Gun Guys (24 page)

“Okay?”

“I’ll take it.”

He drove from Northwest Gun & Ammo straight to Target Sports, a shooting range he’d noticed among the fast-food joints and car washes on Woodward Avenue. The man behind the counter was young and white; the whole legitimate shooting world, it seemed, was white. Behind the man, through a Plexiglas wall, shooters were aiming handguns at targets. Rick could hear muffled pops. “I just bought this gun and want to shoot it,” he said.

The man laid a pair of what looked like stereo headphones on the counter. “Which target?” he asked. Rick took a step back. Pinned to the front of the counter were a dozen styles, including several man-shaped silhouettes and a photo of Osama bin Laden. Rick selected a silhouette. “Lane five,” the man said, draping a target over the counter for him and turning away.

“Uh, I was wondering if you could show me how to load this.”

The man turned and scowled.

He’s trying to make me feel stupid
, Rick thought,
like the guy at Northwest Gun & Ammo
. But he kept his gaze steady, insistent; if he didn’t ask, how was he to learn?

Sighing, the young man took the gun from Rick’s hands and showed him how to press cartridges into the top of the magazine until it was full. “Put it in there,” he said, turning the gun over to show the slot in the grip, “and then do this.” He yanked back the slide and let it snap shut. “Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Line up the front sight with the back sight and put them both on the target. And put your ears on before you open that door; it’s loud in there.”

The range smelled of hot metal. He settled himself in lane five, at a waist-high carpeted shelf that served both as a barrier to walking downrange and a place to rest the gun. Every time the man in lane four let loose, Rick jumped inside his clothes. Even with his hearing protectors on, the gunshots were unbelievably loud. He pinned a target to a clip hanging
from a cable in front of him and pushed a toggle switch. The target zoomed along the cable and came to a stop twenty feet down the gloomy alley. He pressed cartridges into the magazine until no more would go. He rammed the magazine into the pistol and yanked back the slide. He realized he hadn’t drawn a breath in what seemed like several minutes, so he laid the pistol on the carpeted shelf, took a step back, and took several deep breaths of hot, smoky air. Then he stepped forward and picked up the pistol. It felt different loaded. Heavier, but also swollen, as if it were ready to burst. He wrapped his left hand around his right, like he’d seen in the movies, pointed the gun at the paper, and squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked, and he was conscious of a distant bang. A black dot appeared four inches to the right of the silhouette’s head. He put the pistol down. Whew …

He raised it again and fired off all the bullets. When he brought the target up on its pulley, he saw what a poor shot he was. The holes were all over the place. Only about half his shots had hit the silhouette.

He sent the target downrange again, reloaded, and kept firing. Each time he pulled the trigger, he felt a little of the stress of the past twenty-four hours leave his neck and shoulders. Each time he fired, he felt a little less angry, a little less helpless. By the time he’d shot all fifty of his bullets, he was hitting the silhouette every time.

I am a gunfighter now
, he thought.
I have a gun, and I know how to use it
.

Rick asked me to meet him at a Starbucks on Woodward Avenue in Royal Oak, a few hundred yards north of the Detroit city limit and the Target Sports range where he’d first shot his gun. I was freshly in off the road, having arced across Iowa and Wisconsin after Nebraska. “That Starbucks is my office,” he said on the phone. Through the glass door of the Starbucks, I saw Rick before he saw me: a big man with bulging eyes and close-cropped hair perched at a tiny table, folders on his lap, cell phone cramped at his ear. He was typing on a big, old-fashioned Compaq laptop and pumping lots of energy into the phone conversation. Smiling widely and gesturing with his left hand, he radiated the desperation of a salesman whose client was slipping off the hook. He wore a loose-fitting, untucked, short-sleeved denim shirt—the kind I now thought of as a gun-guy shirt, easy to hide a pistol under. When he stood to shake hands, he saw my eyes go to his hip. “It’s there,” he said with a laugh. “Always.”

We talked for a while, then walked down the block to shoot. Target Sports was as stuffy and hot as any indoor range I’d been to. A notice on the wall assured us that ventilators were replacing the air every few minutes, but I could taste atomized lead on my tongue. Even wearing hearing protectors, the blasting in the other lanes made it hard to appreciate the Zen geometry of shooting. As for socializing, forget it.

Gun carriers differed on how the range experience—standing still in a lane, gun ready in hand—prepared a person for a gunfight, which would involve clawing out one’s gun in a panic and firing while dodging for cover. Rick agreed that running and gunning would be better practice, but he argued that any kind of practice handling a gun was valuable. “And any day shooting is a good day,” he said, with that wide salesman’s smile.

I was no longer wearing the Colt. Driving long days from Nebraska with that bulbous six-shot revolver against my back was like suffering a large, external kidney stone. So I’d bought a small Smith & Wesson .38 to keep in my right front pocket. Because it held only five shots, it was a little thinner than the Colt, and its aluminum frame made it light. But there were some trade-offs. It was so small that my pinkie dangled below the grip and so light that it stung my hand every time I shot it. Such is the defensive-gun dilemma. Any gun you’d want to have in a gunfight is unpleasant to carry and perhaps impossible to conceal, and a gun that’s easy to carry is of limited use in a gunfight. The difference between my gun and Rick’s said everything about the difference between Rick and me. Mine was all about carrying; I didn’t really think I’d ever need it. Rick had had a gun pressed to his head; he was all about the moment when he’d shoot back. So the bigger the gun he could lug around, the better.

After fifteen shots with my tiny revolver, my hand felt as if it had been beaten with a ball-peen hammer. Rick cocked an eyebrow at my gun and said it was better than going unarmed. By that he meant, just barely.

“I like capacity, capacity, capacity,” he said, sliding another sixteen-shot magazine into the Smith & Wesson M&P, banging them all off in one long staccato fusillade.

“But seriously, you don’t think you’re really going to get yourself into a sustained gunfight, right? I mean, you’ve read the stats; most gunfights are over in two shots.”

“
Most
are over in two shots, but what about the ones that aren’t?”

He let me shoot his gun, which filled my hand and pointed like a dream. I landed sixteen shots effortlessly in a three-inch group. But it was as charmless as it was efficient—a man-killer, with none of the history of
my Colt or the jewelry elegance of my little Smith & Wesson. Concealing it would have meant dressing differently, and, as Henry David Thoreau said, beware any enterprise that requires new clothes.

Rick and I drove together into downtown Detroit, which looked at first as if it had been evacuated. Storefronts along Woodward Avenue were boarded up, and traffic was sparse. But the closer we got to the center, the more I picked up an edgy, offbeat energy that reminded me of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The worst had happened, and now anything was possible. Espresso shops filled old bank buildings, informal art galleries occupied what once had been Ford dealerships. The sidewalk crowds were about equal parts beaten-down, middle-aged, unemployed autoworkers and hip young artists in groovy eyewear. A kind of backhanded revival was under way, with six-bedroom Victorians going for $7,000, abandoned auto plants converting into free studio space, and urban farms tended by nonprofits sprouting on razed lots in old autoworker neighborhoods. Rick and I parked—no problem finding a spot—and he took me to the Lafayette to eat “Coney Islands”—mediocre hot dogs slathered with chili and fluorescent mustard. The minibus of a retirement community was parked out front, and the place was crowded with doddering white men in lemon-yellow pants being guided by strong young black men holding their elbows: a pretty surreal scene. The room was grimy and hot. It must have been a beloved landmark, because I couldn’t see any other reason for eating there.

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.”