Gun Guys

by Dan Baum

  At the same time, carrying made me feel guilty. Perhaps because of the violence in their streets and the levee disaster in their recent past, New Orleanians had developed a culture of sweetness and tenderness toward one another that was unlike anything I’d seen elsewhere. It was a kind of hippie aesthetic—the easygoing, huggy closeness of a big mourning family. A musician friend, Paul Sanchez, had painted on the front of his guitar THIS MACHINE SURROUNDS SADNESS AND FORCES IT TO SURRENDER. When I saw that, all I could think was: The machine under my jacket creates sadness. To be carrying around the device that had wreaked so much horror on the people of New Orleans felt like betrayal. Even if it made me feel safer, it made me lonely. The gun had lowered a screen between me and the people I loved. It made me careful how I hugged. It made it hard to take off my jacket in a hot restaurant. It made me feel like a traitor to all that New Orleanians were trying to accomplish. The thought of having to send more bullets whizzing through its fragrant, damp air was almost unbearable.

  I left Peter Benoit in the early evening and wandered over to listen to the Jazz Vipers at the Spotted Cat. Standing outside with some friends was Tommy Malone, lead guitarist of the Subdudes. We talked awhile, and when I said I was headed to a bar in an especially rough neighborhood, Malone said, “Whoa. Got a pistol?”

  “I do,” I replied, and everybody laughed.

  17. DEAD AGAIN

  It’s not always being fast or even accurate that counts. It’s being willing.

  —John Wayne, in his last film, The Shootist, 1976

  I’d been wearing either my Colt or my Smith & Wesson .38 everywhere I could legally do so, and the thrill was wearing off. I no longer felt like James Bond. For most of the day, the gun was an uncomfortable lump of metal jammed between my waistband and my love handle or a paperweight dragging on my right front pocket. Had I been spending more time in New Orleans, I might have seen it differently, but you feel pretty dumb walking around Minot, North Dakota, or Boulder, Colorado, armed to kill.

  One aspect of the gun life still pleased me: The rituals of safety slowed me down. I couldn’t rush out of the house wearing a gun as I had when my only accessories were a cell phone and sunglasses. I enjoyed getting the gun out of the electronic safe, checking it to make sure it was loaded and functioning, and tucking it away. Out on the street, I felt vigilant, aloof from petty animosities: a modest equal to death. After practice at the range, I liked gingerly unloading the gun, laying the cartridges in a bowl, swabbing out the barrel and chambers, applying a thin sheen of oil. All that satisfaction, for the four-hundred-dollar price of a revolver.

  But I was also increasingly aware of my inadequacies. I could punch holes in paper pretty well and handle a gun safely on the street as long as I didn’t actually need it. But in the event of a shoot-out with a bad guy, I was not likely to prevail. Could I draw and fire accurately into the flesh of a fellow human being while ducking for cover from whizzing bullets? No way. And if not, why was I carrying?

  When I complained to other gun carriers that the classes I’d attended to get the permit had been a joke, they urged me to get more training. The country was full of shooting instructors, from freelancers like Rick Ector, in Detroit, to the 2,000-acre Gunsite Academy, in Arizona, which Jeff Cooper founded and which advertised a fifteen-hundred-dollar, five-day pistol course and a chance to shoot more than a thousand rounds of ammunition at stationary and moving targets, indoors and out.

  The company that I finally chose, American Shooters, was housed in a gigantic gray concrete cube of a building on Arville Street, in Las Vegas, about a mile west of the Strip. I signed up for a daylong course, “Defensive Pistol,” and showed up at 8:30 a.m. on a sparkling Tuesday.

  The facility was a shooter’s heaven—not only lots of shooting lanes but a big store and a rental counter stocked with every pistol, rifle, shotgun, and submachine gun one would ever want to sample. The clerks, all dressed in identical golf shirts, showed me into a windowless cinder-block classroom, where two other pupils were already waiting.

  I wasn’t wearing my gun. Nevada doesn’t honor a Colorado permit, and the instructors had asked me to bring it unloaded, in a bag. The other guys had their range bags out on their tiny school desks. I took a seat and introduced myself.

  Reid, a professional baseball player, was slim and fit. Tom, a Mercedes dealer, was strong and stocky. Both were surprisingly taciturn. Like the people in my concealed-carry class, they seemed embarrassed to be there. “You actually going to carry?” I asked them. Probably not, they both said. “I want to know what I’m doing in case I do,” mumbled Reid. Tom dragged his eyes from his smartphone for a second. “I just bought it,” he said distractedly. “All I want is to know how to use it.”

  The door banged open, and Jack Hawley strode in, trim and muscular, looking as though he was about to bust out in a dance number. He had icy-bright blue eyes, raptor features, and a shaven head under a beige ball cap. He was dressed for combat: desert combat boots, desert-camo cargo pants, a desert-tan T-shirt over his washboard belly, and a Beretta nine-millimeter semi-automatic in a black duty holster. Like those camp counselors who had terrified me when I was five, Hawley was all man, and it was our job to live up to him.

  “This class is about how to use a pistol in a gunfight,” he announced. “We assume you know the when—that you learned your legal, financial, ethical, and moral responsibilities in your concealed-carry class. Let me start by saying that the best way to win a gunfight—really the only way to win a gunfight—is not to be there when it happens. You got that? Your best move, always, is to retreat. Run away.” He raked us with those icy blue eyes. “This class is about what to do once you’ve decided you cannot retreat and you must take the gun from the holster and fire it.”

  Hawley was now the third gun teacher to tell me that the best strategy in a life-or-death situation was retreat. Gun guys always said the same thing; even the bloggers did. Yet the gun community, led by the NRA, had pressed hard for “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine,” laws that said a person has no legal duty to retreat from a dangerous situation if he is in a place he is allowed to be. Almost half the states had some form of stand-your-ground law, including Illinois, the last state to forbid carry permits under any circumstances. Gun-guy logic, I suppose, was this: It’s a good idea to retreat, but the state has no business telling you that you must.*

  Hawley planted his fists on his hips. “I am going to teach you how to fight with a gun. And it’s a fight. If you’re taking your gun from your holster, somebody is going to die. We don’t want it to be you.” He looked around, as though daring us to ask a question on that topic.

  “The world is dangerous,” he said loudly. “Carry a gun; two is better. Carry extra ammo; more is better. Carry a light; two is better.”

  I raised my hand. “That’s a lot of weight.”

  “Less than a coffin,” he said.

  “I can understand a policeman carrying two guns or extra ammunition. But do you really think people like us need to?”

  Fixing me with those sky-blue eyes, he pulled his gun, pressed the magazine release, and caught the empty magazine in midair. “The magazine is the component of the firearm most likely to malfunction,” he said, holding it high. “You may not need the extra rounds, but if your magazine malfunctions and you don’t have a replacement, you will die.”

  “I carry a revolver.”

  “Five shots?”

  “I’m told most gunfights are over in a second, with at most two or three shots fired.”

  “That’s true,” he said, reholstering his gun. “Most gunfights. What if your gunfight isn’t that way? What if your gunfight goes on awhile and you run out of ammunition in the middle of it? I’ll tell you what happens: You die. You and the people you’re with.”

  He smiled, his blue eyes changing from drill-sergeant tough to schoolteacher kind. He wasn’t a hard-ass; it was all an act. “I’m just sayin’ …” He snapped back into drill-sergeant mode.

/>   “You perform differently under stress. You engage your five-million-year-old lizard brain when someone is trying to kill you. You dump adrenaline. The blood is gone from your hands, and they go numb. Your ears shut off. You get tunnel vision. And it all happens instantly.”

  He led us down a hallway to a deserted indoor range. Directly in front of us were the shooting bays: little booths from which one shot toward a target. He opened a shooting bay—normally an alarming transgression—and led us through, down to where the bullets usually fly.

  It was eerie walking down that gloomy cement cavern, looking back at where the shooters normally stand. We gathered at the end, and Jack repeated aloud the Five Cardinal Rules. “Treat every gun as though it’s loaded! Never let your muzzle cross anything you’re not willing to destroy and pay for! Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target and you’re ready to fire! Be sure of your target and what’s beyond it! Maintain control of your firearm!

  “They apply to everybody, everywhere, all the time!” he shouted. “Four-man entry team in Fallujah, jungles of Vietnam, here on the range, or in your family room. The five rules always apply.”

  He hung a target for each of us—a life-size man silhouette with a six-inch circle over the chest, two-inch circles on the hips, and an inverted triangle on the face. “This is center mass,” he said, putting his hand on the big circle on the chest. “This is where your shots are most likely to stop the threat.”

  Still down at the far end of the shooting lanes, we stood seven yards from our targets and did some shooting. Reid had a nine-millimeter Smith & Wesson M&P semi-automatic like Rick Ector’s. Tom had an extremely complicated double-and-single-action Heckler & Koch pistol festooned with safety, de-cocking lever, slide release, and an external hammer—a lot to keep track of. Their guns held fourteen shots or more. My five-shot .38 revolver seemed puny, but, standing still and shooting slowly, we all did fine.

  “I’m going to give you commands,” Jack said. “ ‘Standard response’ means two shots center mass. ‘Nonstandard response’ means two shots center mass and one shot in each hip to break bone and bring him down. ‘Failure to stop’ means two shots center mass and one in the white zone.” He pointed to the triangle on the face.

  As we hung fresh targets, I considered the words “failure to stop.” A man keeps coming with a knife, despite bullets ripping into his chest. Yeesh.

  Jack barked alternating commands. “Failure to stop!” “Standard response!” “Standard response!” “Nonstandard response!” The faster and louder he got, the more nervous I became and the more I dropped cartridges while reloading. Reid and Tom, with their big semi-automatics, kept shooting and shooting, and when they needed to reload, it was magazine out, magazine in, zip-zip, done.

  Even under the minimal pressure of Jack’s yelling, that triangle and those little circles on the hips were hard to hit. And I kept dropping the damned cartridges. When we were finished, my shirt was damp and the floor around my feet was littered with live ammunition. God forbid my gunfight went on for more than five shots. I’d be toast.

  During a break, Jack took me by the shoulder and walked me up to my target. “See this?” he said, pointing to a hole that was half an inch outside the silhouette’s head. “That is everything you own, everything you’ve ever worked for, everything you’d hoped to leave to your children. That bullet went on to hit a seven-year-old girl, or a mother of three, or a heart surgeon. You own every bullet you fire, and you can’t call them back.”

  He turned to Reid and Tom. “Regardless of what I tell you, if you press the trigger, you own it. We’re grown-ups. The decision is yours, not mine.”

  I already felt a little light-headed, a little heart-fluttery, like at the top of a roller coaster. Talk of thugs running at me as my bullets hit bystanders had me convinced this wasn’t for me. Then we got serious.

  Jack had us shoot while walking toward the targets, while backing away, and while walking across them, putting two shots into each. To ready us for being wounded in our strong hand, he taught us to shoot with our weak one. He taught us to reholster slowly—“reluctantly,” as he put it—while looking around behind us, because people are often shot when they think the fight is over.

  We played a kind of quick-draw game that Jack called “The Initiator.” Two of us stood side by side, facing targets, with our guns holstered. One had his hands at his sides; the other held his arms out straight in front of him. It was up to the one with his arms up to start moving toward his gun. As soon as he did, the other could draw. First one to put two shots into center mass won. The initiator, with his arms out, had the advantage of knowing when the game would start. The other had the advantage of starting with a hand close to his gun. We played over and over; neither player had a clear edge.

  We shot for hours, burning through about four hundred rounds apiece. We hardly spoke; it was all shooting. Jack walked behind us, adjusting our positions like a yoga instructor. We drew and fired, drew and fired, drew and fired, trying to etch the actions into muscle memory. By the end of it, I was bushed.

  But I wasn’t finished. After the other students went home, Hawley handed me off to an instructor named Billy—a short, powerfully built man of about sixty with an egg-bald head and a murky Special Operations past in the brown-water Navy during Vietnam. Billy had a gravelly voice and hands that could probably tear a beer can in half. He wore a .45 automatic on his hip and kept a folding knife the size of a harmonica in his pocket. After we shook hands, he smiled, reached down the front of his jeans to a hidden pocket, and came up with a hammerless stainless-steel .44 Special revolver. It seemed to me that clawing that thing out during the panic of a gunfight would be a good way for Billy to shoot off his wedding tackle, but he laughed that off. “You get as old as I am, and see as much as I have, and you get pretty good with your gear.”

  He put his arm around my shoulders and chuckled in a vaguely malevolent way. “We’re going to do something for you we don’t usually do,” he said. “Ready to have your mind blown?”

  No, actually. I was ready for a beer and a nap.

  “We’re going to put you on the Prism machine, which is really here to train police.” Billy led me to a range that had no shooting bays. Instead it had a booth at the back end in which a young man sat at a big computer console. He said hello with the kind of smirk that indicated that something unpleasant was about to happen.

  Billy walked me downrange until we were standing only a few feet from what appeared to be a bedsheet that someone had stretched across the range like a screen. He told me to remove my holstered revolver, then fixed around my waist a gun belt on which hung a holstered Glock 19—a compact nine-millimeter. He handed me three loaded magazines and told me to put them in my left pants pocket.

  “What’s going to happen is, you’re going to see a scenario played out on that screen, and you have to decide whether or not to shoot.” Once again, something about the exaggerated manliness of Billy and the potential lethality of our project reeled me back to the fright and excitement of Hank Hilliard’s rifle range at Camp Sunapee. I could really blow it here; I’d better not.

  “I shoot at the screen?”

  “It’s made of rubber. Here’s what’s so cool: The heat of the bullet passing through it cauterizes the hole and seals it up. Sensors aimed at the back of the screen detect your hits, the computer analyzes them instantly, and, depending on where your bullets hit, the people on the screen react. They’ll either fall over or not. Is that cool? The whole thing is run by the kid in the booth. You ready?”

  “I’ve never shot a Glock before.”

  Billy had me take it from the holster. It wasn’t fancy, like Tom’s Heckler & Koch—no de-cocker, no external hammer, not even a safety catch. It was the pocket camera of firearms: point and shoot. But it was heftier than my .38, and it held three times as many cartridges. I loaded it, pulled the slide, and returned it to the holster.

  “These are what we call ‘active
shooter’ situations,” Billy said. “You have an unknown number of active shooters in a building—your typical university or office-building situation. You ready?”

  The range went dark, the screen came to life, and I was in some kind of school building. Because I was standing only about ten feet from the screen, it filled my vision. Up came the sound, realistically loud: people screaming and, in the distance, muffled gunshots. I drew the gun and held it with both hands at low-ready. This was nothing like playing a firstperson shooter game on a computer. I was there among the cinder-block walls, the bulletin boards, and the office doors with cartoons tacked to them. And it wasn’t a cheap plastic controller in my hand, but a real gun loaded with live ammunition.

  My heart was somewhere up around my collarbone. My hands were sweating. I found myself moving down a hallway and realized how many places there are in the average building for a bad guy to hide. That doorway! That cranny! Behind that fire extinguisher! I checked each one as I passed: nothing.

  I turned and moved through a door. Loud screams: Someone came running toward me from the gloom at the end of the hall—a young woman, crying and pointing behind her. Another person came running up the hall from back there—someone chasing her? I raised the gun. No, another screaming person, with empty hands.

  Up ahead, a body sprawled on the floor, and something lay near his hand. A pistol? Was he alive? About to pick it up and shoot me? Should I shoot him? No, it was an open cell phone that looked like a gun. Christ, I could have shot a victim.

  While I was looking at the body, another person appeared in the hallway, and I jerked the gun up: another empty-handed innocent. I was gasping audibly, my torso rigid with fear. Yet for all that, I was amazed to find that my index finger still lay along the slide, not on the trigger. Rule Three: Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target and you’re ready to fire. Such was the value of good training; it held even under pressure.