Gun Guys (17 page)

Much as I loved New Orleans, its breathtaking murder rate lent a dark undertone to my visits, as though a bow were being drawn, just at the edge of hearing, across a low E contrabass string. It wasn’t as though the violence was relegated to “those” parts of town or to “those” people, either. One friend, a lawyer, had been shot in the back in a “good” part of town. Another, a Tulane English professor, had been robbed at gunpoint in front of his house. He’d had only seven dollars in his pocket, and as the robbers walked off, a neighbor heard one say to the other, “Seven dollars! We should have shot him.”

Ever since hearing that story, I’d made a point of carrying $300 in cash whenever I walked around New Orleans. But now, of course, I also had a .38 Colt—awkward at Brandon’s funeral, perhaps, but rather comforting elsewhere.

New Orleans at Condition Yellow: I was picking up every detail. That man emerging from the alley with his hands in his pockets—what was he up to? That dude over there wearing sunglasses at night—where were his hands? Whose running feet were those coming up behind me?

Even in the Big Easy, where one’s default condition is relaxed and maybe a little tipsy, I found I’d come to like the sheepdog feeling. Like the militant gun carriers, I discovered I was proud of that coolness of head, presence of mind, and courageous acceptance of responsibility.

But five months into my gun-carrying experiment, I was becoming increasingly aware, with increasing discomfort, that I was participating in a profoundly political act that didn’t square with my own pre-armed worldview. Inveighing against the oblivious sods who drifted around in
Condition White was one more subtle way to gin up resentment toward the airy-fairy elites who lived in gated communities and enjoyed the luxury of musing, sipping tea, and nibbling biscuits while the good people of the world had to work for a living and keep their guard up. And those who armed themselves to ensure their own safety intrinsically devalued the role of the police—the government—to do that job. Gun-rights activists never tired of quoting a 2005 case,
Castle Rock
v.
Gonzales
, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that police had no constitutional duty to protect citizens from crime. “When seconds matter,” snarked the gun-rights bumper sticker, “the police are only minutes away.” Smarter policing was probably behind the big national drop in crime during the two decades bracketing the turn of the twenty-first century, and cops certainly played a role in keeping the public safer in general. But in the
particular
—in the unlikely moment when a lunatic lunged with a knife—a cop almost certainly wouldn’t be there. Furthermore, went the argument, if your life wasn’t important enough for you to meet the “minimum responsibility” of defending it, why should a $31,000-a-year cop risk his life to do it for you?

Once you started thinking that way, it was easy to make the jump to believing that a government that couldn’t protect its citizens shouldn’t pass gun-control laws that hindered their ability to protect themselves. From there, it was an easy jog to grokking the rest of the conservative/libertarian worldview. “My prediction,” wrote a particularly articulate blogger with whom I sparred for a while by e-mail, “is that a substantial proportion of people who come to the realization that they need one or more firearms to protect self and family, because they cannot rely on the government to do so, will eventually come to question whether they should be relying on the government for such things as retirement, medical care and the education of their children.”

Oh, goodie
, I thought when I read that. If I don’t carry the gun, I’m turning my back not only on my own safety but on my duty to participate in the security of my community, and if I do carry the gun, I’m betraying my commitment to Social Security, Medicare, single-payer health care, and public education.

On my last full day in New Orleans, a friend offered to take me to lunch at Commander’s Palace, one of the city’s famous high-end restaurants.
It was a rare treat, and after the rigors of Brandon’s funeral, I was ready to be pampered. Commander’s Palace was locally famous for offering twenty-five-cent martinis at lunch, so I left the gun in my hotel room.

Riding the streetcar uptown through the Garden District, I realized how different I felt without the gun on my hip: lighter, dreamier, more cheerfully conscious of how the afternoon light slanted against the gleaming white antebellum mansions. I was enjoying the faces around me instead of scanning them for threats. Hopping off at Washington Avenue and walking toward the river, I found myself composing lines of prose. I took a few minutes to wander Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 at the corner of Coliseum Street, grooving on the ornate, decrepit mausoleums and imagining New Orleans at the time of the Louisiana Purchase.

I was lapsing into Condition White. And I was loving it.

Condition White may make us sheep, but it’s also where art happens. It’s where we daydream, reminisce, and hear music in our heads. I realized, as I ducked under the blue-and-white awning of Commander’s Palace for my four-martini lunch, that Condition White wasn’t something I was willing to give up indefinitely. And yet, the thought of giving up the gun completely zinged an unexpected pang of guilt through me.

What
, I wondered,
is my responsibility now?
Was a certain level of situational awareness—call it Condition Pale Yellow—a reasonable mind-set to expect of an adult, whether armed or not? I was always going on about the collective good, while my counterparts at gun factories, stores, and ranges were all about individual sovereignty. Was maintaining a certain situational awareness while out in public not only smart for staying safe but also a service to the collective? Loafing along in Condition White, focused comfortably inward, how ready was I to, say, pull a child from in front of a speeding car, spot someone across a restaurant silently choking, or notice an elderly lady who needed help with a heavy parcel—to say nothing of intervening should someone get violent? Not that I’d ever argued
against
maintaining such vigilance, but it was the gun guys who made a virtue of it. One didn’t need to wear a gun to act like a Boy Scout—alert, responsive, and civic-minded—but I was discovering that with gun on hip, it was impossible
not
to act that way. And until I started wearing a gun, I’d never thought much about my minute-to-minute responsibilities to the strangers around me.

Late that night, I was crossing the corner of Dauphine and Kerlerec Streets, on my way back to the French Quarter, with the gun in place under my jacket. I wasn’t smelling the sweet olive, grooving on the architecture, or even mourning Brandon. I was in Condition Yellow and fully aware of two scruffy guys lounging in a doorway up ahead. “Can you help us out?” one asked. I made my usual demurral and walked on. When I’d gone about fifteen feet, one of them yelled, “Faggot!”

I’d never been one to throw down because someone called me a name. But it’s possible that in the old days I’d have yelled something back—especially if I were in the kind of funk that Brandon’s death had lowered over me. At the very least, I’d have felt my blood pressure spike.

This time, though, I didn’t become angry or even annoyed. To my great surprise, a Zen-like calm overtook me. I felt no need to restrain myself; my body didn’t even gesture in the direction of anger. Taking offense wasn’t an option, because I had no way of knowing where it would end, and somehow my brain and body sensed that. I yell something back, they come at me, and I’ll have shot someone because he called me a faggot. Gun guys loved quoting Robert Heinlein: An armed society is a polite society. Having the gun made what might have been a tense and unpleasant moment pass with a weird kind of sweet peacefulness. I began to understand why we hadn’t been hearing a lot of stories about legal gun carriers killing one another over parking spaces. That sheepdog sense of guardianship imparted a kind of moral superiority. I was the vigilant one, protector of the flock, the coiled wrath of God. To snatch out a gun and wave it around would have not only invited catastrophe but also sacrificed that righteous high ground and embarrassed me in the worst possible way.

Of course, the gun hadn’t had a calming effect on Brandon’s killer. But he hadn’t been checked out for a permit and trained to carry. Nor had he been the one on the defensive. The unknowable that really tortured me as I retreated from the name callers on Kerlerec Street was this: If Brandon had been formally inducted into the sheepdog cadre and had had a legal gun concealed upon his person, would he have called Ronald Simms a “punk-ass motherfucker”? Might the gun have saved his life without ever being drawn?

B
randon’s funeral was just about the only place I’d been since starting my gun project where nobody had mentioned Hollywood—as though only a genuine violent death could divorce the firearm from the movie camera. Gun guys could talk all day about precision and workmanship, history and tradition, the Second Amendment and self-defense. But any who denied that movies and television played a part in our infatuation had to be fooling himself. And ever since Camp Sunapee, I’d been as guilty as anybody of conflating movie guns with real.

The camera adores everything about the gun—the flash, the smoke, the menacing
slick-click
of a hammer being cocked, the power the gun bestows upon the weak to inflict third-reel redemptive violence on the strong. Movies don’t need guns to be exciting, but add a gun to a story and the emotional temperature rises. Moviemakers have known this since at least 1903, when
The Great Train Robbery
, a twelve-minute-long silent shoot-’em-up, ended with an actor firing a revolver straight at the camera.

After the heavy dose of gun reality at Brandon’s funeral, I needed a break. So it seemed a good time to make a side trip to the Dream Factory. The mystery to me was not that gun guys caught the bug from watching movies but that more people didn’t. Everybody went to the movies and watched television, yet only some of us fell in love with the cinematic gun—which reinforced my growing belief that a fondness for firearms was somehow etched in the DNA, like hammertoes or blue eyes.

In 1913, a vaudeville performer named Jesse Lasky went into business with his brother-in-law, a thirty-four-year-old Polish Jew who had been born Schmuel Gelbfisz but had anglicized his name to Samuel Goldwyn. Along with a middling-successful thirty-two-year-old Broadway producer named Cecil Blount DeMille, they formed a movie company, the Famous Players—Lasky Corporation, and moved into a rented barn near the corner of Vine Street and Hollywood Boulevard, on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

A year later, when DeMille was directing the first movie made in Hollywood, a Western called
The Squaw Man
, the actors hired to play soldiers gave him fits. “Can’t anybody here teach these men to look like soldiers?” he yelled in exasperation. A reedy young laborer stepped forward and said, “I can.” He was James Sydney Stembridge, a Floridian who, before migrating to California, had served in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War as an Army drill sergeant. He did a fine job teaching the actors to look like soldiers; DeMille kept him around.

Two years after that, the Famous Players—Lasky Corporation was absorbed into a new studio called Paramount Pictures. Stembridge noticed that directors were having trouble finding guns to put in their movies; World War I was on, and even civilian guns were tough to scare up. He proposed to the bosses at Paramount that he scour the country for guns and establish an arsenal that Paramount and other studios could use in their films. Stembridge Gun Rentals was born on the Paramount lot and for the rest of the century furnished the guns for just about every movie made in Hollywood.

This was the temple of firearm mythology I headed for upon landing in Los Angeles. By all accounts, Stembridge Gun Rentals had never sold a gun; it was said to house John Wayne’s guns from
Stagecoach
, the machine guns used to shoot King Kong off the Empire State Building, and the rifles seen in
Beau Geste
. When Robert Downey Jr., shooting the biopic
Chaplin
in 1994, had his company call Stembridge for a rifle similar to what Charlie Chaplin had used in the 1918 film
Shoulder Arms
, Stembridge not only had one like it—an employee pulled from stock the same gun the Little Tramp himself had used.