Lethal Passage (6 page)

Debbie Collins, a sixth-grade teacher who took Paxton Quigley’s course at the Cherokee Gun Club, has a daughter and a Smith & Wesson revolver (she doesn’t know the caliber). When we spoke late in 1992, her daughter was one and a half years old. Collins had been carrying a gun for about five years. During the workweek she locked her revolver in the glove compartment of her car in the school parking lot. While at home, she stored it loaded on top of the refrigerator. Her husband kept a loaded handgun at their bedside during the night.

Keeping her daughter safe from the family’s guns, Collins said, “is a real fear for me.” But Quigley’s course, she added, made her more confident. “I’m more aware now of where [the gun] is all the time. And making sure it’s in a safe place all the time.”

But would she always know exactly where it was?

“I’m sure gonna try. I can’t say that I’ll always, but since that course I’ve been very aware of it. I like to feel like I’ll always be aware
of it.” Once, however, she left the gun in her car, with the car unlocked but in the garage. “That kind of frightened me.”

When her daughter is older, Collins said, “we’re going to take her out, show her how it works and what it can cause, and that way make her less curious about it—I think that’s why a lot of children use them, out of curiosity.” She thought she might follow Paxton Quigley’s suggestion of bringing along a melon to demonstrate the damage a handgun can do to the human head, an idea that evokes the practice sessions of the would-be assassin in Frederick Forsyth’s
Day of the Jackal
. In
Armed & Female
Quigley wrote, “Once a child understands how a gun operates and has heard the sound of a gunshot and witnessed the potential damage, he or she will have a different view of a gun and will gain respect for it.”

Dr. Kellermann, the Emory University researcher, called this idea “well-intended but hopelessly naive.” Parents overestimate the good sense of their children and their ability to resist outside pressures, he said. “Teaching a child respect for a gun doesn’t change the child’s willingness to use it if he’s depressed, if he just failed a test that he felt the rest of his life depended on, or just broke up with his girlfriend or he’s mad at his best friend. Tragedies of this kind are played out in this country on almost a daily basis.”

Others, however, including the NRA and Quigley, argue that the low annual death toll from accidental shootings proves how safe gun ownership is in America.
A 1991 study by the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that in 1988 there were 1,501 unintentional shooting deaths; 277 of the victims were children fifteen years old or younger. This is tragic, the gun camp concedes, but not a bad showing considering that half of America’s households are thought to possess one or more guns.

Proponents of this view neglect to mention the number of nonfatal injuries that occur in accidental shootings.
The GAO began studying firearms accidents in order to gauge how many lives could be saved each year if guns were required by law to include loading indicators, magazine safeties, and other safety devices currently not
routinely installed on guns. (A loading indicator provides a visual warning that a cartridge is positioned in front of the firing pin and ready to fire. A magazine safety disables an auto-loading pistol the moment you pull the ammunition magazine from the base of the grip. Mechanical logic might lead you to assume that when you remove the magazine from a pistol, you unload the gun and render it safe; in fact, a cartridge may be left in the chamber.) Faced with the dearth of information on nonfatal gunshot injuries,
the GAO’s investigators did some primary research of their own. They discovered that police typically do not keep such records. Nonetheless, they managed to find ten major police departments that did. Using the records from these departments, the GAO investigators studied 532 accidental shootings that occurred in 1988 and 1989 and found that only five had resulted in death, for an injury-to-death ratio of 105 to 1. The survey sample included records from the Dallas police department, which had recorded only one accidental shooting death but 248 injuries.

The GAO report cautioned that the survey sample, limited by the lack of available injury data, was hardly representative; the 105-to-1 ratio could not be projected to the country as a whole. The report noted, however, that this ratio fell in line with others reported by the National Safety Council. The overall ratio of injuries to deaths for all accidents of all kinds in America was 94 to 1; for household accidents, 151 to 1. If the 105-to-1 ratio were indeed accurate, it would indicate that 157,600 accidental, nonfatal gunshot injuries occur each year. Even if one excludes Dallas as a statistical outlier, the ratio comes out to seventy injuries for every death, or 105,070 nonfatal gunshot injuries each year.

A gun is an ego pump. It can give a fifteen-year-old mugger absolute power over anyone he encounters except perhaps another armed teenager. Likewise, police fear, a gun may impart a false sense of security to anyone who keeps one for self-defense, especially anyone who carries it outside the home. “
There’s just so many what-ifs,” said Officer Joanne Welsh of the San Francisco police. The mother of
a four-year-old, she won’t bring her service weapon into her house. “A weapon is really only good if that perfect situation you may have envisioned occurs.”

Guns certainly don’t make
police officers feel safe, despite weeks of training and drilling in combat-shooting tactics. They know that just hanging on to a gun in an armed encounter can be difficult.
From 1980 through 1989, 735 police officers nationwide were shot dead in the line of duty; 120 were killed with their own guns.

“
The typical NRA line is, you can’t rape a .38,” said Col. Leonard Supenski, a Baltimore County firearms expert, who testified in a landmark civil suit arising from Nicholas Elliot’s shooting spree. “Well, that’s absolutely false. If the guy’s got his gun out first, you’re gonna lose. If you’ve got a .38 in your purse and the guy gets to it first, you’re gonna lose. If a guy attacks you from behind in the dark with the element of surprise, you’re gonna lose.”

Armed encounters involve a daunting array of split-second decisions. The self-defense shooter must first identify the target. Next, he must gauge the degree of threat. Does the intruder or assailant really pose a mortal danger? In broad daylight, these questions may have ready answers. But a self-defense shooting is most likely to take place under less than optimal conditions, with fear complicating the decision process.

Analysis of police shootings shows that a wild surge of adrenaline quickly impairs fine motor control, Supenski said. “You have tunnel vision, your eyes tend to focus on the threat, you see nothing else around you. Your auditory senses are diminished. It’s called auditory exclusion. You hear only what’s in front of you.”

One of the absurd myths of gunplay nurtured by television and Hollywood is the idea that during a gunfight one can actually count the number of bullets the other guy fired and thus know whether or not his gun remained loaded. Police officers involved in shootings often report never hearing the sound of gunfire.

Amid the confusion of sleep and the distortions of fear, an armed homeowner has yet one more crucial question to answer: What’s behind
the target? A bullet that misses its target, or even one that strikes its target dead on, can continue traveling with enough momentum to pass through interior walls into adjacent bedrooms, even exterior walls into neighboring homes. A miss is likely. In gunfights, Baltimore County police officers miss with seven of ten shots fired, Supenski said. “If the cops miss—and these are the guys who had the training, the retraining, and the recertification—how much more so does somebody who buys a gun and sticks it in the drawer?”

Gun magazines feed America’s gun owners a steady diet of advice on how to behave during a gunfight, much of it written by police officers from small-town departments no one has ever heard of and where gun battles are few and far between. Typically, these stories fail to discuss the emotional aftermath of an armed confrontation. Big-city police departments know the psychic toll can be devastating. In Boston, for example, the police department established a “Shoot Team,” composed of officers who have survived shoot-outs, which gathers after each new incident to help the officers involved come to grips with the terror they felt during the confrontation and the emotional upheaval they experienced afterward.

One of its members, who asked not to be identified by name, lived through two shoot-outs. In the first, he and his partner—for narrative purposes, I’ll call them Nolan and Dougherty—wound up in high-speed pursuit of a stolen Lincoln, chasing it up one-way streets against oncoming traffic. “It was like something out of the movies,” Nolan recalled. “I remember my heart was pounding out of my chest.”

The fleeing car rounded a corner and stopped. One suspect leaped from the car and ran headfirst into a telephone pole so hard he was knocked to the ground. (When the officers later caught this suspect, they knew immediately they had the right man by the splinters in his face.) The other suspect drove the big Lincoln into a vacant lot where it struck a boulder, briefly went airborne, then came to rest. The officers positioned their car to provide defensive cover. The suspect fired.

“All I remember is hearing the crack of the gun going off,” Nolan told me. “The next thing I saw was blue pieces of plastic flying all over the place. My partner went down—I thought he’d been shot.”

In fact, Dougherty had ducked for cover as the first bullet struck the blue roof light and shattered it. The suspect was firing a powerful .357 Magnum revolver and carried a speed loader, a device that holds six bullets and allows them to be inserted quickly into the empty chambers.

Nolan fired every shot in his service revolver and reloaded. The suspect took off. Nolan sprinted after him. At one point Nolan told him to halt, then dropped to one knee and aimed at his back. He didn’t fire. “If I had shot him in the back, I’d be in state prison right now,” he said. He and Dougherty returned to the Lincoln, where they found evidence that allowed them to track the suspect to an address in Boston’s Dorchester section. He was hiding inside an oil furnace. “To this day,” Nolan said, “I don’t know how he got in there.”

Until the capture, Nolan had been running on adrenaline. “It happens so quickly,” he recalled. “All these little items, like a checklist. Is it a clear shot? Is everybody out of the way? Then boom, boom, boom—all in a split second. I was trained to do this, but I wasn’t trained how to deal with it.” Afterward, he said, “I came apart at the seams. I just started shaking. I did what I do best. I got absolutely drunk out of my mind.”

The incident had a lasting impact. He became an alcoholic. He lost his wife to divorce. Now on the wagon, he tries to help other officers vent the powerful emotional reactions they experience after a shooting. Nolan agrees people who feel moved to buy a gun for self-defense ought to be able to do so, but with a caveat: “You need to get some extensive training. Appreciate what a handgun is and what it can do.”

On the whole, he said, society needs to take a longer view and examine why it is that many people feel the criminal justice system has failed them. “I don’t want to see any more guns,” he said. “Guns
kill people. That’s what they’re for. They kill people. And there’s just too many of them out there already.”

Such concern, however, has little persuasive power for people who see crime encroaching from all sides.
Lisa Hilliard, the banker who took Paxton Quigley’s Georgia course, told me she realized how vulnerable she was when she wound up stranded alone on an Atlanta freeway late one night. “I couldn’t help but imagine my name on the news, you know, ‘Decatur woman, age thirty-three …’ ”

Although she had never shot before, she lived among guns. Her husband owned many and kept one loaded by the bedside. The time had come, she reasoned, to learn how to use those guns and take responsibility for her own safety. “Girls grow up believing that they’re going to be taken care of,” she said, then added softly, “But it just ain’t so.”

Why do we place so much trust in guns to solve our problems? What accounts for the official deference we as a nation afford guns, despite the growing count of dead and wounded and the fact that polls show most of us favor federal regulation of firearms? The belief in guns as tools for self-defense certainly contributes to this national tolerance. So too, obviously, does America’s rural passion for hunting deer and other game. Neither, however, can fully explain how firearms became lodged in the national psyche as objects of almost sacred stature.

A good deal of the answer lies in the frontier West—not the real frontier as experienced by the hundreds of thousands of pioneers and gold-seekers of American history, but the imagined West, conjured over the last century by Hollywood directors, TV producers, nineteenth-century reporters, dime novelists, and the frontier heroes themselves, of a vast plain of violence that only guns could subdue. “
What people believe to be true is often as important as reality,” wrote historian W. Eugene Hollon, “and generations of Americans have grown up accepting the idea that the frontier during the closing
decades of the nineteenth century represented this country at its most adventurous as well as its most violent.”