Hidden America Page 14

  He was proud of Yuma and wanted me to like it and I told him I did. He was proud of the firearms industry and wanted me to like that, too, and I was working on it. Unlike the conversation stopper back home, here in Yuma, saying, “Hey, I’m thinking of buying a gun,” was more or less presumed, like picking up dry cleaning, or getting a haircut.

  Guns could be fun too. Allyson liked trap and skeet, and so one day she took me shooting. We drove fifteen miles into the desert where Sprague’s operates an outdoor range, and we took turns with the long gun aiming into the sky at soaring orange clay pigeons about the size of hockey pucks. Trap (the disks fly into the distance) and skeet (they swoop in an arc across the sky) are shooting games that have nothing to do with killing anything. The clay simply goes poof into the air if your aim is good enough, which mine was just once out of perhaps twenty-five tries. Without the burdensome image of killing, I found shooting guns completely enjoyable. “Pull!” I shouted, followed by “Oh, shit,” a pattern that reminded me of summer nights at the driving range, or swinging in circles at the batting cages.

  “What’s the most surprising thing about your trip so far?” Richard asked me one morning. We were driving back from a daybreak session at the outdoor range, where he had given me some beginner lessons on how to shoot my new M&P15. It wasn’t hard. Virtually no recoil, just as Ron had promised, and while in that way I was satisfied with my purchase, I found that I could not let go of a feeling of disappointment, of some kind of tangled shame that had nothing to do with shooting guns, or gun ownership, but that somehow I had wimped out and bought an assault rifle a six-year-old could use. Already, by that point, I was thinking about getting another gun. I thought about the Olympic Arms Plinker Plus I hadn’t really gotten a chance to examine and how much I enjoyed saying “Plinker Plus.” I thought about investing in a vintage Uzi and how much fun it would be to say, “Dude, I have an Uzi.”

  Arizona was big on freedom and the feeling of recklessness was intoxicating.

  “The most surprising thing?” I said to Richard. He was backlit against a morning sky exploding with red and pink and orange. “That’s going to be hard to summarize.”

  “There must be something,” he said.

  “I guess the most surprising thing is that everyone here thinks guns are so normal,” I said. I told him it wasn’t like that where I come from, not like that at all.

  He nodded in consideration, and I wondered if he understood. I offered him a piece of gum and he took it and for a while we just chewed and admired the passing mesquite. “Think of just the hunters,” he said. “Thirteen million in this country. That’s thirteen million Americans trained with firearms—the equivalent of the largest army in the world.” He flipped his visor down to cut the sky. “Anyone thinking of invading this country has to take that into consideration.”

  Well, wow. Hunters? Hunters rising up? It took me a moment to conjure the image. I wondered whom Richard imagined an army of guys dressed in Day-Glo orange and hip waders rising up against. Al Qaeda? The Chinese?

  I asked him who. Who?

  He shrugged, said it could be anyone, another country, anyone. He said the whole point of guns was personal responsibility: taking care of yourself, your family, your neighborhood, your country. The more people there are with guns, the safer the society. “That’s part of what has made this country great,” he said. “That we have the freedom to make sure we’re safe, that we have the means to protect ourselves, to be ready for even the occasional wackos that are out there.”

  I hadn’t come to Yuma to discuss the Second Amendment, but it kept coming up, as pervasive as the constant hot sunshine. People wanted to talk about it, defend it, explain. I wasn’t there to challenge the position, but I did feel like a foreigner bringing news from a distant society. Where I come from, people don’t talk about the right to bear arms all that much; we just don’t.

  “The largest army in the world,” Richard said again. “Bigger than China’s. And if you think Afghanistan and their populace is well armed, wait till they try to come into this country. It should give you some cause for comfort.”

  He looked at me. I had my head jutted forward and my thumbnail between my teeth.

  “That’s just how I look at it,” he said, and continued driving. The heat on the horizon was already visible in wobbles and waves.

  —

  YUMA HIGH SCHOOL is the home of the Criminals, and at home games the football players storm onto the field behind police cars blaring their sirens and circling the team frantically while the mascot, a giant miserable-looking bobble-headed dude in striped prison gear, runs Keystone Kop–style to whip up the fans, many of them dressed in “Crimwear,” criminal-themed T-shirts and hoodies available in the school store—the “Cell Block.”

  The motif is on account of the famous Yuma Territorial Prison, a massive, craggy adobe landmark sitting since 1876 high on a hill in downtown Yuma and where today you can pay $5 for a tour. Yuma is proud of its prison, celebrating it in postcards and parades like the annual Yuma Prison (motorcycle) Run that happens every April. People in Yuma find it notable that in the old days folks back east regarded the Yuma Territorial Prison as the absolute worst place a convict could be sent.

  The criminal imagery was simply a backdrop, of course, but it did help explain things: Bad guys were everywhere. Keeping yourself armed against them was not a matter of debate so much as a way of life, a routine as obvious as church. The bad guys were coming, and you were naïve or just plain stupid not to be prepared.

  Nearly all the shoppers I met at Sprague’s came in asking for something for self-protection. They wanted guns for their nightstands, guns for their purses, guns for their pickups, guns for holsters on waistbands, ankles, and bras. A guy in a wheelchair wanted a pistol to keep beside his thigh, something with a light trigger pull, because his illness made his hands weak. A tiny woman with a spray of tattoos beside her eye wanted something “big, blocky, and manly-looking” to scare off would-be attackers. An old woman with long gray hair wanted something for her kitchen drawer.

  “Where I come from, people don’t talk about shooting bad guys as much as you folks do,” I said one day to a gathering of customers and clerks.

  “You depend on the government to protect you,” said a middle-aged woman dry-firing a Ruger. She was admiring the smooth trigger action and regretting her clunkier Glock. “We depend on ourselves,” she said.

  “It’s an entirely different mind-set back east,” said Kevin, a slim clerk with thinning black hair who had sold me a ticket for the Yuma Catholic High School 125 Gun Raffle. “You can get a permit in New York City to own a gun,” he said. “That’s the thing. They’ll permit you. In Arizona we don’t care. Our government doesn’t allow us, our government stays out of our ability to protect ourselves.”

  But—from what? I’d never been attacked by anyone; I didn’t know anyone who had ever been attacked by anyone. I follow the news, of course, and I see violence enacted all the time on TV. But I didn’t walk around in fear of getting mugged, or worse. Was this simply naïve? The people shopping at Sprague’s were saying yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Anyone without a gun was inviting disaster.

  I thought about my assault rifle. I did not consider personal protection when I bought it. In a bragging and joking way, I sent photos of it to people back home. I kept the Kick Brass wrapper on it and I tried to position it so it looked mean. I didn’t tell anyone that it wasn’t a gun that could easily blow a guy’s head off or anything, even though it did sort of look like it could, and I didn’t say anything about the six-year-old. I read somewhere that the .22 caliber is the gun of choice for Mafia hit men and that made me feel a little better about my choice. I recognized that these were almost certainly socially abnormal thoughts—feeling good that the gun you bought was indeed a killing machine—but that did not stop me from having them.

  It is
difficult for me to say what exactly was prompting me, or what sort of corner I was turning. Perhaps buying an assault rifle—even as a joke, or an experiment—puts you over some sort of threshold. Or it could be something about anyone’s capacity to get caught up in a shopping frenzy: hang around people buying stuff long enough and pretty soon you want to buy the stuff too. I do know the gadgetry of guns appealed to me. The clicking and the clacking, little laser attachments you could add, the feel of steel so expertly shaped to fit a human grip.

  Standing at the counter with Kevin, I asked him to show me something small, for my purse.

  “Women always come in saying they want something small,” he said. “Then they find out how much harder a small gun is to shoot. Save yourself the time and get something big.”

  He unfolded a felt pad and put it on top of the glass case, then brought out a Glock 9mm semiauto. It felt solid and serious. He showed me how to slap in the magazine and how to pull back the slide. It was an unnatural action, kind of a pull and a push at the same time, and I didn’t take easily to it. I asked to see an alloy Smith & Wesson on the top shelf of the case. It was wearing a little tag about being feather-light. Kevin said it was too small for me and the caliber was worthless.

  “You’re not going to stop anybody with a .22. It’s going to poke little holes in the guy.”

  “He’ll run off after that,” I said. “Anybody would.”

  “He’s on meth,” Kevin said. “He’s got your kid by the throat. It’s the middle of the night and he’s going to take your whole family out. He’s coming after you. He’s dragging your kid. He’s on meth! He’s not feeling your little .22s hitting him, I promise you. Those bullets are going right through him, and the ones that miss are going through the drywall right into the baby’s room—”

  I put the Smith down on the counter and shifted my weight in consideration. If anything like that happened to me, or my kid, I definitely would want something capable of blowing a guy’s face off.

  I paid $450 for the Glock, a used one—a bargain. Normally a gun like that would go for $100 more.

  Kevin said he would ship it to a licensed dealer near my home in Pennsylvania, in accordance with federal law, and I could pick it up there. I could then go to my local sheriff’s office and in the time it would take to snap my picture, print it out, and laminate it, I would be able to get a license to carry my new Glock concealed.

  All of it was so easy, and that really was the only confusing part about buying guns. So easy. And yet, why should it be difficult for me to get a gun? I wasn’t a criminal. I wasn’t going to commit a heinous act—not unless I had to defend myself or my family. Defending yourself and your family is what good people do. Getting a gun should be easy for good people, and impossible for bad people. The only trick is telling the difference.

  —

  AT SPRAGUE’S THEY OFFER gun safety classes, five dollars each, and the guys at the counter were always eagerly suggesting them to first-timers, pointing out that actually the classes were free, since they came with a five-dollar coupon to the store. I took the “First Shots” class, which was all about handguns. Fifteen of us sat in a quiet little classroom next to the shooting range, where Richard had set up fresh coffee and cookies, and we marveled at the heft of various pistols and semiautos and passed them around like science experiments. Nic, the instructor, made us wear geeky eye and ear protection, all of which ceased being geeky when we got into the range and started shooting and hot brass shell casings occasionally popped like hayseeds out of the semiautos, and every bang! reverberated through your ribs and teeth and toes. All of the older guys at Sprague’s complained of being half deaf from years of shooting.

  Nic handed me a Ruger .22 target pistol, and he told me to stand square, lean forward, squeeze gently, and I unloaded ten rounds at a red circle twenty-five feet away. He flicked a switch on the wall, and the target came zooming toward us as if on a clothesline. “Awesome!” he said, I think, because I couldn’t hear. My target showed four beautiful holes smack-dab in the coveted red zone, and six others nearby. I told Nic I wanted more bullets and he refilled the magazine.

  My aim the second go was high, way high of the target. “You’re anticipating the bang,” he shouted. “You’re thinking ‘bang’ and pulling up.” I asked for more bullets.

  My third go was terrible. Thinking about anything but “bang” when you knew “bang” was coming was apparently some centered state of consciousness I could not reach. I asked for more bullets. I thought about the enormity of responsibility dumped on your shoulders the moment you decide to add a gun into your life. You have to know how to use it, and if you plan to use it for self-defense, you have to practice and practice until the memory is in your muscles. You don’t want to be fumbling, trying to figure out the slide on your Glock or the safety switch on your Ruger or trying to go Zen when your adrenaline is saying, Fuck! I’m gonna die!

  Nic adjusted my grip, moved my pinkies and thumbs, and pushed me so my stance was way forward, unnaturally forward, and, perhaps like anyone learning a new instrument, I needed to get the damn thing right. I asked for more bullets.

  I got to thinking about the attacker coming at me with my kid by the throat, how I’d have one chance to stop him from ruining everything I ever loved, and my aim got worse. There was so much head in this game. I asked for more bullets. Nic taught me how to load the magazine myself. Press on the spring, insert the little brass bullet, repeat, pull, insert, repeat, repeat, repeat. It was a pain in the ass. Imagine playing a video game and having to stop every two minutes to change the batteries. Can’t we just get back to the shooting? I thought about buying a bunch of thirty-three-round magazines—fifty-round magazines?—for my Glock and filling them up at home in front of the TV, like knitting, so I would be all set up for next time. After the Tucson shootings, a lot of people argued that a thirty-three-round magazine shouldn’t even be legal. The kind of high-capacity magazine that enabled Loughner to get off as many rounds and shoot as many people as quickly as he did was banned from manufacture and sale from 1994 to 2004, when the federal assault-weapons ban expired. Attempts to bring the law back have failed.

  In those moments I could not understand why a senator or congressman or anyone should have a say over my decision to watch TV and fill large and extra-large magazines with bullets.

  I stood square, shut one eye, and fired the Ruger again and hit the red zone twice. I felt like a hero. I asked for more bullets.

  —

  WORKING IN A GUN STORE is hard on your feet, and your back. There was a stool behind the counter at Sprague’s and I was trying not to hog it. I sat and watched customer after customer feel and fondle and dry-fire guns, and I thought about the burden on the clerks whose job it was to dole out firepower—only to the good guys, never to the criminals and the crazies.

  I saw customers get turned down, most commonly teenagers getting carded when they tried to buy bullets. You had to be at least eighteen to buy rifle or shotgun ammo, twenty-one to buy rounds for a handgun. “Sorry, man,” the clerk would say. One clerk told me about drunks wanting to buy guns, drunks wanting to buy knives—he could smell them as soon as they came through the door: “Sorry, man.” Another told me about ATF agents waiting out in the parking lot, hoping to nab people in the act of making straw purchases—a constant threat at a store so close to the border to Mexico, where private citizens are effectively not allowed to own firearms.

  Sergio, one of the clerks at Sprague’s, had some thoughts about what it felt like to work behind the counter and size up people like Jared Loughner. Sergio was quiet, small, with a broad swarthy face and a big, rugged nose. He had been in the business for twenty-five years, seventeen of them at Sprague’s, and he often sat on the stool.

  “You get suspicious,” he said. “A woman yesterday. She was with a guy holding a baby. She said she wanted three guns, but then he did all the talk
ing. He kept saying ‘me’ and ‘mine’ and ‘my money.’ They were just bad actors. I don’t mean bad people. I mean they couldn’t act. I said to the guy, ‘I think you’re trying to get her to buy guns for you.’ And he said, ‘Oh, er, ehhh,’ and he shoved the baby back at her and flew out the door.”

  Looking out for Loughners and other lunatics was part of the job, he said, and he didn’t like that part of the job. “I remember years ago going to an ATF seminar. The agent was talking to us, the counter people, and he said, ‘I need you as a front line of defense. To watch out for criminals.’ And I remember thinking he was out of his mind. How can I tell who’s a criminal? And I don’t have any rights as far as enforcing anything, I don’t have a badge, you know, what can I do?”

  He could refuse a sale. That’s what he’s supposed to do, according to the ATF agents I spoke to, and according to the YouTube “ATF Channel,” where you can watch informational skits featuring clerks doing the right thing. If a clerk feels iffy about selling a gun to someone, he or she should simply say, “No.”

  The ATF has little else to say on the matter, because the ATF is busy. ATF staffing for field inspection is puny, severely stunted in its growth: the number of investigators has not grown since the 1970s. (Critics blame the stagnation on gun lobbyists who are determined to keep government agencies out of the gun conversation.) A network of twenty-five ATF field divisions oversees America’s 56,000 licensed dealers, essentially one for every two states. About 650 inspectors monitor how the large-scale gun stores, like Sprague’s and Walmart, conduct business. Inspectors are supposed to go into each store once every three years, but are lucky if they make the rounds in six or seven, given the manpower.

  NICS is designed to weed out the criminals and the wackos so the clerks don’t have to. Indeed, Sergio said the background check system, which started in 1998, represented a vast improvement over the way things were done in the old days. About 125 million background checks have since been processed through NICS, with nearly 825,000 sales denied. Well over half of those denials were convicted criminals, 8 percent were drug addicts, 4 percent had restraining orders on them for domestic violence, and fewer than 1 percent had been denied a gun because of “adjudicated mental health.”