by Dan Baum
Hunters are warned never to take loaded firearms in a car, but some are so familiar with their equipment—and so sure of their own abilities—that they write their own rules. One night on the way home, with Craig behind the wheel and his brother in back, the Stump sat up front, unloading a lever-action .348 Winchester, a giant of a gun popular in Alaska for killing bears. As he worked the lever to jack the shells free, his finger touched the trigger. The blast, encased in the car, was so loud that Craig’s ears swallowed it as a thick, high-pitched silence. By luck, the bullet missed Dad’s foot, the steering apparatus, and the brake lines, making a harmless hole in the floorboard. The car filled with the smell of burned cordite and the appalling realization that the Stump had screwed up. Nobody yelled, though, and nobody apologized. Craig muttered, “It’s okay. It didn’t hit the tire.” They drove on in silence and never discussed it again.
By the time I started hunting with Craig in Montana in the early 1990s, he was a carpenter and performance artist, gray-haired, broad-chested, and strong as Samson. He was more at home in the woods than anyone I’d ever known, with a natural command of their rich lexicon. We’d “work a drainage” to “jump up” an elk. He’d have me sit by a “swale,” stake out a “coulee,” or climb to a “park.” We’d separate for the morning, and when we met up, he’d draw in the dirt a map of everyplace he’d been. Being an Eagle Scout, he built hunting camps that looked like illustrations from Boy’s Life—the tents squared, with drainage ditches cut around them, a neat fire ring with grill and coffeepot atop, ample firewood in stacks segregated by size, and a hatchet planted in a stump at the regulation 45-degree angle.
What impressed me most when I started hunting with Craig was the solemnity that attended the harvest. Montana’s hunting regulations were published in a thick booklet that divided the state into more than a hundred tiny hunting districts, each with its own fussy rules about species, sex, weapon, the permissibility of vehicles, day of month, time of day, and antler points. Forms had to be filled out and boxes checked. A tiny mistake could invalidate the application. Getting a deer tag was as complicated and tedious as doing taxes, but the process imparted a message: Deer were a precious resource, to be managed with care.
Craig extended the ethic into the field. He taught me to stalk on tiptoe, “glass” animals through binoculars for their legal characteristics before placing a shot, and butcher with the exactitude of a surgeon so as not to waste a mouthful of meat. The hip thing to do in those days was to rub a little tobacco on the dead animal’s fur to thank its spirit for the offering. The whole exercise was wrapped in reverence.
For all of his love of hunting, Craig’s rifle was the most woebegone piece of shooting equipment I’d ever seen. It was an old bolt-action Savage .30-30, a low-end gun to begin with, and in miserable shape. A hose clamp held the rear sight to the barrel. The olive-green cloth strap of a Boy Scout canteen was tied on as a sling. He kept it clean and oiled, being an Eagle Scout, but he cared little for it.
He didn’t shoot it much, either. We’d go to the range before the season began, and he’d bang away a few times to make sure it was sighted in properly, but I never knew him to shoot for fun. He didn’t troll pawnshops with me in search of old guns. During hunting season, he rarely shot. Many years, he bagged no deer at all. He never seemed to care, though. What he liked was hunting—reading the woods, searching for signs, sensing where the animals might be feeding by how the snow fell and the wind blew, cooking and sleeping among the trees. When the season ended, he cleaned and oiled his rifle, put it in the basement, and didn’t think about it again until the following October. When I finally persuaded him to buy a new rifle, he made an odd choice: a lever-action .444 Marlin that shot a monstrous straight-walled, blunt-nosed cartridge. It was designed to hunt bear in dense woods, not deer in the kinds of fields and open forest where we hunted. Guns move people in mysterious ways. The Marlin was heavy, expensive to shoot, and terrible beyond a hundred yards. It did, however, recall the Stump’s big lever-action .348.
Craig was on my mind as I drove back to Boulder after the Arizona machine-gun shoot. Margaret and I were planning to canoe Utah’s Green River with Craig and his wife, Laura, in a few weeks, and I looked forward to being in a new kind of wilderness with the old Eagle Scout.
I tried telling friends in Boulder about the Wikieup machine-gun shoot, but few of them could get past their horror that people were allowed to own machine guns. I also wrote an article about it for Men’s Journal, one of the magazines owned by Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, and for the first time in my twenty-five-year career had an article killed for explicitly political reasons. The editor had quibbles with the piece as editors always do, but wouldn’t give me the chance to fix them. “I can’t even show this to Jann,” said the editor. “It’s not anti-gun enough.”
Not anti-gun enough? Machine gunners were a colorful male subculture that did nobody any harm. Why did an article about them have to be anti at all? I tried explaining to my editor that gun owners felt vilified by the media and that this was a good opportunity for Men’s Journal not only to run a story appealingly full of bang-bang and idiosyncratic characters but also to buy some goodwill from the 40 percent of American households that owned guns. He wouldn’t budge. Jann had his position on gun stories, he explained. Only one point of view was welcome.
I broke my “concealed means concealed” rule only once, and was instantly sorry. A few days after returning from Arizona, I went to hear a lecture at Naropa University, the Buddhist college in Boulder. Naturally, I had my gun under my jacket, and I later made the mistake of mentioning that to a friend. He went white with rage. “You wore a gun into a peace-building institution?” I might as well have told a Hasid that I’d smuggled a crucifix into his shul. Our relationship was strained for months.
I was looking forward to taking a break from the gun; I wasn’t planning to bring it on the canoe trip with Margaret, Laura, and Craig. Nor were we planning to take Rosa. She was deep in the swale of high school’s junior year and the dreary approach of college application essays. Also, she had recently gotten her driver’s license and was eager for a vacation from parental supervision. She was a responsible kid; we had no reason not to trust her. After heaping upon her the obligatory mountain of rules and admonitions, we kissed her on the forehead and ditched her for the desert.
The Green River was a thick chocolate brown, silty with winter runoff. The stretch we were floating had no rapids, and we could paddle or not as we saw fit. We spent many hours holding the canoes together by the gunwales, pinwheeling gently downriver, the scenery gliding past. No e-mail, no cell phones, no automobiles … nothing but river, sky, and the soughing of the breeze. By the middle of the third day we were floating through a Road Runner cartoon; walls of red rock three hundred feet high towered over us like great slabs of raw beef. We paddled close alongside and ran our fingers over their smooth scarlet faces, and when ravens flew by, the sound of their wings echoed off the rock like vorpal blades going snicker-snack.
We came upon a pair of newlyweds on a honeymoon float; they offered us leftover wedding canapés and slushy margaritas, so we lashed our canoes to their raft. Suddenly: a gunshot. A hundred yards ahead, a bullet splashed into the river. A second later came another shot and another splash. Firing at water is the act of a madman; there’s no telling where the bullet might ricochet. So much for being away from guns for a few days. We back-paddled, yelling.
“Hey! Hey!” Craig stood in his canoe and waved his arms.
The shooting stopped. The cliffs gave way to sagebrush flats, and we could see men standing beside a jeep that had big lights mounted on the roll bar. For a minute I thought they were cops or rangers, but they were only off-road motorheads who’d bounced into the canyon on a rutted trail. We stopped back-paddling. There was no alternative but to drift past them. Two of them, young and tattooed, in sleeveless shirts, ball caps on backward, eyeballs swimming in beer, seemed the type who showed up in YouTube
videos, drunkenly firing at propane tanks. The other two, in golf caps and camouflage pants, could have been their fathers. I addressed myself to the oldest, who had steel-gray hair and a big hard belly. “Please don’t shoot at the water!” I yelled. “Those bullets can bounce anywhere!”
“We weren’t shooting at the water,” he called back. “We were shooting at those cliffs up there!” He pointed across the river at a magnificent thousand-foot tower of red rock. I was shocked into silence. Laura—accustomed, from living in Montana, to the antics of armed chowderheads—turned away discreetly and guffawed into her hand. They’d shot at the rock, and the bullet had bounced back to hit the water thirty feet in front of them. Instead of absorbing the wee physics lesson, they’d shot at the rock again. How long would they have kept it up if we hadn’t floated by? Until one of them ended up in the emergency room, probably. It was like watching someone try to win a Darwin Award.
Calling a man a fucking idiot when he’s holding a gun a million miles from civilization is unwise, so I requested merely that they hold fire until we’d rounded the bend. They agreed, and sure enough, as they dropped out of sight behind us, we could hear the shooting start up.
“You see what I’m talking about?” Margaret said. “A gun is not like a knife or a golf club. You can project idiocy a long ways with a gun.”
I couldn’t disagree. My sporting enjoyment over here could sever your aorta way over there. Most gun guys were careful, but chuckleheads had Second Amendment rights, too. We dropped the subject. By the time we reached our Mineral Springs takeout, two days later, we’d all but forgotten the incident. We were sunburned, sweaty, and relaxed down to the cellular level.
As we pulled into Green River in Craig’s pickup, we came under cell-phone coverage, and my phone beeped. Twenty-one messages. First thought: Rosa.
Rosa was fine. Brandon Franklin was dead.
* * *
* Not a universally held view, of course: Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein made himself famous in 2007 by saying in a speech, “We ought to ban hunting now, if there isn’t a purpose other than sport and fun. That should be against the law. It’s time now.” The remark, along with his assertion that animals should have standing to sue in U.S. courts, almost cost him his Senate confirmation as President Obama’s regulatory czar.
6. FLICKED OFF
I like shooting them, Judge. I don’t know why. I feel good when I’m shooting them. I feel awful good inside. Like I’m somebody.
—Bart Teare, played by fourteen-year-old
Rusty Tamblyn in Gun Crazy, 1949
We’d met Brandon in February of 2007, eighteen months after Hurricane Katrina, in the band room of O. Perry Walker high school, in New Orleans. It was in some ways the city’s darkest moment since the storm. Whole neighborhoods were still dark and muddy. Barely a quarter of the inhabitants had returned. Nobody was sure the city would even survive. And New Orleans had long since dropped out of the news. The initial excitement was over, and the long slog was under way. I was in town to write about the recovery for The New Yorker.
Fully a quarter of O. Perry Walker’s kids were living on their own, bunking together in FEMA trailers or abandoned buildings. Their parents, if they had any, had been unwilling or unable to return, and an atmosphere of emergency pervaded the school. That day, though, the band room—grimy, windowless, and stuffy—was a maelstrom of excited teenagers honking their horns into tune, searching for their caps, playing grab-ass. They were getting ready for the highest-profile performance of their young careers—a march down St. Charles Avenue in a nighttime Mardi Gras parade.
The band director, Wilbert Rawlins Jr., an enormous chocolate-brown man, pulled over a broad and stolid boy named Joshua, a baritone player with a face that never changed expression. “This man walked out of the Lower Ninth Ward all by himself, water up to here, with nothing but his mouthpiece in his pocket.” He massaged Joshua’s chest with a big hand. “Heart, you hear me? This boy has heart.” He released Joshua, grabbed a wispy, light-skinned boy, and pulled up the boy’s sleeve to reveal a pocked scar. “Tell Mr. Baum what happened.” The boy looked uncertain. “Go ahead,” Wilbert said.
“I got shot.”
“Tell him who shot you.”
“My dad.”
“Who else did he shoot?”
“My mom and my sister.”
Wilbert let him go, and he drifted off. “You see?” Wilbert said. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
Wilbert told us that he would never put a kid out of band, no matter how bad the kid’s behavior. Years before, when he was teaching at another school, he’d had a kid who was so disruptive during practice that he’d had no choice but to throw him out—and a week later the child was dead, shot down on the street after school. “During band practice!” Wilbert said with stunned, breathy wonder in his voice. “We were in the band room when he got shot! If I hadn’t put him out, he’d have been there with us!”
The band-room door opened and a handsome young man loped in, swinging his shoulders in that gangster-casual figure-eight. Into my head leapt the word: “trouble.” He swaggered through the swirl of teenagers toward the front of the room, and I worried that an attitude like his might infect the band. But it was all an act. He stopped, turned, and raised his right arm, and the room fell silent. “Yo,” he grunted, and horns snapped, in unison, to lips. He pulsed his arm in time, pulling the band through its scales. “That’s a little bit flat. Leviticus, that’s you,” he said above the racket to a tall boy with a trombone. “Sit up,” he said. “Put a little bit into it.” They shifted in their seats, sitting straighter. The next round of scales sounded loud and crisp.
“Brandon Franklin,” Wilbert told me. “I’ve had him since seventh grade. Excellent saxophone player. But more than that, he’s got something.” He was Wilbert’s drum major, which involved a lot more than wearing a big furry hat and waving a baton at the head of a parade. The drum major was essentially a band’s equivalent of a master sergeant. Far from being a troublemaker, Brandon held the band together for Wilbert.
Margaret and I invited him to lunch. “Anywhere you want to go,” we said, and he chose Popeyes Chicken. Over a pile of dusty popcorn shrimp, he told a story as woebegone as they came: the Desire Project, divorced and indifferent parents, an older sister dead already, constant moving from one dilapidated rental to another. What he really wanted in life was to be a high school band director like Wilbert. “But I got a baby on the way and stuff,” he said. “I got to work. I got to provide. I might go to welding school. That’s where the money at.”
We were clearing away the paper residue of lunch and heading for the door when Brandon, behind me, said something so softly that I missed it. I turned and said, “What?”
“I like to be listened to,” he said, looking at the floor. “That’s all I need: a little attention.”
He managed not only to graduate—we watched him do backflips across the stage to receive his diploma—but to get himself accepted into the band program at Texas College. (“Brandon Franklin is not going to be no welder,” Wilbert told us proudly.) But being that far from home, with a baby—and then another—was too hard, and he eventually dropped out. Wilbert turned Brandon’s homecoming into an opportunity, making him an assistant band director, putting him up in the guest room of the house that Wilbert and his wife, Belinda, had rebuilt after the storm, and inducting him into the wildly competitive domino games that were Wilbert’s recreation. When you beat a fellow at dominos in Wilbert’s crowd, you got to stick a Band-Aid on him as a mark of defeat, and Brandon often had the pleasure of doing so to Wilbert. “That boy has become Wil’s son,” Belinda told me more than once. “Actually, it’s more like he’s become Wil—a younger version of his own self.”
A lot of those twenty-one voice mails waiting for me in Green River were from Belinda. In the first one, she was crying so hard I could barely make out the message that Brandon was dead; she’d just seen the news on television as she dre
ssed for work. “Wilbert is still asleep,” she sobbed. “I don’t know how to wake him. I don’t know what he’ll do.”
Brandon’s killing was one of those unspeakably stupid incidents that show up in FBI homicide statistics as “other”: The mother of his children squabbled with her new boyfriend, and when he stormed out, she called Brandon to come over and change her locks. The boyfriend returned with a gun and, finding Brandon, shot him dead—New Orleans’s eightieth murder that year, and it was only May.
The shooter’s name was Ronald Simms; he turned himself in to police that night. He was no gangbanger, but rather seemed to be a decent, hardworking guy who for reasons unknown had spun momentarily out of control. Where had he gotten the gun? Nobody knew. Truth is, nobody seemed to be asking that question, either at the funeral or in the voluminous comments about the shooting posted online. Everybody seemed to assume that if a young man wanted a gun in New Orleans, plenty were available. He could have borrowed it from a friend. He could have bought it out of the trunk of a car in a back alley.
Or he might have paid retail for it, with a credit card, in a brightly lit suburban gun store. New Orleans had no gun shops within its city limits, but several lay in the outlying parishes. Gun laws were loose in Louisiana; stores had to follow federal laws about performing background checks and not selling handguns to people under twenty-one, but no further restrictions applied. Simms was twenty-two and had no criminal record. It’s possible that he’d stopped at a store on his way to his girlfriend’s house, waited fifteen minutes for his background check, and continued on his merry way to do the killing.