Gun Guys

by Dan Baum

  A surly waiter plopped our plates before us, and I told Rick that he sounded like the cliché conservative—a liberal who’d been mugged. He didn’t deny it. “Until I got robbed, I was a cog in the machine. I’ve seen the light now. The anti-gun people, they’ve been brainwashed. For me, getting a gun was like being born again.”

  When Rick left Target Sports that first day in 2006, he said, every cell in his body was quivering, fully in Condition Yellow. He had capabilities. Never again would he place his life in the hands of an evil stranger or be a victim. The course he took to get his concealed-carry license was as awful as mine had been; his instructor never even mentioned the laws that govern shooting an attacker. So Rick decided to become an instructor himself. He wanted to do it right and, in so doing, spread the gospel of armed self-defense. He sweated through the forty-hour NRA class to get his instructor’s license, becoming a voracious student of the techniques, equipment, ballistics, and legalities of defending oneself with a firearm. He heard about something called the Gun Rights Policy Conference and drove five hours to Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, to attend. When he walked in, every face swiveled toward him, and every face was white.

  “I’ve thought about that a lot,” he said. “The gun-rights movement is very white, very Christian, and they don’t do a lot of outreach to the black community. There’s a lot of those people who don’t want me, as a black man, to have a gun.” He took a big bite of a Coney Island and laughed around it. “But hey, that’s true of the NAACP, too!”

  It wasn’t only the NAACP. Every mainstream African American organization and public figure, from Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition to Al Sharpton to the National Urban League, was solidly in favor of ever-stricter gun control. Black America was perhaps the nation’s strongest and most unanimous constituency for tougher gun laws. Even Bobby Rush, who’d gotten his political start as a Black Panther advocating “offensive violence against the power structure,” was now, as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, an advocate of more restrictive gun laws.

  “I look at Bobby Rush and really have a problem,” Rick said, reaching for a napkin to scrape a dab of mustard off his shirt. “Pushing that anti-gun agenda; I have no idea what he’s thinking. All I know is there are members of our community pushing a cycle of dependency. If you’re unarmed and on social welfare, then you’re a slave. You’re letting the government tell you how to live. I thought what we were fighting for all those years was to get people to stop telling us how to live!”

  He balled up his napkin and threw it down onto the table. “There’s a disconnect politically in the black community. We have been brainwashed into believing that guns are evil, and we continue to vote for candidates who are anti-gun. But gun-control laws got their start from pure racism. Read the history! The first gun laws were against recently freed slaves!”

  It struck Rick as the worst kind of ahistorical self-hatred for blacks to deny themselves guns or agitate to make guns harder to get. The early denial of citizenship and the pattern of violence against African Americans made it a no-brainer. “For me, guns are key,” he said. “You can’t be considered a free man if you can’t own a handgun. You are a slave. It’s no coincidence that gun control is strictest where people of color live.” To own a gun, and especially to carry one, he said, was ever a mark of full American citizenship.

  I slid the chili off my hot dog. “It’s easy to understand, though, why blacks who live in violent neighborhoods would want fewer guns around,” I said. “They don’t feel safe.”

  “Being free has nothing to do with being safe,” Rick said impatiently. “You want to live in a completely safe society? Go to North Korea. Malcolm X was more right about this than Martin Luther King. Freedom is not something that someone can give you. If you’re a man, you take it.” Inner-city Detroit was about as far as I could get from Phoenix without going through customs, but I could hear Nick Dranias at the Goldwater Institute making the same argument: that in a country as big, diverse, and free as ours, a certain amount of bad shit is bound to happen, and trying to engineer away all of it would do more harm than good.

  What was unsafe, Rick said, given the violence whites had visited upon blacks, was for blacks to walk around unarmed in majority-white America. “I hear the pacifists say that real power doesn’t need guns, that we should all do the Martin Luther King thing. But listen: King was successful in part because Malcolm X was waiting in the wings.”

  Rick’s marriage to Martha ended in the spring of 2007, around the time he started augmenting his IT salary with a job as a firearms instructor. He managed to position himself as a Cadillac in a lot full of Edsels, charging $150 for a concealed-pistol class instead of the customary $90. He used a defense attorney instead of a police officer to teach the section on self-defense law. “I don’t want a cop telling civilians what to do. A cop’s job is to put you in damn jail.” He began blogging, tweeting, and sending out a monthly newsletter, evangelizing—especially to African Americans—the gospel of self-defense.

  On May 17, 2008, an e-mail appeared on his screen in the office at Chrysler, calling him and sixty of his co-workers to a mandatory meeting in the break room. Chrysler’s chief technical officer walked in and announced, without preamble, “Bad news.”

  Chrysler was outsourcing its IT department.

  Five years from when he would have retired on a Chrysler pension, Rick found himself working for an outfit he’d never heard of, doing the exact same job at the exact same terminal but for 20 percent less money and no benefits. He sold the Tudor house and moved to an apartment. “My marriage and Chrysler: That was my first life,” Rick said as we headed back from the Lafayette to his car. “Divorced, outsourced, and a gun-rights activist: That’s my second life.”

  A snarling purple Dodge Charger, jacked up in back and squirting black exhaust, cut us off at the corner of McNichols Road. Rick touched his brake and dropped back. “See that? My mind-set has changed,” he said lightly. “Before I started carrying, I might lean on the horn if someone cut me off. I don’t do that anymore, because if I lean on the horn and he gets pissed off and we stop and there’s an altercation? It can go anywhere, and it would be, I shot someone because he cut me off on Woodward Avenue. I can’t get mad if someone mean-mugs me. I don’t have the luxury of fighting over a parking space at the mall. I tell students in my class that a concealed-pistol license is not a 007 license. It is a tool of last resort.”

  I walked him inside the Starbucks, where he nestled into a tiny table and unpacked his laptop and files. I looked back as I went out the door. He was performing into the phone again, balancing papers on his knees. All I could think was: Damn. Rick Ector once had a career with benefits and a pension, a Tudor house, a wife and four happy children. Now all he had was his gun and a scaffold of logic built around self-defense and self-reliance, black pride and American manhood. Standing in the exhaust-stinking humidity of Woodward Avenue, with the whole rusted skeleton of Detroit rattling around me, it looked like the shittiest imaginable comedown.

  But something kept me standing there a moment longer, peering through the glass. Rick had lost everything, true, but so had a lot of people in Detroit—and elsewhere. Rick at least had his gun and the self-affirming philosophy, however brittle, of Homo armatum. If I didn’t share it, maybe it was because I didn’t live where he did, and hadn’t had a gun pressed to my head. Rick had found a calling that returned some dignity and meaning to his life. And it wasn’t likely to come to bad. Plenty of people couldn’t be trusted with concealed weapons, but Rick Ector wasn’t one of them. He knew his gun well, treated it with respect, and understood the law regarding its use. He wasn’t likely to do anything mean or stupid with his pistol, and neither, in all probability, were the people who had been background-checked by the state of Michigan and were paying a premium to learn from him how to handle their guns. If they derived comfort and a sense of purpose from their concealed handguns, who was I to complain? They were probably making the city a l
ittle safer.

  Rick did remind me, though, of arguments I’d had with missionaries while living in Africa in the 1980s, about the role of Jesus in Africans’ lives. The poor needed the promise of a heavenly afterlife to endure their misery on earth, they’d say, and I’d argue that if the poor weren’t so focused on the next life, they might organize to make this one more just and enjoyable. Perhaps Rick’s gun was the same kind of consolation prize for a life radically pared down. If he hadn’t had the comfort of a Smith & Wesson M&P’s weight on his hip, he might have been working with his neighbors to better regulate the industries that had stolen his future and to make American society more equitable.

  But then again, maybe not. Americans, whether armed or not, were still looking everywhere but at social class when parsing the texture of their lives. It wasn’t so much that stressed-out blue-collar folks were clinging bitterly to their guns and religion, as Barack Obama had posited while running for president. It was more that guns and religion were keeping them from feeling bitter about the indignities inflicted on the middle class. From the ruins of the Motor City, that seemed worse.

  10. IT’S NOT GOING TO BITE

  I’m going to say what a blogger can and a politician can’t. Guns suck. Guns are bad. I hate guns.

  —Huffington Post blogger Mark Olmsted in a January 2, 2011, column titled “Recoil: A Sane Reaction to Guns”

  Almost five hundred miles lay between Detroit and Bowling Green, Kentucky, and I was due there in two days to watch an unusual gun competition. It would be a fast dash through southern Michigan, Ohio, and Kentucky. Still, I was determined to stop at any open gun store I could find. So many seemed to be closed that it was becoming something of a personal challenge to find one that was up and running.

  I made a rule for myself: not to be drawn into political discussions. The dose of gun-guy rage I’d endured at the Grand Island gun show would last me a while. Surely there was more to the attraction of firearms than resentment.

  On the edge of Cincinnati, I discovered a really great gun store called Target World, which had a huge selection of both new and used guns and its own range to let customers sample the wares before buying them. The AR-15, in all its black plastic variants, crowded out the wooden guns here, as it had almost everyplace else, but I found an unusual pistol from the 1980s that I’d always wanted to handle: the Heckler & Koch P7, which wasn’t cocked until the shooter’s hand wrapped around the grip. I asked the young man behind the counter, who wore a name tag with “Todd” on it, if he would hand it to me.

  I wasn’t wearing either of my revolvers. Ohio did not recognize my Colorado permit, so for the first time on this trip I was unarmed. Not that Todd cared either way; very few customers were in the store, and he seemed glad to have someone to talk to. Neither did it matter to him that, not being an Ohio resident, I couldn’t legally buy the pistol. Showing off an unusual gun to an interested gun guy was the pleasure of the job.

  Beside me at the counter stood an impressively fit father in his sixties with a young-adult daughter. She was plump, with a bouffant and fuchsia stretch pants. I eavesdropped; the daughter, a schoolteacher, had just moved into her first house. They were at Target World to pick out a gun for her to keep at home. They laughed a lot as they looked over various revolvers and semi-automatics. They were having a ball and seemed as comfortable equipping the house with a gun as they might have been choosing a microwave oven.

  On the other side of me, four young black men were handing around a nickel-plated Desert Eagle—a wildly powerful and flamboyant pistol that has no real sporting or self-defense purpose; it was just cool. I asked if they were planning to get carry permits, and they said no, they just liked looking at guns. Outwardly, they looked like the kind of people against whom the schoolteacher was buying a gun to defend herself—dreadlocks, gold teeth, neck tattoos, sagged pants, the works. The salesman helping them, as straight-looking as the young Pat Boone, was the model of politeness. If these guys were as bad as they looked, their records would come up on the background check and scotch the deal. In the meantime, no point in letting a seven-hundred-dollar sale walk out the door.

  As I manipulated the P7, whose mechanism seemed ingeniously safe, I became aware of a voice behind me repeating softly but insistently, “No!” and a moment later, “No!” I turned, alarmed. A salesman was holding a thick-barreled stainless-steel revolver toward a young woman, butt first. She was small-boned and looked all the tinier for the huge man next to her, whose heavily tattooed arms bulged from a sleeveless T-shirt. They both wore wedding rings. She looked up at the big guy miserably and said, “Please.”

  “Just hold it,” the big man urged, and she shook her head.

  “Please,” she said again, twisting her body as though to say, Let’s go.

  “Honey, hold it,” the big man said, firmer.

  Her face crumpled. The clerk holding out the revolver looked worried. “Honey,” the big man said, trying to lighten his tone. “It’s not going to bite.”

  She stared at the outstretched gun and finally put out her hand and took it, letting the gun and her hand drop to the counter with a thud, defeated.

  “May I ask which of you is buying the gun?” the clerk asked nervously. Neither answered. “I mean, who is the end user? Because the person who is going to own the gun has to buy the gun. Legally, I mean.”

  “It’ll be my gun,” the big man said. “But I want her to be comfortable with it.” As the clerk and the big man talked, the woman rested the hand holding the gun on the counter, her head bowed. I couldn’t tell if she was looking at the gun, but her eyes were open and thoughtful; she seemed to be working through her options.

  Her husband moved behind her, put his Popeye arms around hers, and helped her hold the gun straight out. She pulled the trigger once, and again. Then she turned her head back toward him and smiled tearfully. He kissed her on the nose.

  Everything was okay.

  The poor woman seemed to be suffering from what Greg Hepp might call Barbara Boxer’s disease—a visceral aversion to firearms. “Hoplophobia” is what Jeff Cooper called it. Cooper, who died in 2006, was no psychologist. A Marine veteran from both the Second World War and Korea, he earned a political science degree at Stanford and a master’s in history at the University of California, Riverside, and wrote prolifically on gun-related topics from combat shooting and firearm design to big-game hunting. It was Cooper who, in the 1970s, figured out that teaching policemen to stand erect and extend the revolver straight out with one hand was elegant, but useless in a gunfight. He invented the modern way of shooting with which we’re all familiar from the movies—two-handed, in a crouch. Most of the wisdom I’d learned in my concealed-carry class, in fact, came from Jeff Cooper. It was he who set down the Five Cardinal Rules of gun safety* and invented the color-coded conditions-of-readiness chart.

  Cooper coined the term hoplophobia—from the Greek hoplon, or “weapon”—in 1962, defining it as an irrational fear of weapons. “The most common manifestation of hoplophobia is the idea that instruments possess a will of their own, apart from that of their user,” he wrote.† The NRA turned Cooper’s thinking into a bumper sticker, GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE; PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE, which is often derided by gun-control advocates but which is also, strictly speaking, true. A firearm is a tremendously dangerous thing, but it can’t do any harm until somebody picks it up.

  Bumper-sticker slogan or not, hoplophobia as defined by Cooper is a pretty good way to delineate differences between what might be called the pro- and anti-gun camps. Gun-control advocates tend to focus on the gun, so when a terrible shooting happens—at a school, an office building, or a congresswoman’s meet-and-greet—their first line of reasoning is, “We must do something about guns.” To them, the gun is the actor. Control the gun and you ameliorate or solve the problem. To those on the other side, who favor fewer or no firearms controls, imbuing an inanimate metal object with that kind of agency seems genuinely crazy—as fanciful as conjuring up
talking teapots in a Disney cartoon. To the extent they think about reducing gun violence, they tend to focus on the person behind the gun—by making the penalties for misusing one ever more severe. People, they argue, can be taught to think twice. Guns can’t.

  Being careful around guns is entirely rational, especially for people unfamiliar with them. But as someone comfortable with guns, I’ve always found rather precious those who get the fantods merely looking at one—and I’ve known plenty. I’m thinking in particular of a neighbor who was walking her dog past our house at the moment I was taking my hunting rifle from the trunk of the car. She gave a little yip, turned her head away, and held up a palm toward me at arm’s length. It wasn’t that she was afraid she’d be hurt by the gun; she was afraid to see it. Clinical hoplophobia in action or politically correct playacting? I had no idea. I confess, though, that I found it a little irritating, and vaguely insulting. What kind of monster was I, she seemed to be implying, who could handle something that she couldn’t even bear her eyes to fall upon?

  I couldn’t entirely tell about the woman in the gun store. Clearly the gun was repulsive to her. But I also got the distinct vibe that her resistance was as much about her husband as it was about the gun. The gun was his thing. When she seemed to be working through her options, it seemed like this was the math: To accept the gun was to accept the side of him she liked least. To accept the gun would be to give him an extra measure of power in the relationship. When she finally took the gun in her hand and clicked the trigger, and then smiled up at him, she seemed surprisingly serene. She seemed to have decided that she could do this, that in the long run doing this for her husband would be good for the marriage, and therefore good for her.