Gun Guys (8 page)

The only reason I would “lose” a Colorado permit would be if, say, I committed a violent felony or beat up Margaret and had a restraining order placed on me. Florida was willing, even then, to step in and allow me to continue to carry a gun.

For the live-fire portion of the class, we got into our own cars and followed Rob across metro Denver—thirty minutes of our three hours—to a grimy shooting range in a shopping center. Five of the six lanes were taken up by young black guys teaching their girlfriends to shoot, with lots of whooping and laughing amid deafening blasts of nine-millimeters and .45s. My classmates and I filed to the sixth lane and, one by one, snapped off twenty shots from a long-barreled .22 target pistol. As preparation for defending ourselves with a gun, it was about as useful as learning to cook an omelet. We emerged, heads ringing from the concussions of the nine-millimeters and .45s, and Rob was there to hand us a certificate, xeroxed onto faux parchment.

“You can’t possibly believe this class has prepared me to carry a gun,” I said.

“This class has met the
legal requirement
to carry a gun,” he said. “There’s a difference. I strongly recommend more training.”

The shooting portions of the classes had reminded me why I rarely took my guns to the range. I hated the noise. So, in for a penny, in for a pound: As long as I was going to carry a gun, I decided to look into getting a silencer for it.

The first silencer I ever saw was the one Oddjob used to dispatch Solo—before having him crushed inside a Lincoln Continental—in
Goldfinger
. I was eight years old. The elegance of that long tube protruding from the muzzle of the pistol, and the deep
thud
the shot made, moved me the way the first
slick-click
of Hank Hilliard’s Mossberg .22 rifle had. For years I saw silencers in every cylindrical object I found—toilet paper rolls, Magic Markers, apple corers—and affixed them to every toy gun I had. I know how that sounds, but to paraphrase Freud: Sometimes a silencer is just a silencer. When it was time to put away childish things, I tried making real ones by duct-taping two-liter soda bottles over the muzzle of a .22 pistol. They worked, sort of. A crude silencer is naught but a chamber in which exploding gases depressurize before escaping. In a commercial silencer, baffles—which look like a stack of washers separated by tiny spaces—tamp the sound even more. My homemade ones were nowhere near as cool as screw-on silencers. They made it impossible to aim and often flew off with the first shot. But they did give the gun more of a
snap
sound than a reverberating bang.

They were also felonious. The first federal gun law, in 1934, required people who wanted a silencer to apply for a permit, submit to a background check, and pay a two-hundred-dollar federal tax—big money at a time when the average farmworker earned less than a dollar an hour. The same rules applied to machine guns and sawed-off shotguns, which, when Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker, and the Barrow Gang were tearing up the country, were the era’s weapons of mass destruction. Silencers got thrown into the law not because they were gangster weapons but because, in the depths of the Depression, people were using them to poach wildlife. For me to make a silencer without paying the tax was like applying to go to federal prison.

By the time I was in the market for a real silencer, two hundred dollars and a bit of paperwork made applying for the permit little more onerous than applying for a passport. In the decade since 2000, the number of permit applications had grown sixfold. Silencers were becoming so popular
that the National Shooting Sports Foundation—the gun industry’s trade association—sent a flyer to its retailer members alerting them to this growth opportunity.

When I told my friends I was in the process of getting a silencer, they were appalled. “You can buy silencers?” “Why does anybody need a silencer?” “An assassination weapon?” It turned out to be a very American attitude; in Europe, it was hard to get a license for a gun, but in most countries you could buy a silencer over the counter. In some, you were required to do so. Europe was crowded—who wanted to listen to gunfire?

“We in Finland have no legislation which regulate or ban the use of silencers, not the hunting legislation, not the firearms legislation,” wrote Klaus Ekman, of Finland’s Hunters’ Central Organization. “But you have to remember that before you can buy a gun in Finland, you have to explain to the police the purpose you are buying the gun.”

Peter Jackson, a designer and manufacturer of silencers in Scotland, sent me what amounted to a scholarly treatise on European silencer law, which included the remarkable news that silencers were completely unregulated in France; that silencers for shotguns and air rifles could be sold freely through the mail in the United Kingdom (I hadn’t known that shotgun silencers existed); that rifle silencers were available in Britain with minimal paperwork; and that Article 5 of Directive 2003/10/EC, a European Union law,
required
silencers to be issued to anyone, such as a gamekeeper, who used a gun at work. “Although this obligation only applies to the employers of people who are ‘at work,’ ” Jackson wrote, “it is a fair bet that our courts would award heavy damages against any official who denied a recreational hunter the protection against exposure to noise which is mandatory for a professional.” He also reminded me that silencers protect the sensitive ears of hunting dogs, who cannot wear earmuffs like their human masters can—a very British concern.

“The great majority of the people get their image of firearms silencers from those special agent movies,” he wrote. “That is why people resist using silencers on firearms. If I knew only the movie image of silencers, I would resist them, too.”

The agency that issued the permits in the United States was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives—the ATF. I called to ask whether the ATF disagreed with the Europeans—whether they believed that silencers were a public safety risk.

“If the police find a body with a hole in it, they can’t tell if a silencer
was used,” said the official in the appropriate department to whom I was passed, who asked that I not identify him. But, he added, “If we thought there was a problem, we’d do something about it. And we don’t.”

The first step in getting a silencer was to find a “Class III dealer”—someone specially licensed to sell weapons covered under the 1934 law. That led me to the most enthusiastic gun guy I’d ever met: Oliver Mazurkiewicz.

His shop was hard to find. It had no sign out front. MapQuest took me to a locked, smoked-glass door in a Longmont, Colorado, office park, next to something called White Rose Herbals. I buzzed, and a grim-faced man opened the door six inches and peered out at me suspiciously.

“I’m here to see Oliver,” I said, and he opened just enough to let me in, then relocked. It was like entering a speakeasy. “I’m here to buy a silencer,” I said.

“He’ll be back soon.”

I looked around and understood the security precautions. We were standing in a small, windowless showroom that looked like a set from
The Man from U.N.C.L.E
. On the walls hung the most terrifying collection of battle weapons I’d ever seen: twenty-five or so black or desert-tan AR-15s crusted with scopes and lasers, each with a big tubular silencer screwed to its muzzle. I took one of the rifles from the wall, noticing its full/semi switch. It was a machine gun—a silenced, scoped, fully automatic weapon.

“You military contractors?” I asked the sour-faced man.

“Not yet. Hope to be.”

“So who buys these?”

“Who doesn’t?” He went back to a workshop where two other guys were working on guns at a long bench.

I sighted through the machine gun’s big scope out the smoked-glass door. A ladder on a rooftop two blocks away shimmered on the bridge of my nose; I could have hit a fly crawling on it. The door flew open, and a broad-shouldered, sandy-haired man burst through, his face filling the scope.

“Whoa!” he said with a laugh, looking down the barrel. “You Dan?”

I hung the rifle back on the wall. Oliver was a burly man in his early forties, with a handsome Slavic face and a handshake like Oddjob’s car crusher. “That’s a two-stamp gun,” he said, pointing at the rifle with two index fingers. “You need one federal stamp for the machine gun and one
for the silencer. I’ll sell it to you right now for fifty-six hundred, which is an incredible deal.”

He started doing many things at once—checking his computer, making phone calls, fixing the printer, rummaging through paper files, and unpacking two guns from holsters concealed in his waistband: a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum and a compact .40-caliber Glock. While talking on the phone, he handed me a small cardboard box in which I found a black anodized tube about six inches long, with
TEC
-65 and a serial number etched on the side. As he kept up his manic phone call, he took my credit card and ran it for $325—$250 for the silencer and a $75 “transfer fee.” With the phone clamped between his ear and his shoulder, he carried what was now my silencer into the workshop and locked it in a huge gun safe. I wouldn’t see it again for three months. The same time limit applied to background checks for the silencer as for the concealed-carry permit; I’d get them at about the same time. Oliver ended his call and addressed himself to me. “Sorry. It’s just nuts!”

“Silencers?”

“Silencers, guns, everything!”

“How’d you get into this?”

“My mother grew up in Germany during the war and hates guns,” he said. “She wouldn’t let me have a squirt gun, wouldn’t let me have a rubber-band gun. Wouldn’t let me point my finger and go ‘Bang.’ Well, Mom?” He gestured at the firepower surrounding us on the walls. “Look what you did.”

“And the silencers?”

“The majority of my customers are like you.” He swung both arms back, up and over, to point two index fingers at my nose. “They want a silencer because it’s such a taboo. But then they discover that it makes sense to quiet it all down. You try to teach a kid to shoot, and if he’s wearing hearing protectors, you have to yell so he can hear you. Kids get tired of people yelling at them! They tune them out! Silence the gun, you don’t have that problem.

“I won’t shoot without a silencer anymore,” he continued. “Why should I? Why put up with the noise when you don’t have to? Most guys don’t start out thinking that way. They start out thinking just,
It’s cool. It’s James Bond
. You can fault Hollywood for that. You want to hear what it’s going to sound like?”

He scurried into the back room and came out with a scoped .22-caliber rifle that had a six-inch cylinder screwed onto the barrel. We walked
across the parking lot to where a plow had pushed a big pile of dirty snow. Oliver worked the bolt, pointed the rifle into the snowbank, and pulled the trigger. The gun made a faint
phut
—much like in the movies—and a handful of snow leapt from the pile.

“Is that cool or what?” he asked as we walked back inside. Only .22-caliber silencers, like the one I was buying, are as quiet as Hollywood silencers, he said. A nine-millimeter or .45—to say nothing of a full-size hunting rifle—makes a pretty loud pop, though still a lot less than an unsilenced gun. And then there’s the issue of the bullet’s speed. A silencer only reduces the bang of powder exploding. Most bullets, .22s included, travel faster than sound and make a distinctive
crack
. That can be eliminated only by using subsonic ammunition, as Oliver had used in his demo.

“Where do you get
that?
”

“Everywhere. I need to see your driver’s license.” He copied down the information, signed and stamped the form, and handed me a sheaf of papers.

“Go over to Kinko’s and get two passport pictures taken. Take them and these papers to your sheriff and get fingerprinted. You also need him to sign off; he has to give his
permission
.” He rolled his eyes theatrically. “When you get the papers back from him, you send everything to the ATF with a two-hundred-dollar check. It’s all bullshit, but it makes us rich.”

“Then what?”

“Then you wait. Probably the full three months. The paperwork will come back to me. I’ll call you, and you can come pick up your silencer.”

His phone started ringing, and he reached for it with his left hand. At the same time, he extended his right to me to shake, flicked his eyebrows, and smiled wickedly. “Welcome to the dark side.”

My concealed-carry permit came right on time, and I picked it up from the county clerk. It was the size, shape, and texture of a credit card. As with most IDs, the photo made me look like someone who shouldn’t be carrying a gun. I went home and loaded my .38 with 125-grain hollow-point cartridges. I slipped it into a holster and tucked it inside the waistband of my trousers, over my right kidney. Then I put on a sport coat and went out for a walk on Boulder’s quaint downtown pedestrian mall, expecting at any moment to hear someone yell,
“He’s got a gun!”
and tackle me. Nobody, of course, paid me a blind bit of notice.

I found that I wasn’t so much in Condition Yellow as Condition
Day-Glo
Yellow. Everything around me appeared brilliantly sharp, the colors extra rich, the contrasts shockingly stark. I could hear footsteps on the pavement two blocks away. As people around me went about their business, utterly relaxed, I experienced a weird amalgam of envy and pity. Their bliss seemed ignorant, almost irritatingly obtuse. There was an undeniable sheeplike quality to them as they licked their ice cream cones and swung their shopping bags. Utterly blithe and vulnerable, they looked like extras in the first reel of a disaster movie. And there I was, striding among them, uniquely capable of resisting whatever violence might be their portion. It surprised me that it made me feel rather noble.