Gun Guys (46 page)

Then a friend who is a neonatal nurse in California told me that her state legislature had ordered locked away emergency drugs that had always been readily to hand. Worried that an addict might get ahold of
them, the legislature imposed a complicated process that nurses must go through to get access—a process my friend argued might cost a baby’s life. “We’re nurses!” she cried. “We’re responsible professionals! We know how to take care of our medications!” Again, substitute a word or two and she might have been any ordinary gun guy—who is certain that
his
guns will never be a public safety problem—railing against laws that restrict and infantilize everybody because a tiny percentage of miscreants
might
do something ugly. Which isn’t much different, when you think about it, from racial profiling. After my year among the gun guys, I was hearing echoes of the gun-guy complaint everywhere. As the second decade of the twenty-first century began, it seemed, one did not have to be a gun guy to feel messed with, ignored, micromanaged, and disrespected. Unlike most of us, though, gun guys had found a way to focus that resentment into one manageable issue, and had big, well-funded organizations to stoke and amplify their rage.

We’ve settled into a nice middle-aged marriage, my gun and I. I finally bought one that imposes no physical penalty for wearing it—a tiny .380 automatic, so small and flat that I can slip it into the front pocket of my trousers less obtrusively than a wallet. It carries only seven shots and has less knockdown power than the Glock, but it isn’t heavy; it doesn’t restrict how I dress; I don’t have to worry about exposing it accidentally. It reduces the cost of carrying a gun to near zero.

Even Margaret has grown accustomed to it. I don’t tell her when I’m pocketing my gun; she wouldn’t like it. And if I told her I was getting rid of all my handguns, she’d be thrilled. But we were riding bicycles in Miami one evening and found ourselves in a neighborhood that felt a little scary. She cocked an eyebrow and asked with a smile, “You packing?” She wasn’t really hoping I was, but if I happened to have the little gun under my clothing, she wouldn’t entirely have disapproved.

The thing is, I hardly ever carry a gun anymore. My ardor for going armed burned itself out. Most mornings, I open the safe and close it again, leaving the gun untouched. I’d have liked to have had it in some of those dicey jurisdictions where those who obey the law go unarmed: while wandering Tim White’s world on the West Side of Chicago; riding the Metro through southeast Washington, D.C.; taking night walks through Harlem, Brooklyn, and Queens; driving around south-central Los Angeles. But I don’t carry anymore in Boulder. I don’t even carry very often in New Orleans. The stress was too much for me. I never learned to take
my mind off the gun. It rarely made me feel safer. Perhaps more training would have fixed that, but I couldn’t summon the enthusiasm to spend the time, money, and energy. Turns out I’m not much of a warrior, at least in that sense.

But I begrudge nobody the right to get licensed and trained to carry a gun. Given how little effect widespread carrying seems to have on crime rates, either positively or negatively, it is more an aesthetic choice than anything else. Besides, if I can ask you to accept abortion and gay marriage, you have a right to expect me to accept your gun thing. That’s one of the pleasures of living in a country as complicated and diverse as ours. I just hope that those who carry will do everybody a favor and be discreet and careful about it.

I don’t plan to let my carry permit lapse. And I plan to continue taking my carry guns to the range from time to time. Carrying a gun is a skill and a privilege I value, even if I don’t exercise it daily. I am fully aware that there’s almost no chance I will ever need my gun. I no longer imagine armed crazies lurking in every doorway or behind every Dumpster. But circumstances change. I may find myself traveling to a high-crime city that honors my permit. I might start getting death threats from an angry reader. Violent crime could spike again. After carrying for a year, having the skill and legal right to keep a gun in my pocket feels little more ridiculous than keeping a health insurance card in my wallet or a fire extinguisher in my kitchen. In the extremely unlikely event that I’m in a convenience store when a crackhead barges in, waving a gun, having my own gun means I won’t have to leave it up to him whether I die.

I am grateful also to my gun for teaching me about the difference between Condition White and Condition Yellow, and about the value of vigilance, whether I’m armed or not. Carrying a gun tightened the laces on my life a bit. I like that.

Giving up full-time concealed carry doesn’t mean I’ve given up guns (or become a baseball star). I still take the old ones from the safe to clean and shoot them—the Luger, the break-top Smith & Wesson, the Krag. They’re as elegant and evocative of their day as they ever were. I still stop at gun stores and gun shows to look for old and interesting firearms. But I haven’t touched the Glock in months.

A few days after samba-dancing with my Glock, I happened to be wearing it when I stopped at my bank to make a deposit. Because there was a line for the tellers, I moved over to the ATM. After punching in my
code, I fed a stack of checks into the machine’s stainless-steel maw. They disappeared. I waited. Nothing. No acknowledgment of the deposit, no receipt, nothing. The machine had eaten $2,200 in checks without so much as a burp.

This, then, is the epitaph for my year of living dangerously: I walked into a bank with a gun, and the bank robbed me.

O
n July 20, 2012, a man opened fire with an AR-15 rifle in the Century 16 theater in Aurora, Colorado, killing twelve people and wounding fifty-eight. Five months later—just as this book was going to press—Adam Lanza used an AR-15 to murder twenty first-graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut.

Maybe it was the collective sorrow of so many tragedies in quick succession; maybe it was the heartbreaking age of the Sandy Hook victims; but suddenly gun control, a back-burner issue throughout the election season that had just ended, was front and center. The little bodies were still at the morgue when Senator Dianne Feinstein of California announced that she would introduce an assault-rifle ban and a prohibition on magazines holding more than ten rounds. President Obama said he would support both and assigned Vice President Joe Biden to represent the White House in negotiations. Dick’s Sporting Goods pulled AR-15s from its shelves. The private-equity group Cerberus Capital Management announced that it would sell its stake in Freedom Group, whose cluster of corporations includes the one that had built Lanza’s rifle. Columnists suggested repealing the Second Amendment. Longtime Senate opponents of gun control said they were wavering. Even Rupert Murdoch and the
New York Post
became voices for tougher controls on guns.

It was a natural reaction, but I remember thinking,
There goes another year of potential progress on climate change, immigration reform, and income inequality
. Despite all the challenges the country faced, we were now going to spend months in a bitter fight over a new assault-rifle ban.

The public grieving brought to mind the awful spring of 1986, when a University of Maryland All-American basketball player named Len Bias dropped dead after using cocaine. The country was already distraught
over the dawn of the crack epidemic; Bias’s death touched off a long-pent-up reaction. “Write me some goddamn legislation!” House Speaker Tip O’Neill thundered to his staff, and what they came up with, in the heat of the moment, was mandatory minimum sentencing—a policy that would fill prisons, waste billions, and ruin countless lives.

By the time Sandy Hook happened, the country was battered by the Aurora massacre, the Sikh temple murders, the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the Virginia Tech killings, Fort Hood, and many other mass murders stretching back to Columbine High School, in 1999. A familiar-sounding cry for “some goddamn legislation” made me hope that whatever Congress did in Sandy Hook’s emotional aftermath wouldn’t come back to haunt us.

It was easy to argue that banning assault rifles and high-capacity magazines wouldn’t do any good. Banning things that lots of Americans want—from alcohol to marijuana to guns—has never worked well for long. Millions of assault rifles and big magazines were already in circulation and—just as they had the last time Congress debated a ban, in 1994—gun guys were stocking up like crazy. Once again, talking about a ban was putting more fast-shooting guns and high-capacity magazines on the street. And even if we could somehow get control of such weapons, the ban probably wouldn’t make us much safer statistically. Despite the high-profile incidents, assault rifles were hardly ever used in homicides.

But so what? Even if a ban wouldn’t magically evaporate the nation’s supply of assault rifles, it would at least slow the commerce in militarystyle weapons. Eventually the old ones would wear out, and America’s arsenal in closets and garages would become a little less lethal. A ban might not radically alter crime rates, but it might save a life. Wouldn’t that be worth it? Mandatory minimums weren’t a perfect comparison; they’d wasted billions of dollars and destroyed countless lives. What harm would an assault-rifle ban do?

The way I came to see it, the harm was in opportunity cost. If we did the instinctive thing and made gun owners the enemy, we couldn’t do the smart thing and make them allies in the struggle against gun violence. When we demonized good people like Casey Gunnels, Marcey Parker, and Rick Ector, we deprived ourselves of their expertise. We made gun owners like them the enemy by threatening to ban their guns. We demonized them by implying—when we inveighed against “gun culture” and “America’s love affair with guns”—that they were somehow to blame for
Sandy Hook. We alienated them by asking why any “sane” or “decent” person needed an AR-15—the most popular gun in America, enjoyed harmlessly by millions of law-abiding citizens.

Not that most of us gun guys were attractive allies after Sandy Hook. The website, Twitter feed, and Facebook page of the National Rifle Association went dark for a week, and when the organization resurfaced in a much-hyped press conference, it offered only to help put more guns in schools, in the form of armed volunteers. On the blogs, many gun guys got no further than rage. Even before any gun-ban legislation was introduced, one of my favorite bloggers, often a nuanced writer, referred darkly to “the post-Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre anti-Second Amendment witch hunt.”

What a wasted opportunity. Gun guys—who knew guns better than anybody—should have had a lot more to offer. Although there was a cold logic to Wayne LaPierre’s insistence that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” suggesting that we turn schools into armed bunkers was tone-deaf a week after Sandy Hook, as was his bleating that the NRA, successful at nearly every turn for decades, was a victim of the “media” and the “political class.”

Such is the nature of what passes for a “debate” over guns—sanctimony and name calling on one side, a snarling defensive crouch on the other. If we could have kept our hands off the gun-control hair trigger a moment longer, we might have been able to enlist gun guys—or the least doctrinaire among them—in coming up with measures that might have made a statistical dent in gun violence.

The NRA wing of gun-guy America believes that all regulation is illegitimate, that to consider any new law is to start down a slippery slope toward gun confiscation. But some regulations work. They improve public safety without infringing on what the U.S. Supreme Court has deemed an individual right to keep and bear arms. They make it possible for the non-gun-owning public to shape the way our firearms affect them. (And our guns
do
affect them; let’s start by accepting that.) Instead of blindly rejecting any new laws, gun guys ought to come up with ones they like. At the risk of putting my head in the lion’s mouth, here are three modest suggestions to start a conversation:

Responsibility. If gun owners knew they would be criminally liable for crimes committed with guns stolen from their houses, they’d gradually get more serious about locking them up. Adam Lanza might have
been using guns his mother had left unsecured. Quick-access safes make guns available to their owners in emergencies, so there’s no excuse for not requiring gun owners, through criminal penalties, to obey Rule Five: Maintain control of your firearm. We’re obviously not doing a good enough job of it on our own. If gun-rights extremists want to mount an argument against keeping guns safely stowed, let them. (They’ll answer to Jeff Cooper someday.) The rest of us should not mind criminal consequences for those who leave guns lying around where children, troubled teenagers, and thieves can find them.

Training. Some gun guys object to stiffer training requirements for concealed carry. Some don’t think a permit should be required at all; they believe in “constitutional carry,” which is the law in Arizona, Vermont, and Alaska. But take it from someone who’s done it: Packing without good training is a bad idea, both practically and politically. Every gun guy urges every other gun guy to get properly trained before carrying, so why not mandate it? Training is not an infringement of Second Amendment rights; it’s an
enhancement
of Second Amendment rights—a well-trained armed citizen is more effective in a crisis. The NRA offered to train a cadre of armed volunteers for schools, so why does it object to more stringent training requirements for everybody who carries? The non-gun public fears concealed carry. Gun owners should be leaders in making the practice safer, more effective, and easier for our neighbors to accept.

Background checks. Closing the gun-show loophole—requiring background checks at gun shows—is a no-brainer. It is no great burden on anybody, and it would give us one less thing to fight about. I live in a state that has closed the loophole, and I have bought plenty of guns at shows with little inconvenience. My gun rights are intact.