Gun Guys by Dan Baum Read Free Book Online Page B

Americans were defending themselves with guns every year as were being murdered with them.
    It seemed crazy to me that guns could be used harmlessly so often without us ever hearing about it, until I considered what I would do if a thug threatened me on the street, I pulled my gun, and he ran away. Would I call the police? Only if I was in the mood for spending the rest of my evening answering questions—and perhaps being booked for assault, being held in a cell overnight, and losing my gun. More likely, I’d shut up. And even if I did report the incident, how likely is it that a reporter would find it newsworthy?
    It’s possible, of course, that in both surveys a lot of those who reported using their guns to stop a crime were inventing a story to make themselves feel cool or had brandished a gun needlessly at a panhandler or harmless bump in the night. But even if only an eighth of Hemenway’s already “low” number were genuine life-or-death situations, guns were still quietly saving as many lives as, or more than, they were taking. For someone like me, who started out thinking widespread concealed carry was a bad idea, this was rattling.
    In any case, my sneering at Florida had been misplaced: Shall-issue may not have caused crime to drop, but neither had it uncorked rivers of blood. And let’s be honest—I found that a little thrilling. Because now I could get a concealed-carry permit of my own and start handling my gun every day without feeling as though I were contributing to a virulent social pathology.
    Colorado required people who wanted a carry permit to get trained, but it left the details up to county sheriffs. Mine, a jovial and popular Democrat named Joe Pelle, required only proof of training by an “NRA-approved” instructor. Knowing how Boulder’s pleasures tended toward qigong and Pilates, I expected to drive some distance to find a shooting school. So I was surprised to find in the phone book something called the Boulder Rifle Club, whose NRA-approved concealed-carry classes were booked an astonishing two months out. The number of carry permits Sheriff Pelle issued annually had risen eighteenfold in the previous decade. Nine hundred Boulderites applied every year. Maybe the aging hippies in Whole Foods hadn’t blinked at my gun because they were packing themselves.
    “There’s Brazilian music tonight at the Laughing Goat,” Margaret said one afternoon as we returned from yoga class. “Rosa and I are going.” She snapped her fingers theatrically. “Oh, that’s right. You have your
gun thing
tonight.”
    And off I slunk, to join the legion of the armed.
    Boulder can be an uncomfortably high-tone place—wealthy and possessed of a higher concentration of advanced degrees than any town in America. The club turned out, though, to be down-home in the extreme: naught but a couple of ranges bulldozed from the sagebrush, and a cement-floored, cinder-block-walled “clubhouse” that was about as elegant as aboiler room. I was glad; this was what a shooting place was supposed to look like. Red school lockers lined one wall, and a lone flickering fluorescent tube gave the room a sickly middle-school pallor. The bulletin board carried ads for gunsmithing, taxidermy services, guns, and car insurance. Posters taped to the wall, I was relieved to see, were all about gun safety; nothing in the room was political—no NRA posters.
    Three big thirtysomething guys dressed in identical black hoodies—hoods up—whispered and chuckled to each other like a band of Jawas en route to capture R2-D2. The rest of the students had already found seats at the cheap folding tables that would serve as desks: an elegantly dressed elderly gentleman, a middle-aged husband-and-wife team, and, at a table with an empty chair, one of Rosa’s teachers from middle school.
    “What are
you
doing here?” I asked, taking a seat.
    His eyes didn’t quite meet mine; he seemed mortified to have been recognized. “I’ve never owned