Gun Guys (6 page)

Usually, the NRA and the gun business preferred to maintain the fiction that crime was out of control and everyone should own a gun for self-defense. But after the shall-issue revolution, they claimed credit for the drop in crime. Criminals were afraid to prey on people who might be armed, they argued, so more gun ownership meant less crime.

It was easy to argue that crime was falling everywhere, not just in shall-issue states, and falling faster in some restrictive states than in some shall-issue states. The back-and-forth over the effect of shall-issue laws demonstrated precisely why statistics are almost useless when debating gun policy; people read into identical data what they want to see. Few are going to be shaken off their fondness or antipathy for guns by a page of statistics.

This much, though, was beyond debate: Almost seven million people had obtained carry permits in the two dozen or so years since Florida had risen up, and when you ran the numbers, legal gun carriers committed murder at a quarter the rate of the general population.

A subset of the “more guns, less crime” debate erupted in 1995 over how often law-abiding citizens used guns to defend themselves. It was an important question, because if lawful defensive gun use happened often,
that would support the movement to make carry permits easier to get. If it was rare, it would weaken the need for permissive carry. Everybody agreed that defensive gun use rarely ended in shots fired and usually involved nothing more than brandishing the gun or announcing, “I’ve got a gun.” Beyond that, nobody agreed on anything.

Two prominent gun researchers squared off. In one corner was Gary Kleck, of Florida State University, a longtime critic of most gun-control laws. Relying on a collection of telephone and questionnaire surveys, he came up with a breathtaking 2.5 million defensive gun uses a year, or more than 6,800 a day. Across the ring from Kleck was Harvard’s David Hemenway, who throughout his career had been as consistently anti-gun as Kleck was pro. Using the government’s National Crime Victimization Survey, Hemenway came up with only 80,000 defensive gun uses a year.

I interviewed both men on the phone, and each predictably disparaged the other’s work in the harshest terms, as though
no gentleman
would consider using the data the other had chosen. Their pissing match went on for years in academic journals. Each had his defenders. The NRA weighed in on Kleck’s behalf, citing his 2.5 million number as proof that guns were important to public safety. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the country’s leading proponent of stricter gun laws, backed Hemenway’s number as evidence that the utility of private gun ownership was overrated. In 2004, the National Research Council stepped into the ring as referee and essentially called off the match. “Ultimately, the committee found no comfort in numbers: the existing surveys do not resolve the ongoing questions,” it wrote.

I slogged through all the arguments, and what came through most clearly was that both sides had lost track of the obvious: Even Hemenway’s lower number was huge. “Only” 80,000 a year meant that 220 times a day, Americans were protecting themselves with firearms one way or another. This meant that eight times as many Americans were defending themselves with guns every year as were being murdered with them.

It seemed crazy to me that guns could be used harmlessly so often without us ever hearing about it, until I considered what I would do if a thug threatened me on the street, I pulled my gun, and he ran away. Would I call the police? Only if I was in the mood for spending the rest of my evening answering questions—and perhaps being booked for assault, being held in a cell overnight, and losing my gun. More likely, I’d shut up. And even if I did report the incident, how likely is it that a reporter would find it newsworthy?

It’s possible, of course, that in both surveys a lot of those who reported using their guns to stop a crime were inventing a story to make themselves feel cool or had brandished a gun needlessly at a panhandler or harmless bump in the night. But even if only an eighth of Hemenway’s already “low” number were genuine life-or-death situations, guns were still quietly saving as many lives as, or more than, they were taking. For someone like me, who started out thinking widespread concealed carry was a bad idea, this was rattling.

In any case, my sneering at Florida had been misplaced: Shall-issue may not have caused crime to drop, but neither had it uncorked rivers of blood. And let’s be honest—I found that a little thrilling. Because now I could get a concealed-carry permit of my own and start handling my gun every day without feeling as though I were contributing to a virulent social pathology.

Colorado required people who wanted a carry permit to get trained, but it left the details up to county sheriffs. Mine, a jovial and popular Democrat named Joe Pelle, required only proof of training by an “NRA-approved” instructor. Knowing how Boulder’s pleasures tended toward qigong and Pilates, I expected to drive some distance to find a shooting school. So I was surprised to find in the phone book something called the Boulder Rifle Club, whose NRA-approved concealed-carry classes were booked an astonishing two months out. The number of carry permits Sheriff Pelle issued annually had risen eighteenfold in the previous decade. Nine hundred Boulderites applied every year. Maybe the aging hippies in Whole Foods hadn’t blinked at my gun because they were packing themselves.

“There’s Brazilian music tonight at the Laughing Goat,” Margaret said one afternoon as we returned from yoga class. “Rosa and I are going.” She snapped her fingers theatrically. “Oh, that’s right. You have your
gun thing
tonight.”

And off I slunk, to join the legion of the armed.

Boulder can be an uncomfortably high-tone place—wealthy and possessed of a higher concentration of advanced degrees than any town in America. The club turned out, though, to be down-home in the extreme: naught but a couple of ranges bulldozed from the sagebrush, and a cement-floored, cinder-block-walled “clubhouse” that was about as elegant as a
boiler room. I was glad; this was what a shooting place was supposed to look like. Red school lockers lined one wall, and a lone flickering fluorescent tube gave the room a sickly middle-school pallor. The bulletin board carried ads for gunsmithing, taxidermy services, guns, and car insurance. Posters taped to the wall, I was relieved to see, were all about gun safety; nothing in the room was political—no NRA posters.

Three big thirtysomething guys dressed in identical black hoodies—hoods up—whispered and chuckled to each other like a band of Jawas en route to capture R2-D2. The rest of the students had already found seats at the cheap folding tables that would serve as desks: an elegantly dressed elderly gentleman, a middle-aged husband-and-wife team, and, at a table with an empty chair, one of Rosa’s teachers from middle school.

“What are
you
doing here?” I asked, taking a seat.

His eyes didn’t quite meet mine; he seemed mortified to have been recognized. “I’ve never owned a gun,” he said softly. “I’ve hardly ever shot a gun.”

“And now you want to
carry
a gun?”

“I don’t know,” he mumbled, and busied himself with the paper handouts.

The twelve-hour class was to be spread over four consecutive week-nights. This first night would be a general introduction to firearms and the social realities of carrying one. Night two: live firing. Night three: the legalities of self-defense. The last night would cover strategies for carrying.

Our teachers called us to order. Dick was a big man in his sixties with a boxer’s nose and a Jersey City stevedore’s accent. Judy was short and sturdy, also in her sixties, with cropped auburn hair and a wry, tough-gal way of talking out of one side of her mouth. From the moment they started making Obama and illegal-immigrant jokes, they made it clear that they were not of Boulder’s dominant culture and that for the next four nights we were on their turf. They also made it clear that they were not bumpkins; Judy was a lawyer, and, while Dick didn’t tell us his profession, he let drop that he lived in an expensive part of town.

So they weren’t teaching this class for the money, which was a good thing. Assuming the other seven people were paying a hundred dollars for the class, as I was, the Rifle Club was taking in eight hundred dollars. Divided by twelve hours and two teachers, that was a little more than thirty-three dollars an hour to stand in a cold, dimly lit cinder-block room for four nights running—and the Rifle Club was no doubt taking
a cut. Dick and Judy were here because they believed in the cause. They wanted to help more citizens get licensed to carry guns.

We went around the room introducing ourselves and saying why we’d come. Two said they weren’t sure they wanted to carry; they mostly wanted to learn how to live safely alongside a firearm. I said the same. The other five all said they wanted to carry—but not when they were on city streets, only when they were out in the woods.

This was a new one for me; I’d always thought of concealed carry as an urban thing. I was accustomed to taking a gun along when car camping by the roadside, because one never knew who would be prowling the highways. And I’d carried a rifle or a shotgun in the Alaskan wilderness, because of the grizzlies. But Colorado trails were the last place I’d ever felt unsafe. Some people, apparently, are creeped out by the forest. “What happens if someone comes into camp to steal from us and takes my husband out?” the woman asked, and I wondered what she might have in a campsite that someone would be willing to kill for. A camp stove? A sleeping bag? Maybe she was imagining some sort of hideous
Deliverance
scenario. Which wasn’t completely unreasonable, I supposed, just different from my own ideas about when a concealed gun might be necessary.

Dick started, in barely disguised boredom, describing the parts of a gun. “This is the trigger. This is the muzzle.” I looked at my watch. Two and a half hours to go, with three more nights to come. For people teaching a skill on which lives could depend, Dick and Judy seemed lackadaisical, drifting through prescribed material, turning pages lazily, often losing their train of thought. It wasn’t until two hours into the evening that Dick let drop why he seemed to care so little. “I don’t have a carry permit,” he told us casually. “I don’t believe I should have to ask the government’s permission to exercise my constitutional rights.”

“So you carry illegally?” I asked.

He said he did not. He kept a gun in the armrest of his pickup truck and several in his home, but he didn’t carry concealed, because he wanted neither to break the law nor approach the government on bended knee for permission to do something already guaranteed to him in the Constitution.

“But you think we should.”

“Really, it’s the only rational thing to do, given the way crime is these days.”

“Out of control,” Judy said. “Absolutely out of control.”

Say what? Just that day I’d been looking at the figures on America’s stunning drop in violent crime—one of the few pieces of unalloyed good
news out of the previous two decades. I put up my hand, but the lights went out.

Judy started a video produced by the NRA. It opened on a suburban street of landscaped McMansions, “a neighborhood probably not very different from yours,” according to the narrator, which made me wonder whether they showed this same film in, say, downtown Oakland. We watched as a white guy in chinos and a ski mask jimmied a window, let himself in, and, even though the woman in the negligee told him she had a gun and was calling the police, kicked open her bedroom door. She shot him twice. Then we watched another scenario: the same white guy in chinos and a ski mask threatening a businessman in the alley behind his store and suffering the same fate. I was convinced: Ban chinos.

“The way crime is simply out of control, you can’t afford not to be prepared,” Judy said. Dick handed around a color police photo of a man slashed open with a knife. Both Dick and Judy insisted repeatedly that crime was “out of control.” I kept track; they used the words “out of control” nine times. The disconnect between their ironclad belief and the reality was so stark, it was disorienting.

This first night, then, wasn’t about teaching us gun skills. It was about recruiting us into a culture animated by fear. Because until we bought in, the very idea of carrying a gun was ridiculous. I could understand the NRA and the firearms business wanting everybody convinced that crime was out of control; it was good for membership, and good for business. But Dick and Judy?

Maybe it wasn’t enough for them to say they liked guns and wanted to carry one around and handle it every day. Maybe they felt they needed more justification. I was always looking for a reason to have guns in my life; why wouldn’t they?

During a break, I asked Dick if he wasn’t being a tad misanthropic. “I’m an optimist,” he said, “but we live in a world of assholes.”

The first night was not, for the record, worthless. They taught us the eminently sensible Five Cardinal Rules
^†
and made us repeat them back aloud.
And Judy kept returning to what may have been her best piece of advice: “You can’t call back the bullet. You own everything the bullet touches. You have to ask yourself: ‘Can I afford to pull the trigger?’ ” Dick chimed in, “You have to let anger issues go. If you have anger issues, perhaps concealed carry isn’t for you.” Judy stepped around him, put her fists on her hips, and fixed us with that gun-moll squint. “You need to decide whether you’re willing to take a life. Make your decision in advance and review it often. Don’t wait until you’re in a situation. If you can’t do it—if you can’t take a life—
don’t get a gun
.”

By eleven o’clock, my legs had frozen from the knees down from sitting with my feet on that frigid cement floor. As we stood, I expected to chat a bit with my fellow students. To my surprise, everybody put his head down and headed for his car in silence.

On the second night, we were to bring our guns in bags, unloaded. I selected my Colt Detective Special, a snub-nosed .38 revolver that had starred in every black-and-white cops-and-gangsters movie since the silent era.