Skipping Towards Gomorrah (34 page)

—Charlton Heston

 

 

 

 

I
'm holding a gun.

I've never held a gun before, and it's making my heart race.

My instructor, Paul, is trying to give me some pointers about the proper way to handle a .22-caliber, clip-loaded handgun, but I can't hear him over the pounding in my chest. Handguns scare the shit out of me.

My dad was a Chicago cop who, like a lot of cops, hated handguns with the kind of passion that comes from being shot at every once in a while. When the subject of gun control came up at a neighborhood barbecue or family party, my dad wearily pointed out to anyone who was anti-gun control that handguns were designed to do one thing and one thing only: kill people. If a guy wants to hunt, he gets a hunting rifle; if a guy wants to protect his home and family, he gets a shotgun. If a guy wants to rob people on the subway or knock over convenience stores or kill a human being in cold blood, he gets a handgun.

My dad owned a handgun, of course: his service revolver, which he kept in a locked filing cabinet. I can't remember ever seeing him with his gun; he never showed it off to us, and he never encouraged us to play with toy guns, although he couldn't really stop us from making guns out of sticks, fingers, and PB&J sandwiches. My dad's attitude towards guns instilled a deep-seated fear of all guns in me as a child, and now, as an adult, about the only thing that scares me more than handguns are the nutcases who fetishize them. So I was a little nervous when I walked into the Bullet Trap, an indoor shooting range and a gun shop in Plano, Texas.

Plano is the ugliest place I visited while working on this book. Hell, Plano is the ugliest place I've ever been to, and I've been to a
lot
of ugly places, from mud-brick villages in southern Egypt, to crumbling Stalinist apartment blocks on the edges of Moscow, to Gary, Indiana. Unlike Egypt and Moscow, Plano can't plead poverty; Plano is a wealthy suburb of Dallas, where the houses are made of brick and built big. Builders have given their housing developments names like King's Court, Steeple Chase, Willow Bend, and Old Shepard Place. Judging by the names of these pseudo-neighborhoods, you would think Texas was crammed full of legal and illegal aliens from the British Isles, and not Central and South America.

Plano doesn't appear to be much of a Gomorrah—not at first glance. The anglophile/anglodenial housing developments are linked to each other by six-lane roads and an almost endless string of upscale strip malls. The too-numerous-to-count, big-box chain restaurants—the multiple Chi-Chi's, Bennigan's, and Tony Roma's—might make gluttony appear to be Plano's only major sin, but Plano has its very own club for married swingers, and nearby Dallas has at least a half a dozen. On a down note, Plano's youngsters have a serious drug problem; in the late 1990s, an epidemic of heroin abuse claimed the lives of dozens of teenagers from well-to-do families in Plano. (This is a tragedy, of course, but it's not argument for continuing the war on drugs. The war on drugs didn't keep heroin out of Plano, and if a war couldn't keep heroin out of a place like Plano, it's hard to imagine what, short of carpet-bombing, would.)

The Bullet Trap was in a long, low, industrial building behind a Whataburger, a fast-food chain indigenous to Texas. The gun range couldn't be seen from the road, and I wound up getting lost. I had to stop in a convenience store that sold soda, junk food, beer, rolling papers, dream catchers, and more than a hundred different kinds of lethal-looking knives (!) to ask for directions. From the outside, the Bullet Trap looked as if it could've been a dentist's office once or a print shop or a you-store-it warehouse. The inside of the Bullet Trap resembled a large rec room in a hobbyist's basement. There weren't any windows, the place smelled musty, the carpets were industrial, the walls were paneled, and guns were displayed in glass-topped counters. There were guns I'd heard of—Colt, Smith & Wesson, Glock—and guns I hadn't—Rugers, Taurus, Walther, Keltel, Beretta, Kimber, Sig.

The place was filled with men: big men, he-men, gun-lovin' men, men who probably would shoot me if they could read what was on my mind. Looking at the guns in the cases and on the walls at the Bullet Trap—guns for sale, guns for rent—I was thinking, Christ, I wish I lived in a country that didn't allow its citizens to own guns, any guns, handguns or rifles or shotguns. I hate guns.

Anger is the desire for vengeance, according to Saint Augustine, but that doesn't mean anger is necessarily bad. Saint Augustine recognized that there were times when anger was called for, moments when the thirst for vengeance is tempered by a justifiable righteous indignation. At those times, anger could be a force of good in the world.

American gun owners regard themselves as a force for good in the world—but they've always seemed like an angry bunch of yahoos to me, constantly fuming about black helicopters, “jack-booted thugs” who work for the federal government, and all the damn liberals and their damn laws mandating the use of trigger locks and the safe storage of guns, both moves that would save the lives of hundreds of children every year (and not the children of liberals). Owning a gun in America is one way for conservative white males to demonstrate their anger at crime, liberalism, feminism, and modernity.

Law-abiding gun owners, according to the National Rifle Association, aren't angry; they're merely realistic. This is a dangerous world we live in, and they need their guns to protect themselves, their families, and other law-abiding citizens from all the damn criminals (and the damn liberals who coddle them). Whenever some lunatic pulls out a gun in a school or a business and starts blowing people away, the National Rifle Association helpfully suggests that the problem isn't too many guns in the United States but too
few
guns. If only the murdered teachers, students, or coworkers of the deranged shooter or shooters had themselves been armed, they could've returned fire and saved lives. Guns aren't the cause of gun violence, the NRA insists, but the solution to gun violence. The more guns, the more better.

Never mind that a school cafeteria filled with hundreds of students blasting away at each other would result in more deaths; never mind that the presence of a gun in a home triples the risk of a homicide taking place in that home; never mind that the presence of a gun in the home increases the risk of suicide by five times; never mind that Japan, which strictly limits gun ownership, had just 28 gun deaths in 1999, compared with 26,800 in the United States; never mind that England's murder rate is one-sixth that of the United States, as
New York Times
op-ed writer Nicholas D. Kristof points out; never mind that firearms were used in approximately seven out of every ten murders committed in the nation in 1999.

And never mind the fact that the United States is already swimming in guns. There are 200 million privately owned guns in the United States, 65 million of which are handguns. If the presence of guns prevents violence, the United States should have the lowest levels of violence in the industrialized world, not the highest.

Never mind all that.

If the NRA, its members, and the conservative politicians they buy and sell ever admit that handguns make the United States an infinitely more dangerous place than, say, Canada, we still can't ban even handguns for two very important reasons.

First, if handguns are banned, only criminals will have handguns. “Gun control laws raise the cost of obtaining a firearm,” Bork writes in
Slouching Towards Gomorrah
. “This is a cost that the criminal will willingly pay because a gun is essential to the business he is in.” Banning handguns ultimately won't work, Bork insists, “[because] illicit markets adapt to overcome difficulties.” Bork's argument against gun control could easily be applied to drugs: Since illicit markets adapt to whatever law enforcement measures are taken, it makes no sense to ban illicit drugs. Likewise, banning rap music, pornography, and sodomy—all things Bork would like to ban—won't work because illicit markets will sprout up to meet demand. Bork is a hypocrite, applying one argument to the proven evil of handguns, while using another for the dubious “evils” of rap, porn, sodomy, and so forth. What's more, Bork's argument against banning handguns falls apart when you consider the evidence. Judging by the comparatively low murder rates in Great Britain, Canada, Japan, and New Zealand, it seems that criminals do indeed have a difficult time coming by handguns.

Things get more problematic for gun-loving drug warriors when you consider the economic costs of gun violence. “A study of all direct and indirect costs of gun violence,” according to Handgun Control Inc., “including medical, lost wages, and security costs estimates that gun violence costs the nation $100 billion a year.” Conservatives point to the same figure—$100 billion in economic losses—when they argue for continuing the war on drugs. If the cost of drug use makes an open-and-shut case against legalization, how come the identical cost of gun violence isn't an open-and-shut case for a ban on handguns?

The other big argument against banning handguns is, um, let me see. . . . I had it right here a second ago. Christ, what was it again? Let me do a quick search on Google. Oh, right, the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The Second Amendment presents a huge problem for people like me—that is, for big fans of our nation's founding documents—particularly that pursuit of happiness stuff in the Declaration of Independence. Owning guns clearly makes some very angry Americans very, very happy, and I'm not interested in coming between a heavily armed person and his definition of happiness. Also, unlike fundamentalist Christians, my conscience doesn't afford me the luxury of picking and choosing which bits of favorite centuries-old documents I'm going to take literally. If I want the full-meal-deal on the Declaration of Independence and the First Amendment, I feel somewhat obligated to sign off on the full-meal-deal on the Second Amendment. After all, it does say the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, which seems pretty straightforward.

But is it?

To his credit, Robert Bork acknowledges that the Second Amendment doesn't necessarily grant the average citizen the right to keep and bear arms. He characterizes the amendment as “ambiguous.” “The first part of the Amendment supports proponents of gun control by seeming to make possession of firearms contingent upon being a member of a state-regulated militia,” Bork writes in
Slouching Towards Gomorrah.
“The next part is cited by opponents of gun control as a guarantee of the individual's right to possess such weapons, since he can always be called to militia service. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that there is no individual right to own a firearm. The Second Amendment was designed to allow states to defend themselves against a possibly tyrannical national government. Now that the federal government has stealth bombers and nuclear weapons, it is hard to imagine what people would need to keep in the garage to serve that purpose.”

The First Amendment, on the other hand, is much less ambiguous than the Second (which has never stopped Bork and other conservatives from attempting to punch holes in it): “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The First Amendment has a fan base, as does the Second Amendment, and it's a shame that there isn't more overlap between the two groups. Much mistrust and mutual contempt separates the fans of the First and Second Amendments. As a First Amendment fan, I can't resist pointing out that the First Amendment does come
first,
but in the hopes of bringing Firsts and Seconds closer together, I'd like to clear up a couple of misconceptions. First off, First Amendment fans tend to live in crowded urban areas, and we're afraid of getting shot. Second Amendment fans tend to live in less populated areas, and they're afraid that people from urban areas are going to come and take their guns away. On behalf of all First Amendment fans everywhere, I'd like to tell Second Amendment fans that we're not coming to take your guns because—hello!—
we're afraid of getting shot
and you people have guns. If we came and tried to take your guns away, you would shoot us—I've seen Charlton Heston say exactly that on CNN a half a dozen times. So, really, we're not coming for your guns.

If it's not too much trouble, Firsts would love Seconds to find ways to make it harder for your guns to fall into the hands of the people who shoot at us on the subway or, for that matter, we'd like you to keep your kids from blowing their own heads off with your guns. To that end, we're for gun training, registration, licensing, trigger locks, gun safes, smart guns that fire only when they're being held by their owners, banning cop-killer bullets, and banning handguns and other concealable weapons. See? We don't want to take your guns. We just want to make the world a safer place.

(Why do Firsts care so much about protecting the children of Seconds? Because most Firsts are liberals, and liberals are very concerned about other people, especially children. That's why liberals are all over trigger locks and safe storage laws. I mean, come on—most of the people out there pressing for mandatory trigger locks and safe storage don't have guns in their homes. Their kids aren't around guns, and so it's not their kids who're getting their heads blown off in garages and basements. Maybe their concerns are misplaced; kids who grow up around guns are likelier to be right-leaning gun nuts when they grow up. If gun foes want to turn the tide against guns, maybe they shouldn't work so hard to save gun-owners' children. Just a thought.)