Gun Guys

by Dan Baum

  I kept moving down the hall. I turned left into a classroom. People were lined up against a blackboard, crying. On the floor lay at least one body, maybe two. Standing directly in front of me was a big woman with her arm around another woman’s neck and a gun to the woman’s head.

  I froze.

  The big woman with the gun was yelling at me. Everybody else was screaming; the noise was overwhelming, the tableau so terrifying that my brain locked up. I don’t know how long I stood there, frozen, before the screen went dark.

  Billy appeared at my shoulder. “You should have shot her.”

  “What?” I squeaked. I felt like I’d been plugged into a wall socket. “I was afraid of hitting the hostage.”

  “The hostage is dead already,” Billy said calmly, and fixed me with the kind of level gaze I imagined him using in combat when delivering such news as “The leg has to come off” or “You’re dying.” I must have been trying to break eye contact, because he moved his head sideways a little to keep me locked in. “You’ve got bodies on the floor,” he said. “Look at me. Bodies on the floor shows intent. The woman with the gun has demonstrated she is willing to kill and she’s going to kill again. You have only three options: You can back away; she kills the hostage. You can shoot and maybe hit the hostage. Or you can freeze, like you did, and she kills the hostage and you both. Either way, the hostage is already dead; you have to save yourself and everybody else in the room.”

  “Christ.” I blinked and shook my head, like a dog shaking off water.

  “It’s the real deal. We stopped it because we didn’t want to overload you too soon. She was about to shoot you and then the hostage. Want to do it again?”

  No. I wanted to cry until I stopped shaking.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Billy murmured into his walkie-talkie, and the scenario restarted. The doors, the gunshots, the screaming, the running people. I moved into the room where the woman with the gun was behind the hostage, yelling at me. Two-thirds of her face was hidden behind that of the hostage; I could see one of her eyes. I raised the Glock and shot once. She collapsed like a silk scarf drifting to the floor. The screen went dark.

  “Good shooting!” Billy growled.

  My heart was going like crazy and I was gasping air, but I felt terrific—like a superhero who had saved the day. I felt not a trace of remorse for having killed a woman. At that moment, in the seconds after it happened, it only felt good. The threat was over, because I’d kept my head and shot perfectly. I’d kept people from getting killed.

  I had no memory of either the shot or the recoil. Although it was the first time I’d fired a Glock, I’d made an incredibly difficult shot. Whether that said something about the gun or performance under pressure, I couldn’t say. But it was the second time I’d shot well with one of the high-tech guns I’d so disdained. The first had been the kid’s AR-15 at the Family Shooting Center. Gunmaking had come a long way.

  Billy spoke into his walkie-talkie, and the screen showed a still image of the moment I’d shot, with a blue dot on the woman’s left eye, where my bullet had struck. “You hit her in the white zone,” he said, using two blunt index fingers to define the triangle on his face: eye, eye, middle of upper lip. “The shock wave takes out her medulla oblongata, and it’s impossible for her to pull the trigger. It’s the perfect shot—the white zone is the only shot that really ends a situation.” Odd, I thought, as I used my sleeve to wipe sweat from my forehead. In the gun world, white has contradictory meanings: the lowest condition of readiness, and the ultimate bullet strike. “Your alternative was to shoot the hostage here,” Billy continued, pressing a finger into his own shoulder. “That’s a nonfatal wound. She falls, and you have a clear shot at the shooter. Ready?”

  The screen lit up, and I was in an office building, with even more hiding places than the college—cubicles, closets, hallways. People were screaming and crying, running all over; it was impossible to tell which might be the shooter. A door burst open to my right, and I jerked up my gun. Again, Jack’s training kept my finger from moving onto the trigger.

  I didn’t yet have a target. I wasn’t about to shoot.

  People poured toward me and around me. I moved through a door and found myself at the top of a stairway. Two people came running up. A man in a yellow hoodie appeared on the landing, gun in hand. I shot, and, to my immense relief, he collapsed.

  “Notice the blood spatter on the wall,” Billy whispered in my ear, proud of the realism.

  I continued down the stairs, stepping around the body, and eased through a door into another floor of cubicles. Bodies lay on the floor. I didn’t know if this was the work of Yellow Hoodie or if there were more shooters. The machine kept me moving down a hallway. Slowly.

  I looked left. Sitting at a computer, a man in a dark jacket had his hands up. In one hand was a gun, pointed straight at the ceiling.

  I put my sights on him and moved my finger to the trigger. He started to lower the gun, and I shot him.

  From down the hall, about twenty-five feet away, a third gunman advanced.

  I shot and shot and shot, and he kept coming, firing his gun, the muzzle flashes as big as basketballs. The screen went dark.

  “You’re dead,” Billy said.

  A still image appeared on the screen: the man in the long hallway shooting at me. Five blue dots made a perfect ring around him, one quite close to his head. None on him. I’d missed every time.

  “Shooting fast isn’t always the best thing,” Billy said. “You can’t miss fast enough to win a gunfight. Take that extra half second to aim. Chances are he’ll miss with his first shots. And even if you’re hit, chances are you won’t die; if you keep your head, you can still shoot back.”

  As I was absorbing the grisly lesson, Billy added, “That guy on the stairs? I’d have put another one in him as I went past. You don’t know if he’s dead, if he’s faking, if he’s wounded. He could pick up the gun and shoot you as you walk past.”

  “Isn’t that murder?”

  “It’s a gunfight. A gunfight is to the death—yours or his. It’s what you have to remember, over and over, if you’re going to carry a gun.”

  The screen lit up, and I was in a shopping mall. More screaming people, more distant gunshots. Two young women came running toward me. Suddenly, between them and me, a man in a Raiders jacket stepped out, holding a rifle. He turned toward them; I put my sights on his back but didn’t shoot.

  Rule Four: Be sure of your target and what is behind and around it. If I shot, I might have hit the girl in the white sweatshirt.

  Mistake: The man fired, and the girl in the white sweatshirt fell dead. I shot him twice in the back.

  The slide on my gun locked back: empty. As fast as I could, I dropped the empty magazine, found a new one in my pocket, rammed it in, grabbed the slide, hauled it back, and released it forward. I turned left into a corridor and came face-to-face with a young man holding a gun.

  I put the sights on him and pulled the trigger … Nothing happened. I pulled and pulled. Nothing. My gun was dead. The man lifted his gun at me and fired. The screen went dark.

  “The loudest sound you’ll ever hear in a gunfight is click.” Billy laughed sardonically. “Your slide was out of battery,” he said, meaning it hadn’t returned all the way forward after I’d released it. “I could see that. I wanted to see what you’d do. Here’s something you won’t forget again, I’m sure: When you release the slide forward, give it a little bang on the back to make sure it’s seated.”

  Shit. Jack had taught us that. I’d forgotten, and I was dead again.

  I went through about a dozen scenarios: a high school, the Las Vegas City Council Chambers, a patrol in Afghanistan. By the end, I was soaked in sweat and needed to sit down and eat something with sugar in it.

  Billy was kind. He said I’d done well. In most of them, though, I’d died.

  My day with Jack and my hours on the Prism left me with two powerful impulses. One was to get a bett
er gun. I couldn’t have done as well on the Prism with either of my .38s. I couldn’t have shot as far, as accurately, or as fast. Reloading—fumbling individual rounds into the cylinder after only five or six shots—would have gotten me killed even more often than I’d died with the Glock. Rick Ector’s motto finally made sense.

  Capacity, capacity, capacity. I’d been carrying those .38 revolvers because I “liked” them, because they pleased me historically and aesthetically. Now my taste in guns seemed dilettantish and irresponsible. If I was going to carry a gun, it should not be a fashion statement. I should carry only if I believed I might someday have to use a gun to defend my life or someone else’s. In that case, what I needed was the weapon that was most likely to get the job done.

  After a lifetime of buying used guns, I finally bought a brand-new one—a Glock 19, the same as I’d shot on the Prism, the same gun Angelina Jolie used in Mr. and Mrs. Smith—as well as the one with which Jared Loughner shot twenty people, killing six and injuring Arizona representative Gabrielle Giffords. It was a terrifically ugly thing, as graceless as a stapler, utterly without charm. It had black plastic in all the places that wood should have been. The slide was shaped like a stick of margarine, with none of the sweep and styling of an early-twentieth-century pistol. It lacked any engraving save the Glock logo. It wasn’t much of a fashion accessory, but it put bullets where I wanted them to go. It was no bigger than the six-shot Colt, and yet it held sixteen cartridges. I picked out a suede inside-the-pants holster, slipped the unloaded Glock into it, and, standing at the gun-store counter, tucked it in place over my right kidney. It was instantly apparent how much more comfortable the Glock was going to be. With no bulging cylinder, it didn’t poke me in the love handle.

  But something about this transaction was making me uneasy. Signing the credit card slip with the Glock in place on my belt, I found myself crossing a threshold. I wasn’t merely playing now; I was genuinely arming myself to kill someone in a gunfight, and paying $438 for the privilege. My little experiment in going armed was taking on a life of its own. Was I carrying the gun, or was the gun carrying me?

  At home, I opened a box of Golden Saber nine-millimeter hollow-points—specialty self-defense ammo at a breathtaking twenty-four dollars for a box of twenty—and loaded the Glock. Pointing it at the floor of my garage, I pulled the slide, chambering a round and cocking the firing pin. It instantly felt swollen to bursting. A semi-automatic is a different animal from a revolver. It’s more mysterious, because its moving parts and its ammunition aren’t visible from the outside. It requires more trust in the hardware than a revolver does. A Glock may not have a hair trigger the way some semi-autos do, but to a revolver guy like me, the thing—hot, cocked, and ready to go—felt especially dangerous in the hand. Holding it was one thing; slipping it into my pants completely freaked me out.

  I found myself walking on tiptoes with my hips thrust forward, prancing along like a marionette, lest I put pressure on the trigger and blow off my right buttock. I removed it from my pants and set it on my garage workbench, wondering how anybody carried such a thing.

  Finally, on the advice of some guys on the GlockTalk.com chat board, I tried an experiment. I unloaded the gun, pulled the slide to cock it, and returned it to its holster. Then I massaged the holster with my fingers every which way, as hard as I could, and found that I couldn’t make the trigger click no matter what I did. Part of what makes the Glock so popular is that, although it doesn’t have a manual safety catch, it’s designed with three internal safeties that prevent it from firing unless the trigger is deliberately pulled. Somewhat satisfied, I reloaded it, holstered it, and stuffed it down my pants with a tremendous sense of misgiving. If the Colt had been unignorable, the Glock practically shrieked in my ear every minute I carried it.

  What, exactly, had I gotten myself into? Those scenarios on the Prism system’s screen had lodged somewhere in my medulla oblongata. I was a believer: Nightmares happened, and in the most mundane of places. For weeks after, I imagined “active shooter situations” everywhere I went—at Safeway, in the library, at the movies. What would I do if all hell broke loose right now? What would I use as cover? How would I position myself so as not to hit a bystander? And this was after one hour on a simulator. The guys coming back from a year in Iraq and Afghanistan, I thought. How do they stand it?

  If I wasn’t well trained after Las Vegas, at least I was better trained. And now I had a gun that might actually do me some good in a horrible situation. Now that I was minimally competent and properly equipped, the other powerful impulse that overcame me after Vegas was to continue with my training. I pictured an attack at Boulder’s annual United Nations’ Day celebration—a place where it was entirely possible to imagine some SinCity2A type showing up to war-paint his face with liberals’ blood. What would I do? Run away? If I did that, with my gun on my hip, how would I live with myself if people were murdered? I’d be like a doctor who walked away from a stranger having a heart attack.

  But if I ran toward the sound of the guns, with my one piddly day of training, I could easily be killed—or kill a bystander. So what exactly were my choices? I could stop carrying the gun and run away with impunity. But if I was going to carry, I needed to train more and practice more. I had willy-nilly bought in to something from which retreat seemed possible only if I gave up the gun. But if I did that, was I abdicating a responsibility to keep myself and the people around me safe? Or did I have no such responsibility?

  No wonder hard-core gun guys felt superior to their unarmed brethren and enraged by their contempt. Who else among us willingly took on such life-and-death challenges? One might call such people testosterone-poisoned death freaks, which is how they were often portrayed by those who would have disparaged gun culture. But another word might be “warrior.” And society had always had a place for he who would willingly take up the sword and place himself in harm’s way. It’s a peculiar specialty, requiring a certain personality, a certain worldview, a certain combination of physical and emotional courage, and a certain way of organizing questions of morality in one’s mind.

  For the most part, we love those guys. They’re the ones we make movies about. And one can’t drive fifty feet without seeing a bumper sticker urging us to SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. What I’d discovered during my gun-guy walkabout was that warriors walked among us, on our own soil and out of uniform. Not every gun guy was a warrior. Not even every person who’d obtained a concealed-carry permit was necessarily a warrior. But while I met relatively few of the six million Americans who’d done so, every one I encountered was serious about the undertaking. They’d decided, on some level, to be one of society’s warriors. The question for me, after Las Vegas, was whether it was a role I wanted to play.

  * * *

  * The nation got a lesson in stand-your-ground law in March 2012, when a twenty-eight-year-old neighborhood-watch volunteer in Florida named George Zimmerman shot dead an unarmed seventeen-year-old black boy named Trayvon Martin and was not initially arrested because the local police chief insisted that Zimmerman was protected by Florida’s stand-your-ground law.

  18. TRIBES

  I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. Don’t fire the gun while you’re talking!

  —Leslie Nielsen, as Lieutenant Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun, 1988

  As much as I’d wanted to avoid gun politics, Washington, D.C., was like the drain at the bottom of the bathtub. Like it or not, I was already circling it. And every time somebody mentioned the Second Amendment, I inched a little closer.

  The Second Amendment was a problem—for me, for the anti-gun crowd, even for the NRA. Its maddeningly vague, awkwardly punctuated and capitalized text reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” No other amendment was as opaque as the Second. Nobody had ever had a ghost of a clue what the framers meant by it.

  Scholars, lawyers, and politicians had argued for dec
ades about whether the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to own and carry a gun or whether its preamble limited it to a collective right of the people to organize when necessary into well-regulated militias. For years, the tide of the Second Amendment argument flowed in the direction of the collective-militia analysis. Then it washed up against Antonin Scalia. In 2008, he wrote the lead opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, striking down the federal district’s thirty-three-year-old handgun ban, reversing long-standing precedent, and establishing that the Second Amendment indeed guaranteed an individual right to be armed. Writing for the 5–4 majority, Scalia declared that gun bans were “off the table” in the federal district. A year later, in McDonald v. Chicago, the Court extended Scalia’s ruling to the entire nation.

  I naively expected it to be a healing moment. The Court had taken gun bans “off the table,” so I waited for the NRA and its allies to abandon their insane scaremongering that even the mildest gun regulation was a step toward forcible disarmament. For their part, I expected the anti-gun side to recognize that the game had changed and give up attempts to deprive people of firearms. Silly me.

  The NRA’s American Rifleman magazine warned, bizarrely, that after Heller, “our firearm freedoms may be in greater danger.” As for Washington, D.C., and Chicago, their city councils passed catch-22 laws that hewed to the letter of the Court’s decisions while making handgun possession all but impossible—with the predictable result that both faced multiple lawsuits they could ill afford and would probably lose.

  The framers had written the Second Amendment awkwardly in order to get it ratified by mutually hostile infant states, and the perpetual bickering over the paragraph’s meaning depended on attempts to divine what the white-wigged men were thinking at the time. Whole shelves of books had been devoted to describing the political and economic conditions of 1791 and how the framers would have been responding to them. The more conflicting interpretations of intent I read, and the more I tried my own hand at intercentury mind reading, the less relevant the whole exercise came to appear.