by Dan Baum
Rick had never fired a gun, and he didn’t fire the Mossberg. It was a shotgun, after all. If he ever had to shoot, he’d be just steps away, and a shotgun would spray enough pellets to get the job done. He slid it under the bed and instructed his children in the protocol: That’s Daddy’s. Don’t touch.
They were sensible, as he’d been. He only had to tell them one time.
A grim advantage to living through Detroit’s economic collapse was that an unbelievable stream of antiques and collectibles became available as families’ fortunes imploded, and Martha seized the opportunity to start a business. She combed the paper for auctions and estate sales, snapped up treasures for pennies on the dollar, and resold them. Often, a family’s collapse was so quick and thorough that their belongings were simply left on the sidewalk. Rick and Martha spent a lot of weekends driving through hard-hit neighborhoods, finding Gustave wardrobes or Arts and Crafts bureaus given up to the rain. Neighborhoods were being abandoned at breathtaking speed to drug addicts and gangbangers; Rick and Martha were careful to be out by nightfall. Often, toughs eyeballed them from the corner as they poked through piles of belongings; Rick sometimes found himself wishing he had the Mossberg with him, or a handgun up under his clothes, but he pushed those thoughts aside. What would he do with a gun out here? Guns were the scourge of the city.
Besides, to get a carry permit, you had to give the state gun board a good reason. Antiques hunting wouldn’t qualify.
In 2000, so many people were dying from gunfire every week that when the legislature began considering whether to make Michigan a shall-issue state, like Florida, the debate pegged the needle on the city’s emotion meter. Democrats and Detroit’s black preachers inveighed against it; how could making guns easier to get possibly help? White suburban leaders made the Florida argument—that bad people had all the guns they wanted, and good people deserved the right to protect themselves.
Rick felt odd new feelings stir. At the giant Pentecostal Apostolic church that he and Martha now attended, he’d just answered an altar call and given his life to Jesus, wading into a vast pool with dozens of others to be immersed in the cleansing water. Rick knew that guns violated Jesus’s teachings to love one’s enemy as oneself, and he still felt that if black preachers and Democrats were against the shall-issue law, that was enough for him. At the same time, though, he’d been reading: All the while that Jesus was preaching love and forgiveness, he kept armed guards. Didn’t Scripture describe Peter slicing an ear off one of the Roman centurions who came to arrest the Lord? What did he use for that? A loaf of bread? A fish?
It was confusing. The nightly news showed hundreds of people lining up to get carry permits. A lot of them were black. A lot were probably Christians. Probably Democrats. People like him. But the process was taking eight months at least. It seemed like a bureaucratic nightmare. Rick let it slip from his mind.
Meanwhile, he had more serious worries; Martha was contemplating divorce. She and the kids had decamped to her mother’s house, across town. It was strange to wake up alone in the bed and to come home to an empty house after staring at a computer monitor all day. He hardly spoke a word to anyone some days, from sunup to sundown. The fat, fair era of a house flush with cash and alive with children was only a decade gone, but it felt like another lifetime. Rick’s affability was draining away. He found himself shouting at drivers who cut him off on the freeway.
One chilly evening in September 2006, he pulled into his detached garage, exited its side door to the backyard, and started tiredly across the lawn to the house. Behind him, someone spoke.
Rick turned; a young man stood at the end of the driveway, wearing a dark hoodie, holding a gun. “You know what this is,” he said.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Rick said. He thought of the shotgun under his bed, an impossible thirty feet and two doors away.
The young man made a motion with his chin, and another man, identically dressed, stepped from the shadows. They ordered Rick to sit on the gravel, hands on his head. One held the gun to Rick’s ear while the other went through his pockets, taking keys, wallet, and watch. Rick glanced up; the eyes of the man holding the gun looked dead. There was no way to read whether he intended to pull the trigger; it seemed it wouldn’t matter to him either way. Rick squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for a bullet to crash through his skull. When he opened them, the men were gone. Shaking, he hurried into the house.
He paced—kitchen, living room, dining room, kitchen—trying to unclench his heart. It wasn’t fear propelling him from room to room. It was rage. Not at the muggers—they were just knuckleheads. No, he was furious at himself, for putting off getting a carry permit and leaving it up to those thugs to decide whether he lived or died. If he’d had a gun, he’d have pulled it the minute he saw that boy at the end of the driveway.
Shot the motherfucker, is what he’d have done.
Rick’s experience at the Northwestern District Police Station the next day only deepened his conviction to get a gun. He sat on a bench for hours. “We’ll get to you when we get to you,” a sergeant grunted whenever Rick tried to speak. The detective who finally took the report—black, exhausted, steel-haired—scribbled notes morosely. He didn’t even pretend they’d follow up.
“This is an armed robbery,” Rick finally pointed out.
“I know what this is.”
“A serious crime, right?”
“One of many,” the old detective said. He looked up. “You know what? You speak really well.”
Rick had gotten the same bullshit at Chrysler: You speak really well for a black man was the subtext, as though an educated black man should be a rarity worth remarking on. That the detective was black only made it worse. “Well, thank you,” Rick said. “Let me ask you: What do I need to do to buy a handgun?”
The detective put down his pen. “You don’t want to do that.”
“Oh, yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t.” The old man fixed Rick with eyes so exhausted, they looked as though they’d been shellacked. “We got enough people running around with guns. You don’t want to be part of the problem.” He looked back down at his paperwork. “Leave it to the professionals.”
“To the professionals.”
“That’s right.”
“The police.”
“That’s right.”
“Where were you when I had that gun up to my head?”
“Sir …”
“Where were you when that nineteen-year-old punk-ass was making up his sweet mind whether to leave my babies fatherless?”
“Sir …”
“Acey-deucey, like, ‘Shoot him or no?’ ” Rick stood up, shaking with fury. “No, man, I’m serious. You can’t protect me.”
Rick spent a couple of days replacing the ATM card, credit cards, keys, and driver’s license the muggers had taken, and as he moved around the house he found himself hyperaware, checking doors, windows, and closets for intruders. Out on the street, his eyes never stopped moving, scanning alleys, doorways, and parked cars. He couldn’t stop thinking about those dead eyes, about how little his life meant to that thug. Martin Luther King’s peaceful pieties seemed just that now, while Malcolm X made more sense to him, elaborating the right and responsibility of every man to defend himself by whatever means necessary.
Rick added to his list of errands that week a stop downtown at 1300 Beaubien—Detroit Police Headquarters—to pick up the paperwork for a concealed pistol license. The lady behind the window told him it would take about three months, and that if he wanted to buy a gun before then to keep in the house, he’d need a “purchase permit.”
“How long does that take?”
“You take a seat on that bench, and I’ll run your record. If it comes up clean, I can issue it right here.”
“Let’s do that.”
An hour later, Rick was at Northwest Gun & Ammo Supply, on Grand River Avenue in suburban Redford, laying the paper on the counter. The clerk, a white guy about his age, s
at on a stool reading the Detroit News. “I want to buy a gun,” Rick said.
The clerk looked him up and down and made a face, vaguely annoyed. “What kind?”
Rick had no idea. His brother-in-law had mentioned owning something called a Smith & Wesson M&P, so Rick asked for one of those.
“You sound pretty sure.”
“I am. Smith & Wesson M&P.”
“I like the Glock.”
“Smith and Wesson M&P.” He wasn’t going to let this supercilious white dude dissuade him. He wanted his brother-in-law’s gun.
“What are you going to use it for?”
What do you think I’m going to use it for? he thought. Tennis? “I just got robbed. I’m getting a carry permit.”
The man’s face softened subtly. Rick seemed to have passed some kind of test. The man reached into a glass case full of guns—black ones and gray ones, big ones and little ones. He came out with one, gripped it in two hands as though to tear it in half. Clack-click! It stayed in one piece, but the whole top of it locked back, exposing the insides. He handed it to Rick. Rick had no idea what to think. His questions—How do you load it? What do I have to do besides pull the trigger? Does it kick?—got stuck in his throat, dammed up behind a wall of ignorance. All he said was, “Smith and Wesson M&P?”
“That’s it.”
“How much is it?”
“Five hundred and sixty-nine dollars.”
Rick’s chest thumped. He’d been expecting it to cost half that. He looked down, befuddled. The boxy black gun lay on the counter. It had all kinds of confusing buttons and levers. He picked it up gingerly. One thing was clear; it felt good in his hand. “Okay then.”
“Okay?”
“I’ll take it.”
He drove from Northwest Gun & Ammo straight to Target Sports, a shooting range he’d noticed among the fast-food joints and car washes on Woodward Avenue. The man behind the counter was young and white; the whole legitimate shooting world, it seemed, was white. Behind the man, through a Plexiglas wall, shooters were aiming handguns at targets. Rick could hear muffled pops. “I just bought this gun and want to shoot it,” he said.
The man laid a pair of what looked like stereo headphones on the counter. “Which target?” he asked. Rick took a step back. Pinned to the front of the counter were a dozen styles, including several man-shaped silhouettes and a photo of Osama bin Laden. Rick selected a silhouette. “Lane five,” the man said, draping a target over the counter for him and turning away.
“Uh, I was wondering if you could show me how to load this.”
The man turned and scowled.
He’s trying to make me feel stupid, Rick thought, like the guy at Northwest Gun & Ammo. But he kept his gaze steady, insistent; if he didn’t ask, how was he to learn?
Sighing, the young man took the gun from Rick’s hands and showed him how to press cartridges into the top of the magazine until it was full. “Put it in there,” he said, turning the gun over to show the slot in the grip, “and then do this.” He yanked back the slide and let it snap shut. “Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. Line up the front sight with the back sight and put them both on the target. And put your ears on before you open that door; it’s loud in there.”
The range smelled of hot metal. He settled himself in lane five, at a waist-high carpeted shelf that served both as a barrier to walking downrange and a place to rest the gun. Every time the man in lane four let loose, Rick jumped inside his clothes. Even with his hearing protectors on, the gunshots were unbelievably loud. He pinned a target to a clip hanging from a cable in front of him and pushed a toggle switch. The target zoomed along the cable and came to a stop twenty feet down the gloomy alley. He pressed cartridges into the magazine until no more would go. He rammed the magazine into the pistol and yanked back the slide. He realized he hadn’t drawn a breath in what seemed like several minutes, so he laid the pistol on the carpeted shelf, took a step back, and took several deep breaths of hot, smoky air. Then he stepped forward and picked up the pistol. It felt different loaded. Heavier, but also swollen, as if it were ready to burst. He wrapped his left hand around his right, like he’d seen in the movies, pointed the gun at the paper, and squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked, and he was conscious of a distant bang. A black dot appeared four inches to the right of the silhouette’s head. He put the pistol down. Whew …
He raised it again and fired off all the bullets. When he brought the target up on its pulley, he saw what a poor shot he was. The holes were all over the place. Only about half his shots had hit the silhouette.
He sent the target downrange again, reloaded, and kept firing. Each time he pulled the trigger, he felt a little of the stress of the past twenty-four hours leave his neck and shoulders. Each time he fired, he felt a little less angry, a little less helpless. By the time he’d shot all fifty of his bullets, he was hitting the silhouette every time.
I am a gunfighter now, he thought. I have a gun, and I know how to use it.
Rick asked me to meet him at a Starbucks on Woodward Avenue in Royal Oak, a few hundred yards north of the Detroit city limit and the Target Sports range where he’d first shot his gun. I was freshly in off the road, having arced across Iowa and Wisconsin after Nebraska. “That Starbucks is my office,” he said on the phone. Through the glass door of the Starbucks, I saw Rick before he saw me: a big man with bulging eyes and close-cropped hair perched at a tiny table, folders on his lap, cell phone cramped at his ear. He was typing on a big, old-fashioned Compaq laptop and pumping lots of energy into the phone conversation. Smiling widely and gesturing with his left hand, he radiated the desperation of a salesman whose client was slipping off the hook. He wore a loose-fitting, untucked, short-sleeved denim shirt—the kind I now thought of as a gun-guy shirt, easy to hide a pistol under. When he stood to shake hands, he saw my eyes go to his hip. “It’s there,” he said with a laugh. “Always.”
We talked for a while, then walked down the block to shoot. Target Sports was as stuffy and hot as any indoor range I’d been to. A notice on the wall assured us that ventilators were replacing the air every few minutes, but I could taste atomized lead on my tongue. Even wearing hearing protectors, the blasting in the other lanes made it hard to appreciate the Zen geometry of shooting. As for socializing, forget it.
Gun carriers differed on how the range experience—standing still in a lane, gun ready in hand—prepared a person for a gunfight, which would involve clawing out one’s gun in a panic and firing while dodging for cover. Rick agreed that running and gunning would be better practice, but he argued that any kind of practice handling a gun was valuable. “And any day shooting is a good day,” he said, with that wide salesman’s smile.
I was no longer wearing the Colt. Driving long days from Nebraska with that bulbous six-shot revolver against my back was like suffering a large, external kidney stone. So I’d bought a small Smith & Wesson .38 to keep in my right front pocket. Because it held only five shots, it was a little thinner than the Colt, and its aluminum frame made it light. But there were some trade-offs. It was so small that my pinkie dangled below the grip and so light that it stung my hand every time I shot it. Such is the defensive-gun dilemma. Any gun you’d want to have in a gunfight is unpleasant to carry and perhaps impossible to conceal, and a gun that’s easy to carry is of limited use in a gunfight. The difference between my gun and Rick’s said everything about the difference between Rick and me. Mine was all about carrying; I didn’t really think I’d ever need it. Rick had had a gun pressed to his head; he was all about the moment when he’d shoot back. So the bigger the gun he could lug around, the better.
After fifteen shots with my tiny revolver, my hand felt as if it had been beaten with a ball-peen hammer. Rick cocked an eyebrow at my gun and said it was better than going unarmed. By that he meant, just barely.
“I like capacity, capacity, capacity,” he said, sliding an
other sixteen-shot magazine into the Smith & Wesson M&P, banging them all off in one long staccato fusillade.
“But seriously, you don’t think you’re really going to get yourself into a sustained gunfight, right? I mean, you’ve read the stats; most gunfights are over in two shots.”
“Most are over in two shots, but what about the ones that aren’t?”
He let me shoot his gun, which filled my hand and pointed like a dream. I landed sixteen shots effortlessly in a three-inch group. But it was as charmless as it was efficient—a man-killer, with none of the history of my Colt or the jewelry elegance of my little Smith & Wesson. Concealing it would have meant dressing differently, and, as Henry David Thoreau said, beware any enterprise that requires new clothes.
Rick and I drove together into downtown Detroit, which looked at first as if it had been evacuated. Storefronts along Woodward Avenue were boarded up, and traffic was sparse. But the closer we got to the center, the more I picked up an edgy, offbeat energy that reminded me of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The worst had happened, and now anything was possible. Espresso shops filled old bank buildings, informal art galleries occupied what once had been Ford dealerships. The sidewalk crowds were about equal parts beaten-down, middle-aged, unemployed autoworkers and hip young artists in groovy eyewear. A kind of backhanded revival was under way, with six-bedroom Victorians going for $7,000, abandoned auto plants converting into free studio space, and urban farms tended by nonprofits sprouting on razed lots in old autoworker neighborhoods. Rick and I parked—no problem finding a spot—and he took me to the Lafayette to eat “Coney Islands”—mediocre hot dogs slathered with chili and fluorescent mustard. The minibus of a retirement community was parked out front, and the place was crowded with doddering white men in lemon-yellow pants being guided by strong young black men holding their elbows: a pretty surreal scene. The room was grimy and hot. It must have been a beloved landmark, because I couldn’t see any other reason for eating there.