Gun Guys

by Dan Baum

  I first met Peter in New Orleans almost sixteen years later, on August 31, 2005, two days after Hurricane Katrina. Four times, as I’d walked through the oak-strewn Garden District covering the disaster, I’d encountered white people with guns. They seemed frozen in a kind of apocalyptic panic, as though all the wrongs committed by white folks since the time of the Middle Passage were going to be paid back on that day.

  This was long before I’d gotten a concealed-carry permit, but on the way in, my ears full of dire—and false—reports of violence in New Orleans, I’d asked a friend in Baton Rouge if he thought it was a good idea to borrow one of his guns before plunging into the disaster zone. He’d just chuckled. “They have lost everything in that city,” he drawled. “But they will find a jail cell for a Yankee reporter with a gun.”

  Thousands of people were gathering at the Convention Center, which was up on the river levee and unflooded. I bought a bicycle someone was shedding as he evacuated and pedaled through the dry part of the Ninth Ward. At the corner of Burgundy Street and St. Roch, a man in a wheelchair sat blinking in the murky sunlight. He had wide-spaced eyes that turned down at the corners, giving his face a sad, contemplative cast. I introduced myself, and he asked where I was from before giving his last name. “Good,” he said. “With you I don’t have to say Ben-wah.”

  I joked that he was the first unarmed white man I’d encountered all day. “I won’t touch them,” he said. “It was a gun put me in this chair.” We wandered around together for an hour, I on my bike and he using the heels of knotted-up hands to push his chair along. Then he rolled off in his direction, and I in mine.

  When Kalisch’s bullet hit him, Peter went down like a dropped marionette. He never lost consciousness, though. Kalisch stood there looking at him. At least she didn’t raise the gun and shoot him again.

  “Call 911,” Peter said, and someone must have, because a while later—it seemed a very long time—the police came in. Lying on the floor, Peter could feel a cold draft that told him they’d left the front door open. They didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry, and they were surly. “They got a baby, and feel how cold it is in here,” one said. “Let’s take the baby.” Peter tried to say, “Hey, you left the door open. That’s why it’s cold.” By then, though, he wasn’t able to speak.

  Though he could see his legs stretched out, they felt odd, as though they were doubled up under him. It was painful. “Straighten my legs,” he tried to say. “Straighten my legs.”

  It was at Charity Hospital that Peter gradually came to understand that his walking life was over, that there would be no more bicycle trips up the California coast. As doctors and nurses raced around frantically, he kept hearing the words “cervical,” and “cord,” and “no response.” Then he looked past the nurses and saw big, tough Greg from Mandeville Street standing in his leather jacket, crying wetly. That was when Peter knew he was fucked.

  “You’re lucky,” the nurses told him when they got him into a ward bed after hours in the ER. “You’re a C7; you’ll have your hands.” He could move his arms, but the hands were curled up. They’d be usable, but not for any finer work than picking up a fork between the flat of his thumb and the side of his palm. He lay in his charity bed and sobbed. If only he hadn’t met Kalisch. If only he hadn’t thrown away Monica’s love. If only he hadn’t bought that fucking gun.

  At first he thought the only silver lining was that he’d bought cheap ammunition. Had he bought something more powerful, he’d be dead. They eventually drilled holes in his skull, fitted him with a steel halo to immobilize his head, and carted him over to rehab. The skin on his hips broke down from bedsores, and he lay there in his own stink, immobile, penniless, and lost. He had to have skin grafts to heal the bedsores, and he endured repeated operations until the grafts took. He found himself wishing he’d bought the better ammunition after all.

  Then one day he looked up, and there stood Monica.

  “It’s not like I took him back right away,” Monica said in a deep Boston accent as she dug her spoon into Peter’s macaroni and cheese. We were having lunch at the Cafe Reconcile, on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard in New Orleans; I’d driven here to meet them after hog hunting with Casey Gunnels. Monica had stopped in to the restaurant “for a minute” as she sped from one home-health-care job to another. She didn’t have time to order her own lunch, only enough to eat Peter’s. He smiled and slid his plate a little closer to her.

  Monica was bigger than I expected, attractive and at the same time mannish in the way she held her shoulders and moved her hands. Her hair was straight and dark red, and her smile was so wide, it seemed to extend beyond the line of her cheeks.

  “He went back to Kalisch!” she said with a laugh, around a mouthful of mac and cheese.

  “Kalisch didn’t go to prison?”

  “Nah,” Peter said, flapping one of his crumpled hands. “She went to jail for a couple of days, but I dropped the charges. The nurses thought I was crazy.” He smiled ruefully.

  I was starting to think maybe the sadness in his face had predated the injury—a product of his hard-knocks Cambridge upbringing. Or maybe it was just the shape of his face. Either way, despite his obvious delight in the way things had turned out, he never lost that sad, knowing cast—even when smiling.

  “I thought Kalisch and I would go home and live happily ever after,” Peter was saying. “And we had Callan. I thought, if Kalisch goes to jail, maybe Callan ends up a ward of the state; maybe he gets sent to some abusive foster home.”

  Monica lofted her eyebrows and nodded as though to admit that she approved—as though to say she’d have loved to see Kalisch punished but that the best thing wasn’t necessarily the obvious thing.

  “We go back to the commune,” Peter said. “Nobody made a big deal about my being shot and paralyzed; it was like, That kind of thing happens. These were motorcycle people, remember. They got racked up all the time. For Callan’s sake, Kalisch stopped smoking and drinking and started eating right. But I think she realized, Well, Peter is disabled now, he can’t do stuff, things are different. She started going out, leaving me and Callan sitting there looking at each other. I did the Irish Catholic thing, like my mother would have: Don’t say anything and maybe everything will work out. But I was really depressed. Charity gives you a handful of diapers and Valium and says, ‘See you later.’ I wasn’t taught how to take care of myself properly, how to keep myself clean. I wasn’t practicing nutrition.

  “I got sick. I was sweating, with chills, huddling over the space heater. My brother Paul came up from Atlanta and took me to the hospital. They took one look at me and said, ‘He ain’t leaving; he’s going into isolation.’ I had TB. I probably got it from one of the people passing through the commune.”

  The Cafe Reconcile was created to give at-risk teenagers a chance to learn how to work in a restaurant, and a six-month internship was a treasured opportunity. Our cornrowed waiter, a hulking young man in a red Cafe Reconcile T-shirt, loomed over our table and told us, with great solemnity, that Bananas Foster Bread Pudding was on the menu. Peter and Monica locked eyes for a second. “We’ll take one, with two spoons,” Monica said.

  “It was when Peter was sick that I got back in the picture,” Monica said, reaching across the table and taking his twisted hand.

  Monica moved him to her house and got him set up with proper home care. She got him involved in wheelchair rugby, which helped him recover physical and mental strength. And she supported him through a college degree and helped him develop a carpentry career.

  I asked Peter whether Kalisch had ever apologized.

  “She said once that she wasn’t in her right mind,” Peter answered. “And three years after, she said, ‘It’s unfortunate.’ Not ‘I’m sorry,’ just ‘It’s unfortunate.’ ”

  “He bought me a little diamond ring,” Monica purred. “I asked him, ‘What is this, honey?’ and he said, ‘Uh, uh, uh, it’s a, uh, friendship ring.’ ” She laughed a deep, satisfied laugh.
“When commercials come on for diamond rings now—showing those lovey-dovey couples?—Peter laughs and says, ‘I guess other people know what a diamond ring means.’ ”

  Peter’s story was a catalog of arguments for gun control: loosey-goosey rules at a gun show, the casual purchase of a handgun without learning how it worked, and a loaded gun tossed unsecured into a dresser drawer.

  Closing the gun-show loophole wouldn’t necessarily have saved him; his record was clean. But had he been required to get in line at the gun show for a background check, pay an additional ten dollars, and wait around until the results came back, he might have said to hell with it and walked off into a sunnier future.

  A lot of gun guys would say that was precisely what the endless parade of nitpicking new regulations was intended to do: not weed out criminals, but discourage law-abiding people from buying guns, like driving people away from cigarettes by making them stand outside in the rain to smoke. And for every Peter Benoit, who would have been better off without a gun, they’d point to someone who was raped and murdered in her apartment because she either couldn’t get a gun or was daunted by the bureaucratic hoops through which she’d have had to jump.

  But the story of Kalisch shooting Peter pointed to another, more pervasive problem with how Americans thought about gun violence. Gun-control advocates liked to speak of “keeping guns out of the hands of criminals.” Those who favored gun rights talked of protecting themselves from “criminals” and of punishing “criminals” harder to discourage them and get them off the street. You’d have thought that “criminals” were a distinct community, like pilots or bus drivers, a card-carrying profession whose members could be identified by their striped shirts, Lone Ranger masks, and newsboy caps. But a lot of shootings were just like Peter’s or Brandon Franklin’s—done by people who were law-abiding until the moment they picked up the gun.

  Lots could have been done to make such shootings less likely. The problem was that both sides of the “gun debate” could think no further than what government might do—gun controllers calling for more restrictive laws, and gun guys gnashing their teeth over same. As the two sides bickered, people continued to die. Meanwhile, steps that might actually have reduced shooting deaths and injuries wouldn’t have involved government at all.

  As individuals, the majority of gun guys were achingly responsible with their guns. They locked them up, kept them clean, practiced with them, and obeyed the Five Cardinal Rules about treating guns as loaded and keeping them pointed in a safe direction. As a community, though, gun guys were lethal—so focused on how “criminals” and government were the villains that they had forgotten to examine how they, who knew guns better than anybody, might have helped reduce the number of people killed and injured by them.

  The wrongest of wrong hands weren’t necessarily those of “criminals” but of curious children and depressed teenagers. If it seemed like every other week the nation learned of a little kid accidentally shooting himself or a playmate, it was because it happened somewhere in America about that often, and everybody in the cable-television-and-Internet-connected country heard about it. The chance of a kid dying by gunfire was one in a million, but in a country with forty million children under age ten, that was a lot of dead kids. Accidental child death was one of the few gun statistics that had grown worse since 1999. Teenage gun suicide was a lot lower than it had been in 1999, but still high. Almost half the teenagers who killed themselves in 2007 did so with a gun, and, unlike those who tried it with pills, car exhaust, razor blades, or a rope, those who attempted suicide with a gun almost always succeeded.

  Where were those children and teenagers getting the guns? Not from gun stores—the minimum age to buy a long gun was eighteen, and twenty-one for a handgun. Not from gun shows, either, unless they were getting an adult to buy them. And not from some murky “illegal gun market.” They were getting them, by and large, from their parents, who left them around, loaded, where immature hands could find them.

  The same went for criminals. In the mid-1980s, a pair of sociologists surveyed almost two thousand violent felons in prison about their gun lives. Almost half the guns that the felons described having used were stolen. Add to that the ones they thought were “probably” stolen, and it jumped to 70 percent. Most were stolen from households. At the time I was writing this, an estimated half a million guns a year went missing one way or the other.

  To the legislatures of twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia, the solution to both problems seemed obvious: pass laws that required guns either to be stored separate from their ammunition, locked up, trigger-locked, or some combination of the three. A lot of gun guys hated those laws. They argued that a gun that was separated from its ammunition, disabled, or locked away was useless if needed in a hurry.

  Not true. I kept my handgun loaded in the bedroom, in a metal safe the size of a toaster that popped open the second I punched in a three-button code. I bought it on eBay for twenty-five dollars. It solved both problems. The gun was secure, but instantly available to me alone. A lot of gun guys used such safes. They just didn’t want to be ordered to use them.

  Neither did a lot of gun guys want to be ordered to report a stolen gun to the police. In 2012, the Judiciary Committee of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives voted to penalize any town that required gun owners to report stolen firearms to the police. Other states had likewise succumbed to pressure from gun guys, who considered it tyranny to have to tell the police anything about their guns. Only seven states and the District of Columbia made reporting a stolen gun mandatory.

  The real question was: If gun guys were the paragons of civic virtue that they claimed to be, why did they have to be ordered to lock up their guns or report a gun theft to the police? Wouldn’t a responsible citizen have done so anyway? Gun guys were operating under a double standard. They wanted to be left alone to buy, use, and carry guns because, they said, they understood firearms better than any bureaucrat. But at the same time, enough of them behaved so carelessly that thousands of people were needlessly killed, injured, or victimized every year by guns left lying around.

  Was a gun guy who kept his guns properly secured responsible for some knucklehead who didn’t? If the NRA was consistent in its logic, the answer was yes. Solidarity was a constant theme of the NRA, whose e-mails, mailings, and magazines exhorted members to support the community of gun owners by writing to their representatives about gun-related legislation, voting out anti-gun legislators, and voting in those who were pro-gun. But that’s where service to the community ended. For the NRA to have suggested that law-abiding gun owners take responsibility for the cads would have shattered the notion that “criminals” were a separate class. So while the NRA trained people in gun safety and published books about gun care, it—like every other gun-rights group—avoided drawing a connection between the carelessness of law-abiding gun owners and America’s still high rate of needless gun death.

  What could the NRA and the community of responsible gun owners have done to reduce gun deaths without government intervention? They could have made irresponsible behavior socially unacceptable, just as it had become unthinkable, among most Americans, to smoke inside another person’s house, say words like “nigger,” or make lascivious comments about underage girls. It would have taken time, but it could have been done, and some were trying. Robert Farago, who wrote a funny and popular gun blog called The Truth About Guns, ran a regular feature called “Irresponsible Gun Owner of the Day”—often a YouTube video of some young man acting stupid or a news item about a needless tragedy. After Arizona instituted “constitutional carry”—allowing any adult to carry a concealed gun with no training or permit—a group called TrainMeAZ.com organized to exhort citizens to get trained and to help them find trainers. Farago and TrainMeAZ, though, were lonely voices. The big dog, the NRA, had for decades run a monthly feature in its magazines called “The Armed Citizen,” about people successfully defending themselves with firearms. Had it called its
members to a higher standard of responsibility with a complementary column called, say, “The Armed Bonehead,” it would have reached millions more people than either Farago or TrainMeAZ. Most of all, I enjoyed imagining how gun culture could have changed—and lives could have been saved—if, say, gun guys refused to hang out or go shooting with those who left loaded guns lying around their houses. “Sorry, dude. I’m not shooting with you until you clean up your act.” Or if gun guys refused to shop at a gun store that sold home-defense handguns without insisting that buyers also take electronic safes to keep them in. Little by little, shooters and gun stores would have gotten the message, and the problem of unsecured guns—the main source of gun tragedy—would have withered away. Government would have been out of the picture, so there would have been nothing to resent and nothing to fight about. Both sides would have gotten what they said they wanted.

  Gun guys were right to object to government officials who proposed bans without understanding what they were banning. But until they took responsibility for the gun violence that continued to frighten and desolate their fellow Americans, they were setting themselves up for more of it. Taking collective responsibility for social problems is not the same thing as knuckling under to a tyrannical government. In fact, it’s the exact opposite.

  It felt pretty weird talking to Peter Benoit, the bullet pock still visible on his throat, with a loaded revolver under my clothes. But then, as I’d discovered a few months earlier at Brandon’s funeral, everything about wearing a gun in New Orleans was complicated. I loved the city, but hideous things happened to people even in “good” parts of town. It was one of the few places on my gun-guy walkabout where I was glad I was licensed to carry a gun.