Gun Guys by Dan Baum Read Free Book Online

usually manage that; everybody else went unarmed or carried illegally.
    Then came the
Miami Vice
days of the mid-1980s. The crack cocaine epidemic was heating up, and crime was on the rise. Miami was the worst of the worst—which is why the era’s emblematic hyperviolent cop show was set there. Most places ravaged by gun violence reacted by passing increasingly strict gun laws, on the theory that making it harder for law-abiding residents to get guns would make it harder for criminals, too. Florida, though—suffering a murder rate almost half again higher than the national average—went the other way. Bad guys would always be able to get guns, the legislators figured, so law-abiding citizens should have the means to defend themselves.
    In 1987, Florida created a state agency to issue carry permits to anyadult who wanted one, provided there was no good reason to deny it. The Florida law was nicknamed “shall issue”—as in, state officials shall issue the permit and not apply their own discretion. I was living in Atlanta at the time and sneered at the bumpkins to the south.
Oh, that’s a
good
idea
, I thought.
Let’s put
more
guns in circulation. That’ll stop the killing
. There was a whiff of Wild West machismo to Florida’s move, like handing out guns to a posse. I predicted that every Florida fender bender would turn into a gunfight.
    The majority of Americans, though, saw it differently. Or, perhaps more accurately, a majority of the people who cared one way or the other about it saw it differently and made a lot of noise. From Maine to Arizona, they clamored for the right to defend themselves. Or maybe they clamored for an opportunity to live the gun life, to handle a gun every day. Whatever the case, once gun guys heard about what Florida had done, they asked their legislatures to follow suit. And, one after another, they did.
    It was a big moment in the history of gun politics. The gun-rights movement had won just about every battle it had engaged since coalescing in the late 1960s, but most had been defensive battles against new gun-control laws. Reversing the burden of proof on carry permits
expanded
gun rights. For the first time, the movement was on offense.
    By the time I was embarrassing myself by carrying a blunderbuss down the aisles of Whole Foods, thirty-seven states had gone shall-issue—including my home state of Colorado. Many recognized the permits of other states. So I had an alternative to displaying my firepower. I could carry discreetly and show the gun only when I needed to—like flashing a Masonic pin or giving the secret handshake.
    I still faced, of course, the Margaret hurdle. She never said no to anything, but she had infinite power to make me feel like an idiot and a weenie. She would surely do so when I mentioned a carry permit. The responsibilities of literature, however, were great.
    “You want to wear a concealed
gun
,” she said when I brought it up one night at dinner. Across the table, our sixteen-year-old daughter, Rosa, put down her fork and said, “Dad.”
    I explained that I needed to look like a gun guy. I explained that I needed to get into the gun-guy mind-set. I explained, and I explained. Margaret and Rosa looked at each other in a way that no woman everlooks at a man. It was a look that said,
We have to share the planet with men; let’s make the best of it until we find a use for them
.
    By this time it was no longer necessary to speculate, as I had in Atlanta, as to what kind of mayhem widespread concealed carry might unleash. We had two decades of experience demonstrating that the short answer was: None. The national murder rate had fallen to about half what it had been when Florida started the shall-issue revolution; rape, robbery, and aggravated assault had also fallen sharply. Not only were “bad guy” murders way down—those committed in the course of other felonies—but so were the kind of spur-of-the-moment shootings that turned law-abiding people