destruction. Silencers got thrown into the law not because they were gangster weapons but because, in the depths of the Depression, people were using them to poach wildlife. For me to make a silencer without paying the tax was like applying to go to federal prison.
By the time I was in the market for a real silencer, two hundred dollars and a bit of paperwork made applying for the permit little more onerous than applying for a passport. In the decade since 2000, the number of permit applications had grown sixfold. Silencers were becoming so popular that the National Shooting Sports Foundation—the gun industry’s trade association—sent a flyer to its retailer members alerting them to this growth opportunity.
When I told my friends I was in the process of getting a silencer, they were appalled. “You can buy silencers?” “Why does anybody need a silencer?” “An assassination weapon?” It turned out to be a very American attitude; in Europe, it was hard to get a license for a gun, but in most countries you could buy a silencer over the counter. In some, you were required to do so. Europe was crowded—who wanted to listen to gunfire?
“We in Finland have no legislation which regulate or ban the use of silencers, not the hunting legislation, not the firearms legislation,” wrote Klaus Ekman, of Finland’s Hunters’ Central Organization. “But you have to remember that before you can buy a gun in Finland, you have to explain to the police the purpose you are buying the gun.”
Peter Jackson, a designer and manufacturer of silencers in Scotland, sent me what amounted to a scholarly treatise on European silencer law, which included the remarkable news that silencers were completely unregulated in France; that silencers for shotguns and air rifles could be sold freely through the mail in the United Kingdom (I hadn’t known that shotgun silencers existed); that rifle silencers were available in Britain with minimal paperwork; and that Article 5 of Directive 2003/10/EC, a European Union law, required silencers to be issued to anyone, such as a gamekeeper, who used a gun at work. “Although this obligation only applies to the employers of people who are ‘at work,’ ” Jackson wrote, “it is a fair bet that our courts would award heavy damages against any official who denied a recreational hunter the protection against exposure to noise which is mandatory for a professional.” He also reminded me that silencers protect the sensitive ears of hunting dogs, who cannot wear earmuffs like their human masters can—a very British concern.
“The great majority of the people get their image of firearms silencers from those special agent movies,” he wrote. “That is why people resist using silencers on firearms. If I knew only the movie image of silencers, I would resist them, too.”
The agency that issued the permits in the United States was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives—the ATF. I called to ask whether the ATF disagreed with the Europeans—whether they believed that silencers were a public safety risk.
“If the police find a body with a hole in it, they can’t tell if a silencer was used,” said the official in the appropriate department to whom I was passed, who asked that I not identify him. But, he added, “If we thought there was a problem, we’d do something about it. And we don’t.”
The first step in getting a silencer was to find a “Class III dealer”—someone specially licensed to sell weapons covered under the 1934 law. That led me to the most enthusiastic gun guy I’d ever met: Oliver Mazurkiewicz.
His shop was hard to find. It had no sign out front. MapQuest took me to a locked, smoked-glass door in a Longmont, Colorado, office park, next to something called White Rose Herbals. I buzzed, and a grim-faced man opened the door six inches and peered out at me suspiciously.
“I’m here to see Oliver,” I said, and he opened just enough to let me in, then relocked. It was like entering a speakeasy. “I’m here to buy a silencer,” I said.
“He’ll be back soon.”
I looked around and understood the security precautions. We were standing in a small, windowless showroom that looked like a set from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. On the walls hung the most terrifying collection of battle weapons I’d ever seen: twenty-five or so black or desert-tan AR-15s crusted with scopes and lasers, each with a big tubular silencer screwed to its muzzle. I took one of the rifles from the wall, noticing its full/semi switch. It was a machine gun—a silenced, scoped, fully automatic weapon.
“You military contractors?” I asked the sour-faced man.
“Not yet. Hope to be.”
“So who buys these?”
“Who doesn’t?” He went back to a workshop where two other guys were working on guns at a long bench.
I sighted through the machine gun’s big scope out the smoked-glass door. A ladder on a rooftop two blocks away shimmered on the bridge of my nose; I could have hit a fly crawling on it. The door flew open, and a broad-shouldered, sandy-haired man burst through, his face filling the scope.
“Whoa!” he said with a laugh, looking down the barrel. “You Dan?”
I hung the rifle back on the wall. Oliver was a burly man in his early forties, with a handsome Slavic face and a handshake like Oddjob’s car crusher. “That’s a two-stamp gun,” he said, pointing at the rifle with two index fingers. “You need one federal stamp for the machine gun and one for the silencer. I’ll sell it to you right now for fifty-six hundred, which is an incredible deal.”
He started doing many things at once—checking his computer, making phone calls, fixing the printer, rummaging through paper files, and unpacking two guns from holsters concealed in his waistband: a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum and a compact .40-caliber Glock. While talking on the phone, he handed me a small cardboard box in which I found a black anodized tube about six inches long, with TEC-65 and a serial number etched on the side. As he kept up his manic phone call, he took my credit card and ran it for $325—$250 for the silencer and a $75 “transfer fee.” With the phone clamped between his ear and his shoulder, he carried what was now my silencer into the workshop and locked it in a huge gun safe. I wouldn’t see it again for three months. The same time limit applied to background checks for the silencer as for the concealed-carry permit; I’d get them at about the same time. Oliver ended his call and addressed himself to me. “Sorry. It’s just nuts!”
“Silencers?”
“Silencers, guns, everything!”
“How’d you get into this?”
“My mother grew up in Germany during the war and hates guns,” he said. “She wouldn’t let me have a squirt gun, wouldn’t let me have a rubber-band gun. Wouldn’t let me point my finger and go ‘Bang.’ Well, Mom?” He gestured at the firepower surrounding us on the walls. “Look what you did.”
“And the silencers?”
“The majority of my customers are like you.” He swung both arms back, up and over, to point two index fingers at my nose. “They want a silencer because it’s such a taboo. But then they discover that it makes sense to quiet it all down. You try to teach a kid to shoot, and if he’s wearing hearing protectors, you have to yell so he can hear you. Kids get tired of people yelling at them! They tune them out! Silence the gun, you don’t have that problem.
“I won’t shoot without a silencer anymore,” he continued. “Why should I? Why put up with the noise when you don’t have to? Most guys don’t start out thinking that way. They start out thinking just, It’s cool. It’s James Bond. You can fault Hollywood for that. You want to hear what it’s going to sound like?”
He scurried into the back room and came out with a scoped .22-caliber rifle that had a six-inch cylinder screwed onto the barrel. We walked across the parking lot to where a plow had pushed a big pile of dirty snow. Oliver worked the bolt, pointed the rifle into the snowbank, and pulled the trigger. The gun made a faint phut—much like in the mo
vies—and a handful of snow leapt from the pile.
“Is that cool or what?” he asked as we walked back inside. Only .22-caliber silencers, like the one I was buying, are as quiet as Hollywood silencers, he said. A nine-millimeter or .45—to say nothing of a full-size hunting rifle—makes a pretty loud pop, though still a lot less than an unsilenced gun. And then there’s the issue of the bullet’s speed. A silencer only reduces the bang of powder exploding. Most bullets, .22s included, travel faster than sound and make a distinctive crack. That can be eliminated only by using subsonic ammunition, as Oliver had used in his demo.
“Where do you get that?”
“Everywhere. I need to see your driver’s license.” He copied down the information, signed and stamped the form, and handed me a sheaf of papers.
“Go over to Kinko’s and get two passport pictures taken. Take them and these papers to your sheriff and get fingerprinted. You also need him to sign off; he has to give his permission.” He rolled his eyes theatrically. “When you get the papers back from him, you send everything to the ATF with a two-hundred-dollar check. It’s all bullshit, but it makes us rich.”
“Then what?”
“Then you wait. Probably the full three months. The paperwork will come back to me. I’ll call you, and you can come pick up your silencer.”
His phone started ringing, and he reached for it with his left hand. At the same time, he extended his right to me to shake, flicked his eyebrows, and smiled wickedly. “Welcome to the dark side.”