 Bars in the Old City neighborhood of Philadelphia let out at 2
A.M. On the morning of January 17, 2010, two groups emerged,
looking for taxis. At the corner of Market and Third Street,
they started yelling at each other. On one side was Edward
DiDonato, who had recently begun work at an insurance company,
having graduated from Villanova University, where he was a
captain of the lacrosse team. On the other was Gerald Ung, a
third-year law student at Temple, who wrote poetry in his spare
time and had worked as a technology consultant for Freddie Mac.
Both men had grown up in prosperous suburbs: DiDonato in Blue
Bell, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia; Ung in Reston,
Virginia, near Washington, D.C.
Everyone had been drinking, and neither side could subsequently
remember how the disagreement started; one of DiDonato’s friends
may have kicked in the direction of one of Ung’s friends, and
Ung may have mocked someone’s hair. “To this day, I have no idea
why this happened,” Joy Keh, a photographer who was one of Ung’s
friends at the scene, said later.
 Last year, mass shootings accounted for just two per cent of
American gun deaths. Most gun violence is impulsive and up
close.
The argument moved down the block, and one of DiDonato’s
friends, a bartender named Thomas V. Kelly IV, lunged at the
other group. He was pushed away before he could throw a punch.
He rushed at the group again; this time, Ung pulled from his
pocket a .380-calibre semiautomatic pistol, the Kel-Tec P-3AT.
Only five inches long and weighing barely half a pound, it was a
“carry gun,” a small, lethal pistol designed for “concealed
carry,” the growing practice of toting a hidden gun in daily
life. Two decades ago, leaving the house with a concealed weapon
was strictly controlled or illegal in twenty-two states, and
fewer than five million Americans had a permit to do so. Since
then, it has become legal in every state, and the number of
concealed-carry permit holders has climbed to an estimated 12.8
million.
Ung had obtained a concealed-carry license because he was afraid
of street crime. He bought a classic .45-calibre pistol but
later switched to the Kel-Tec, which was easier to carry; for a
year and a half, he stowed one of the pistols in his pocket or
in his backpack. He had never fired it. Now, on the sidewalk, he
held the Kel-Tec with outstretched arms. A pedestrian heard him
yell, “You’d better not piss me off!” Ung maintains that he
said, “Back the fuck up.” DiDonato thought the pistol looked too
small to be real; he guessed that it was a BB gun. He spread his
arms, stepped forward, and said, “Who are you going to shoot,
man?” Ung pulled the trigger. Afterward, he couldn’t recall how
many times—he said it felt like a movie, and he was “seeing
sparks and hearing pops.”
Ung hit DiDonato six times: in the liver, the lung, the
shoulder, the hand, the intestine, and the spine. When DiDonato
collapsed, Ung called 911 and said that he had shot a man. On
the call, he was recorded pleading, “Why did you make me do it?”
DiDonato, in a weak voice, can be heard saying, “Please don’t
let me die.” When police arrived, Ung’s first words were “I have
a permit.”
More American civilians have died by gunfire in the past decade
than all the Americans who were killed in combat in the Second
World War. When an off-duty security guard named Omar Mateen,
armed with a Sig Sauer semiautomatic rifle and a Glock 17
pistol, killed forty-nine people at a gay club in Orlando, on
June 12th, it was historic in some respects and commonplace in
others—the largest mass shooting in American history and, by one
count, the hundred-and-thirtieth mass shooting so far this year.
High-profile massacres can summon our attention, and galvanize
demands for change, but in 2015 fatalities from mass shootings
amounted to just two per cent of all gun deaths. Most of the
time, when Americans shoot one another, it is impulsive, up
close, and apolitical.
None of that has hurt the gun business. In recent years, in
response to three kinds of events—mass shootings, terrorist
attacks, and talk of additional gun control—gun sales have
broken records. “You know that every time a bomb goes off
somewhere, every time there’s a shooting somewhere, sales spike
like crazy,” Paul Jannuzzo, a former chief of American
operations for Glock, the Austrian gun company, told me.
Sometimes the three sources of growth converge. On November 13th
of last year, terrorists in Paris killed a hundred and thirty
people and wounded hundreds more. On December 2nd, a husband and
wife, inspired by ISIS, killed fourteen people in San
Bernardino, California. This year, on January 5th, President
Obama announced executive actions intended to expand the use of
background checks. By the end of that day, the share price of
Smith & Wesson, the largest U.S. gunmaker, had risen to $25.86,
its highest level ever. After the attack in Orlando, shares of
Smith & Wesson rose 9.8 per cent before the market opened the
next day. Last week, the company reported that, in its latest
fiscal year, revenue grew thirty-one per cent, to a record $733
million. In a call with investors and analysts, Smith & Wesson’s
C.E.O., James Debney, said that he was “very pleased with the
results that we got.” He attributed the growth in firearm sales
to “increased orders for our handgun designed for personal
protection.”
The story of how millions of Americans discovered the urge to
carry weapons—to join, in effect, a self-appointed, well-armed,
lightly trained militia—begins not in the Old West but in the
nineteen-seventies. For most of American history, gun owners
generally frowned on the idea. In 1934, the president of the
National Rifle Association, Karl Frederick, testified to
Congress, “I do not believe in the promiscuous toting of guns. I
think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”
In 1967, after a public protest by armed Black Panthers in
Sacramento, Governor Ronald Reagan told reporters that he saw
“no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying
loaded weapons.”
But the politics of guns and fear were changing. In 1972, Jeff
Cooper, a firearms instructor and former marine, published
“Principles of Personal Defense,” which became a classic among
gun-rights activists and captured a generation’s anxieties.
“Before World War II, one could stroll in the parks and streets
of the city after dark with hardly any risk,” he wrote. But in
“today’s world of permissive atrocity” it was time to reëxamine
one’s interactions with fellow-citizens. He ticked off the names
of high-profile killers, including Charles Manson, and wrote of
their victims, “Their appalling ineptitude and timidity
virtually assisted in their own murders.” Adapting a concept
from the Marines, he urged civilian gun owners to assume a state
of alertness that he called Condition Yellow. He wrote, “The one
who fights back retains his dignity and his self-respect.”
Soon armed citizens acquired a political voice: in 1977, at the
N.R.A.’s annual meeting, conservative activists led by Harlon
Carter, a former chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, wrested
control from leaders who had been focussed on rifle-training and
recreation rather than on politics, and created the modern
gun-rights movement. In 1987, the refashioned N.R.A.
successfully lobbied lawmakers in Florida to relax the rules
that required concealed-carry applicants to demonstrate “good
cause” for a permit, such as a job transporting large quantities
of cash.
Under the new “right to carry” laws, which two dozen other
states later adopted, officials had no choice but to issue a
permit to anyone who was “mentally fit” and had not been
convicted of a violent felony. Then the N.R.A. set about
extending the right to carry into places that had remained off
limits, including bars, colleges, and churches. Beginning this
fall, Texas will be the eighth state to allow students and staff
at public universities to carry on campus. (A smaller movement
advocates “open carry”—bearing unconcealed weapons in public—but
many gun owners consider that option counterproductive, because
it repels moderate allies.)
For gun manufacturers, the concealed-carry movement was a
lucrative turn. In 1996, the N.R.A.’s chief lobbyist, Tanya
Metaksa, said, “The gun industry should send me a basket of
fruit.” Small-calibre guns, like Gerald Ung’s .380-calibre, had
been regarded as a joke. “They were called ‘mouse calibres,’ ”
Jannuzzo said. “People were very disparaging.” But, as states
loosened their laws, gunmakers marketed those weapons as “true
pocket guns,” with “maximum concealability.” Ammunition
companies reëngineered small rounds to increase their velocity
and lethality. In 2014, manufacturers produced nearly nine
hundred thousand .380-calibre guns, more than in any previous
year, and a twenty-fold increase since 2001. In 1999, twenty-six
per cent of gun owners cited personal protection as their top
reason for buying a gun; by 2013, self-defense was cited more
than any other reason. “I see grown men grab a .380-calibre gun
out of the truck and put it in their pockets,” Jannuzzo said.
“It’s a whole new world out there.”
The Orlando massacre renewed calls to restore a federal
assault-weapons ban, which expired in 2004, given that
military-style rifles were used by killers in Orlando, San
Bernardino, at the Sandy Hook Elementary school, and in Aurora,
Colorado, among other places. But in 2014 rifles accounted for
just three per cent of the more than eight thousand gun
homicides recorded by the F.B.I. A ban would have a limited
effect on gun-industry profits. The right-to-carry movement, by
unbridling the presence of firearms in American life and
erecting a political blockade against efforts to qualify it, has
transformed the culture and business of guns.
The greatest legal and political questions around guns today are
not what types of weapons people will be allowed to use in the
future but who can use them and why. On June 9th, a federal
appeals court in California sided with gun-control advocates,
ruling that local governments can set conditions on the right to
carry concealed weapons. “This is the beginning of a battle, not
the end,” Adam Winkler, a specialist in gun law at the
University of California, Los Angeles, said. The Supreme Court
has ruled that Americans have a right to “self-defense within
the home,” but it has said nothing regarding what Americans can
carry in public “It’s the next great frontier for the Second
Amendment,” Winkler said.
Those who have taken to carrying concealed weapons often
describe the experience as a change that reaches beyond physical
self-defense. Laurie Lee Dovey, a gun-industry writer, reminded
me of the moment, in 2008, when Barack Obama was recorded saying
that small-town voters “cling to guns or religion.” Eight years
later, she said, those voters have upended American politics
with a populist surge in both political parties, and Obama’s
words no longer feel like an insult. “Of course I cling to my
guns and my religion!” Dovey said. “What’s wrong with that? It’s
the greatest phrase ever.” The expression has inspired pro-gun
T-shirts that say “Proud Bitter Clinger.”
Gerald Ung received his concealed-carry permit in Virginia. To
meet the requirements, he attended an N.R.A.
basic-pistol-shooting class. I was curious to know what that
involved, and on a recent Saturday morning I drove half an hour
from my home, in Washington, D.C., to the N.R.A.’s headquarters,
an office park of mirrored-glass buildings, in Fairfax,
Virginia. I’d been advised to take the Utah Multi-State
Concealed Firearm Permit Course. Utah’s permit is popular
because it is valid in at least thirty states.
Our class, which consisted of five men and a woman, met in a
room adorned with hunting trophies and a flat-screen TV. Our
firearms instructor, Mark Briley, Jr., announced that we would
not be touching any guns. “At the end of this class, you will
have weapons familiarity as defined by Utah,” he said. “They do
not require live fire.” (The N.R.A.’s lobbying arm opposes
minimum training and proficiency standards for carry permits,
calling them “needless mandates,” and it has successfully
spurred some states to eliminate them.)
Briley—father of three, African-American, goatee—wore black
cargo pants and a black polo shirt, and he had the qualities of
a great teacher: enthusiasm, patience, a sense of humor. “I was
going to a predominantly white church in Farmville”—population:
8,169—“and people said, ‘If you keep going with those white
folks, the next thing you know they’ll have you shooting guns
and riding Harleys.’ ” He now teaches shooting and rides a
Harley, he said.
Briley moved briskly through the lesson: we compared ammunition
malfunctions (a hang fire versus a squib load), defensive rounds
(the hollow point versus the full-metal jacket), and styles of
shooting (the Weaver stance versus the isosceles). Periodically,
he paused. “Any questions on any components of the semiautomatic
pistol frame?” There were none.
We reviewed different kinds of threats—home invaders, muggers,
druggies—and Briley urged us to “get out of the realm of just
thinking about people hurting us with weapons.” He said,
“Honestly, if they have arms, they’re armed.” He lingered most
on the risk of mass shootings. “We’re approaching a time here in
America where knowing the difference between concealment and
cover may be the difference between living and dying,” he said.
“What’s concealment and cover at a mall? What’s concealment and
cover at a movie theatre? There is no safe place.” He urged us
to scan every room with an eye for potential hiding places.
“Does it have plants? Are they fake or real? If they’re real,
does it have potting soil?”—which could deflect incoming fire.
“I’m always thinking.”
He warned us against trying to be heroes or losing our tempers.
We’d all heard of an argument over texting that erupted in a
Florida movie theatre in 2014. A man threw popcorn at a
fellow-moviegoer, who pulled out a .380-calibre pistol and
killed him. (The shooter, Curtis Reeves, Jr., who has pleaded
not guilty, is awaiting trial for second-degree murder.) Briley
warned us against ending up in court in what he called “today’s
anti-gun climate.” He quoted his grandmother: “ ‘Marky, there’s
a reason they call it the criminal justice system.’ I said,
‘Why?’ She says, ‘Because the criminals get the justice and
you’ll get the shaft.’ ”
We moved on to the law, and Briley, cautioning that he was not
giving legal advice, pulled up the text of Utah Code 76-2-402,
and read it aloud with the speed of an auctioneer: “A person
does not have a duty to retreat from the force or threatened
force . . . in a place where that person has lawfully entered or
remained.” He put it plainly: “So Utah would be what we call a
Stand Your Ground state. Let me tell you this: Stand Your Ground
is not a blank check to use your firearm. It just says, ‘I don’t
have to retreat.’ ” He brought up George Zimmerman, the
neighborhood-watch volunteer in Florida, who, in 2012, claimed
self-defense in fatally shooting Trayvon Martin, an unarmed
black seventeen-year-old. Nearly three years after Zimmerman was
acquitted, he has critics as well as admirers in the gun
community. In May, he tried to sell at auction the gun that he
used to kill Martin. The auction was sabotaged—at one point, a
leading bidder registered as “Racist McShootface”—but he
auctioned it again a few days later and reportedly received two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Briley urged us to see Zimmerman’s story as a warning. He said,
“Who would trade places with Zimmerman today? No hands ever go
up in any class I’ve asked that question.” Briley went on, “The
growing concern I have about folks in the concealed-carry
community is that we don’t look at less than lethal options as a
part of our tool kit.”
We finished class on schedule. We had been there four hours, and
I had fulfilled all training requirements to receive my
concealed-carry permit. I was home in time for lunch.
Americans have come to accumulate three hundred and ten million
firearms, and to understand how they achieved this it’s useful
to visit the home town of the gun business. Most gun owners
today are in the South and the West, but most gunmakers are in
New England, because in 1794 George Washington picked
Springfield, Massachusetts, to make military weapons. The
Springfield Armory, which trained early gunsmiths, such as
Horace Smith, spurred the construction of factories along the
Connecticut River. It’s still known as Gun Valley.
As a business proposition, guns suffer from an irreparable flaw:
they last a very long time. Therefore, the industry constantly
needs new customers or novel ways to sell more guns to old
customers. (It was Samuel Colt who is said to have coined the
phrase “new and improved.”) These days, the business relies
mostly on old customers. In 1977, more than half of all American
households had a gun in the house. By 2014, it was less than a
third. Each gun owner now has an average of eight guns,
according to an industry trade association.
Mike Weisser entered the gun business in 1965 and has worked as
a wholesaler, a retailer, an importer, and an N.R.A.-certified
instructor. At seventy-one, he is a blunt and voluble
storyteller who lives outside Springfield, with his wife,
Carolyn, a pediatrician. Weisser received a doctorate in
economic history from Northwestern, and has taught at the
University of South Carolina and elsewhere. “The first home
movie of me was at the age of five, twirling a plastic
revolver,” he recalled. In 2001, he bought a storefront in Ware,
Massachusetts, and over the next thirteen years he sold, by his
estimate, twelve thousand guns, while writing six books. As a
blogger, he is known as Mike the Gun Guy. On a recent morning in
Springfield, Weisser pulled his car up to a vast brick factory
complex that once held the headquarters of Smith & Wesson. In
the seventies, Weisser was a Smith & Wesson distributor, and
business was steady. “They had a lock on the police market,” he
said. “They had a certain number of guns they made every year.
It was very quiet.”
But by the late eighties American gun manufacturers were facing
two serious problems: popular European imports, such as Glock,
were luring away police and military consumers; and hunting,
once a reliable market, was in decline as rural America emptied
out. In 1977, a third of all adults lived in a house with at
least one hunter, according to the General Social Survey; by
2014, that statistic had been halved. Weisser said, “The gun
industry, which had been able to ride on an American cultural
motif of the West, and of hunting, is realizing that’s gone.
Plus, you’ve got the European guns coming in that are so good
that the U.S. Army is even using them. Jesus Christ Almighty,
we’re fucked.” In 1998, an advertisement in Shooting Sports
Retailer warned, “It’s not ‘who your customers will be in five
years.’ It’s ‘will there be any customers left.’ ” Richard
Feldman, a high-ranking N.R.A. lobbyist in the eighties, who
worked as a liaison to the industry, told me that companies
looked for ways to make up for the decline of hunting: “You’re
selling whatever the market wants. It doesn’t matter where you
make your money. It’s irrelevant.”
A solution, of sorts, arrived in 1992, when a Los Angeles jury
acquitted four police officers of using excessive force in the
beating of Rodney King. The city erupted in riots. “It was the
first time that you could see a live riot on video while it was
going on,” Weisser said. “They had a helicopter floating around
when a white guy pulled up to the intersection. These black guys
pull him out of the truck and are beating the shit out of him
right below that helicopter.” The new market for self-defense
guns was born, Weisser said, and it was infused with racial
anxiety. “That was the moment, and if you talked about ‘crime’
everybody knew what you meant.”
Selling to buyers who were concerned about self-defense was even
better than selling to hunters, because self-defense has no
seasons. The only problem, from a marketing perspective, was
that America was becoming, by any measure, a less dangerous
place. Violent crime peaked in 1991, during the crack-cocaine
era, and has dropped by almost half since then. Victimization
rates of rape or sexual assault are down sixty per cent from
their historic highs. (The reasons for the decline are debated,
but most scholars credit a combination of an improved economy,
more police, better technology, and a broad decline in alcohol
use.) Nevertheless, in a 1997 article in the magazine Shooting
Industry, Massad Ayoob, a popular pro-gun writer and trainer,
urged dealers to seize the opportunities created by the new
concealed-carry laws: “Defensive firearms, sold with
knowledgeable advice and the right accessories, offer the best
chance of commercial survival for today’s retail firearms
dealer.”
By the end of the nineties, the gun industry was ailing again.
Inspired by lawsuits against the tobacco industry, more than
thirty local and state governments had sued gun manufacturers.
The N.R.A. refused to settle, but the suits were damaging. In
one case, a whistle-blower named Robert Hass, who had been Smith
& Wesson’s marketing-and-sales chief, said that companies knew
far more than they admitted about how criminals obtained guns,
and that “none of them, to my knowledge, take additional steps .
. . to insure that their products are distributed properly.”
This time, a gunmaker thought he had a solution—one that would
not only sell more guns but lower the toll of gun violence. Ed
Shultz, who was then the C.E.O. of Smith & Wesson, had grown up
attending a one-room schoolhouse, the son of an Iowa hog farmer.
Though he called himself a “rabid gun owner,” he was also a
pragmatist: easygoing with the press, and experienced. He had
manufactured lawnmowers, furniture, bicycles, and other goods.
In the hope of ending the lawsuits, he secretly agreed to
negotiate with the Clinton Administration. To avoid detection,
the talks were held in airport hotels and obscure federal
offices. After six weeks, the negotiators were near a deal, and
Shultz was sitting across from the Administration’s point man,
Andrew Cuomo, who was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Housing and
Urban Development.
Cuomo, now the governor of New York, told me recently, “I was a
gun owner at the time, and I have kids in the house.” He said to
Shultz, “If you tell me you could sell a gun that my child
couldn’t operate, even if it was sitting on the counter, loaded,
that is appealing to me.” In the late nineteenth century and the
early twentieth, Smith & Wesson manufactured more than half a
million handguns with a two-part safety that the company boasted
was “perfectly harmless in the hands of a child,” but it
abandoned them during the Second World War, when it focussed on
producing military guns. Shultz was open to building a new,
high-tech version—a “smart gun” that could be fired only by its
owner. “He says, ‘I’m not interested in any political statement.
I’m interested in a business-survival strategy,’ ” Cuomo
recalled.
On March 17, 2000, Clinton and Cuomo announced the deal: among
other things, Smith & Wesson agreed to develop a smart gun and
take steps to prevent dealers from selling to criminals. Cuomo
declared, “We are finally on the road to a safer, more peaceful
America.” But on the day the deal went public the N.R.A.
denounced Smith & Wesson as “the first gun maker to run up the
white flag of surrender.” It released Shultz’s phone number, and
encouraged members to complain. He received many threats. One
caller said, “I’m a dead-on shot, Mr. Shultz.” Another executive
took to wearing a bulletproof vest, according to “Outgunned,” a
history of gun-control politics, by Peter Harry Brown and Daniel
G. Abel. Online, a boycott took hold, and sales of Smith &
Wesson guns fell so sharply that two factories temporarily shut
down. In ten months, the stock lost ninety-five per cent of its
value, and the company was sold the next year for a fraction of
its former worth.
Shultz left the company, and he all but stopped talking to the
press. When I happened on a phone number for him, he called me
back only to ask how I’d found it. “I need to know where the
hole is, so I can plug it,” he said, and declined to talk about
the gun business.
With the help of Congress, the industry has avoided further
lawsuits. In 2005, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act
immunized gun manufacturers, distributors, and dealers from
civil liability for damages caused by their products. Mike
Fifer, the C.E.O. of the U.S. gunmaker Sturm, Ruger, said at an
N.R.A. convention in 2011 that the law is “probably the only
reason we have a U.S. firearms industry anymore.”
Smith & Wesson has repaired its relationship with the N.R.A. In
2012, Debney, the current C.E.O., was inducted into the N.R.A.’s
Ring of Freedom, the highest rank of donors, reserved for those
who give at least a million dollars. He received a yellow sports
coat and was featured on the cover of an N.R.A. magazine,
wearing the jacket and holding a concealed-carry gun. Smith &
Wesson underwrites several N.R.A. initiatives, including “The
Armed Citizen,” a column, in print and online, that celebrates
civilians who draw their guns in self-defense. The gunmaker has
never forgotten Ed Shultz’s attempt at compromise. “It almost
took down the company,” Debney told an interviewer in 2013. “We
won’t make that mistake again.”
In May, seventy thousand members of the N.R.A. convened in
Louisville for the organization’s annual meeting, which combines
elements of a trade show, a political convention, and Comic-Con.
When I arrived, I encountered a figure in a giant bird
costume—the mascot of the N.R.A.’s Eddie Eagle GunSafe program,
which teaches children up to fourth grade not to touch guns.
After that, the industry hopes they will become gun users. A
2011 report by the industry’s trade association urged the
creation of “hunting and target shooting recruitment programs
aimed at middle school level, or earlier.”
Cartoon
On a stage to one side, two men with guitars were performing
under a sign marked “N.R.A. Country,” a program that sponsors
musicians in order to attract younger members, a major industry
priority. The challenge is a “slow-motion demographic collapse,”
according to the Violence Policy Center, a gun-safety advocacy
group. Last year, Shooting Sports Retailer warned that “the
problem with failing to recruit and grow is that numbers equate
to political power.”
In Louisville, a giant banner promised “11 Acres of Guns and
Gear.” For kids, there were .22-calibre hand-guns designed to
look like military-issue sidearms. (In 2013, the magazine Junior
Shooters gave one to a thirteen-year-old reviewer, who raved
that it “looks cool and feels like a Beretta, which I think is
awesome.”) For sport shooters and survivalists, who talk about
TEOTWAWKI (“The end of the world as we know it”), there were
AR-15s, or “black rifles”—the civilian version of military
M-16s—which are known in the industry as the “Barbie doll of
guns,” because buyers keep coming back for new grips, sights,
and other mix-and-match accessories.
Much as the industry capitalized on the Los Angeles riots, it
has excelled, since 9/11, at tapping into the fear of terrorism.
Feldman, the former N.R.A. lobbyist, told me, “The threat is no
different on 9/12 than it was on 9/10, but the perception of it
changed dramatically. It is fear, but it’s not a fear that the
gun industry is promoting. It doesn’t have to.” Survivalist
fantasies about the breakdown of society “crossed over from
being the lunatic fringe to more serious after 9/11,” Feldman
said. “It’s not about the government coming after you. It’s
about terrorists taking out the electrical grid.”
In recent years, the gun industry’s product displays have become
so focussed on self-defense and “tactical” gear that some
hunters feel ignored. After a trade show in January, David E.
Petzal, a columnist for Field & Stream, mocked the “SEAL
wannabes,” and wrote that “you have to look fairly hard for
something designed to kill animals instead of people.” The
contempt is mutual; some concealed-carry activists call hunters
“Fudds,” as in Elmer.
The U.S. Concealed Carry Association had a large exhibit. Based
in Wisconsin, it promotes what it calls the “concealed-carry
lifestyle” and sells training materials and “self-defense
insurance,” which subsidizes legal fees for gun owners if they
shoot someone. Tim Schmidt, the founder, told me, “When I had
kids, I went through what I call my ‘self-defense awakening.’ ”
In 2004, he launched the magazine Concealed Carry and then
expanded. Members now receive daily e-mails urging them to buy
additional training and insurance, in case, as a recent e-mail
put it, “God forbid, the unthinkable should happen to you, and
you’re forced by some scumbag in a drug fueled rage to pull the
trigger.”
For several years, Schmidt had a sideline in packaging his sales
techniques. He calls the approach “tribal marketing.” It’s based
on generating revenue by emphasizing the boundaries of a
community. “We all have the NEED to BELONG,” he wrote in a
presentation entitled “How to Turn One of Mankind’s Deepest
Needs Into Cold, Hard CASH.” In a section called “How Do You
Create Belief & Belonging?,” he explained, “You can’t have a yin
without a yang. Must have an enemy.”
The meeting featured seminars, and one after another the
speakers encouraged attendees to be ready to fight. Kyle Lamb, a
former Delta Force operator, urged the mostly middle-aged crowd
to adopt a “combat mind-set.” He said, “Ten minutes from now, or
an hour from now, or two days from now, you may be in that
fight.” He said that we must prepare for the emotional
consequences, including “the sound people make when they get
shot.”
The biggest crowd turned up for Dave Grossman, a prolific author
who has taught psychology at West Point. In “On Combat” (2004),
he described society as populated by sheep, wolves, and
sheepdogs. “If you want to be a sheep, then you can be a sheep
and that is okay,” he wrote. “But you must understand the price
you pay. When the wolf comes, you and your loved ones are going
to die if there is not a sheepdog there to protect you.” The
concept went viral, inspiring T-shirts and a fictional scene in
“American Sniper,” the film based on the memoir of Chris Kyle,
in which Kyle’s father tells him to be a sheepdog, “blessed with
the gift of aggression.”
Grossman, who is friendly and intense in person—I discovered
later that he is a paid lecturer for Tim Schmidt’s group—gave
his audience the bleakest portrait of the future that I’ve
heard. He predicted that terrorists will detonate a nuclear
weapon on a boat off the coast of the United States, and that
they will send people infected with diseases—“suicide bio
bombers”—across the border from Mexico. Then he said, “I’ll tell
you what’s next, folks: school-bus and day-care massacres.”
Eventually, he wound his way to the solution: concealed carry.
“There is a time, in the first five to ten minutes in every one
of these events, when one or two well-trained people with a
concealed weapon can rise from the entire pack.” Americans,
Grossman told us, must accommodate to a future of “armed people
everywhere.”
Gerald Ung, the man who shot Edward DiDonato during an argument
on a Philadelphia street, didn’t buy a gun because he was
thinking of a “bio bomber.” In 2008, while he was in law school,
he moved to an unfamiliar neighborhood and heard about a girl
who was raped nearby and a classmate who had been robbed. He
remembered a statistic from the news that Philadelphia averaged
a murder a day. It seemed to him, he said later, that “kids were
just basically jumping people all the time.” Ung’s anecdotes
composed a chaotic portrait, and there was truth in
it—Philadelphia had one of the highest crime rates in
America—but they didn’t give him much context, and the city, in
fact, was safer than it had been in years. In 2008, major
crimes, including murder, rape, and aggravated assault, had
dropped to their lowest level since 1978. By 2009, murders were
down twenty-five per cent in three years. Ung’s sense of unease
was widespread. When crime rates were actually dropping, in the
mid-two-thousands, almost seventy per cent of Americans believed
that crime had risen in the previous year. Some studies of those
misperceptions blame a change in life style: as people drive
more, and have less contact with neighbors, they report a
greater fear of crime. Other studies focus on news reports that
give heavy attention to low-probability threats. An analysis of
Los Angeles television stations in 2009 found that local
broadcasts often started with crimes that were not even in Los
Angeles, leaving viewers with the impression that the biggest
thing happening most days is something awful. Frightening but
remote threats, such as shark attacks, which some scholars call
“fearsome risks,” throw off our judgment. Our instinct is to
respond with action—in Ung’s case, by carrying a gun.
Ung was charged with attempted murder and aggravated assault. He
went on trial on February 8, 2011. DiDonato remained in critical
condition for a month. After fourteen surgeries, he had regained
the ability to walk, but his left foot hung limp, and he
suffered lasting damage to his intestines.
In court, many of the participants from that night testified,
and it became clear that, in the seventy seconds in which the
encounter unfolded, each side had misread the intentions and
emotions of the other. Thomas Kelly, the reveller who had lunged
at Ung’s group, had misjudged the effect of his cursing and
gesturing. “It was more of a humorous ‘Fuck you,’ ” he said,
though Ung’s friend Joy Keh was convinced that Kelly and the
others were a “bloodthirsty gang.” Ung’s misreading may have
been the most catastrophic. When Kelly hiked up the drooping
belt of his pants, Ung suspected that he, too, might have a gun.
That mistake is not uncommon: a person holding a gun is more
likely to misperceive an object in another person’s hand to be a
gun, according to a 2012 study published in the Journal of
Experimental Psychology.
After a six-day trial, the jury acquitted Ung of all charges.
(“A victory for all of us,” a gun-rights blog declared.) In the
courtroom, Ung sobbed and clasped his hands in prayer. “Just get
me out of here,” he said, weeping, as he was led away by his
supporters, and he never said another word in public.
The centerpiece of the N.R.A. annual convention this year was
the endorsement of Donald Trump for President, the most
fervently pro-gun nominee in Presidential history. He has called
for a national right to concealed carry.
Trump and the N.R.A. were not always allies. In his book “The
America We Deserve,” published in 2000, Trump accused
Republicans of toeing “the N.R.A. line” by rejecting “even
limited restrictions.” He wrote of his support for a ban on
assault weapons and a seventy-two-hour waiting period on gun
purchases, both anathema in the gun-rights community. But as a
candidate Trump had abandoned those views, and he was forgiven:
at gun shows this year, venders have been selling olive-green
“Trump’s Army” T-shirts, alongside shirts in red and white,
lifeguard-style, marked “Waterboarding Instructor.” (Trump has
promised to resume the use of waterboarding.)
When Trump took the stage in Louisville, he said, “There are
thirteen million right-to-carry permit holders in the United
States. I happen to be one of them.” (He has a permit in New
York State; it’s not clear how often he has carried a gun.)
Trump can seem like the ultimate spokesman for the age of
concealed carry: the original “tribal marketer,” the man who
sees enemies everywhere. He reminded the audience of the
fourteen people who were killed in San Bernardino: “If we had
guns on the other side, it wouldn’t have been that way.” He made
a gun out of his thumb and forefinger, and said, “I would
have—boom!”
There was a time when the N.R.A. defined itself by conservative
free-market principles, but in recent years, as American incomes
have diverged, it has given greater emphasis to a populist line,
suggesting that powerful Americans are seeking to disarm and
endanger less privileged citizens. Before Trump took the stage,
the crowd watched a video about “political élites and
billionaires.” “The thought of average people owning firearms
makes them uncomfortable,” the narrator said. “They don’t like
how the men and women who build their office buildings, vacation
homes, and luxury cars, who mop their floors, clean their
clothes, and serve their dinner, have access to the same level
of protection as their armed security guards.” Alert to the
theme, Trump called on Hillary Clinton to give up her Secret
Service protection. “They should immediately disarm,” he said.
“And let’s see how good they do.” He promised his audience,
“We’re going to bring it back to a real place, where we don’t
have to be so frightened.”
Having an enemy is also part of N.R.A. strategy, according to
Feldman, the former lobbyist. During George W. Bush’s
Presidency, when the threat of gun control receded, membership
dropped, he said. (The group declines to confirm that.)
“Negatives are so much more powerful than positives in
politics,” he told me. “I can get people all fired up about
something that takes something away. Even if you don’t own one
of these guns, if they’re going to take one away from you, all
of a sudden I want to buy one.” In writing mailings to members,
Feldman emphasized the threat posed by Americans who support gun
control. He gave me a hypothetical example: “ ‘If you can’t send
us twenty-two dollars and fifteen cents by the close of business
Friday, the lights on your cherished Second Amendment freedoms
will dim forever.’ I mean, I can go on, but that’s your standard
fund-raising shtick.”
For all the bluster, in two days at the convention I encountered
few members of the rank and file who actually believed it. Many
were wary of the hucksterism, the bravado, the odes to the
“sheepdog.” “Even if you’re going to intervene, it should never
be with a gun first,” Lowell Huckelberry, a concealed carrier
and retired businessman from southern Illinois, told me. When I
asked people, as I did dozens of times this spring, why they
chose to carry, most attributed it to a compounding sense of
vulnerability, a suspicion that spectacular displays of violence
signal a breakdown of public morality and the state’s ability to
provide security. “We had a recent mall shooting,” Rachel Keith,
a forty-six-year-old woman who has been carrying for six years,
told me. In response, she taught her daughters to scout for
exits in public places, and enrolled them in pistol classes so
that they will “be confident that they, too, can work a gun.”
Armed citizenship generates its own momentum. Sid O’Nan, a
genial and self-effacing father of two teen-agers, who works as
an I.T. specialist for the Department of Agriculture, told me
that, growing up, he had done some hunting, but not much. Yet in
recent years he saw more guns around. “As I would invite buddies
over, they would always have handguns,” he said. He now carries
a Glock 17. The notion that more firearms reduces the risks
posed by more firearms is paradoxical to some and reassuring to
others. I asked O’Nan what he meant when he said that times had
changed. “I just see all the garbage that’s going on, and I
thought, You know what? I couldn’t live with myself if I
couldn’t be there to protect my family,” he said. “I don’t know
firearms. I don’t know ballistics. I don’t know holsters. I’m
just trying to glean from a friend what he says. I’ve asked him,
‘Should I go for the head if somebody has full-body armor?’ He
says, ‘No, just center mass. Your 9-mm. will knock them to the
ground, and you can get the heck out of there.’ ”
At the heart of the concealed-carry phenomenon is a delicate
question: Does it save lives?
Last month, I called David Jackson, a thirty-two-year-old truck
driver in Columbia, South Carolina. He has six children. On
January 26th, he was getting a haircut at Next Up Barber and
Beauty, accompanied by his girlfriend and two youngest sons,
ages two and four, when a pair of men in masks and hoodies came
in the front door. One pumped a shotgun and said, “You already
know what this is.” The other waved a handgun, and started
moving down the line of chairs, demanding wallets and cash, and
reaching into the barbers’ pockets.
A surveillance camera recorded what happened next. When the
robber with the handgun had his back turned, Jackson reached
under his plastic salon smock, pulled out a .357 Magnum—he had
obtained his license six months earlier—and fired. It happened
that one of the barbers, Elmurray Bookman, was also licensed to
carry. Bookman pulled out his gun, and, together, he and Jackson
fired at the robber, who tumbled out of the back door, collapsed
on the sidewalk, and died of multiple gunshot wounds.
Jackson turned to the front of the shop, where the first robber
was fleeing through the door. Jackson fired three more bullets
but missed, and the robber escaped. When the police arrived,
they watched the footage, took down Jackson’s statement, and
ruled the shootings self-defense. It was a one-day story on the
local news. Jackson returned to work the following Monday.
When the gun industry talks about concealed carry, it highlights
experiences like Jackson’s. But he was no ordinary shooter: he
spent two years in the Air Force, where he trained for hundreds
of hours. Later, he erected targets behind his home so that he
could practice. (Gerald Ung visited a gun range on three or four
occasions.) When I spoke to Jackson, he was in the cab of his
truck. I asked how he felt about the experience. “Terrible,” he
said. He wouldn’t change his decision to shoot, but it had
shaken him. “I don’t feel good. You know, kind of sick about it.
A lot of times, you know, you close your eyes to go to sleep and
you think about it. I can see everything that happened, and
then, right before the shots go off, I wake up. I jump.”
I asked Jackson why he had obtained a permit. “I thought it was
going to be more an ISIS thing, or something,” he said. “I never
thought I’d need to use it like that.” I asked how his kids were
doing. “They’re like kind of obsessed with guns now. Especially
my four-year-old. He’s like, ‘My daddy shot the robber!’ That’s
what he always says. The other day, he asked me, ‘Daddy, could
you teach me?’ I was like, ‘Teach you what?’ ‘How to shoot.’ I
told him when he turns five I’ll start teaching him.”
In the early years of concealed carry, there was a debate about
whether it reduced violence or increased it. A decade ago, when
mass shootings were emerging as a frequent phenomenon, the
conservative economist John Lott asserted that carry guns could
halt those killings—a precursor to the N.R.A.’s current maxim
that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good
guy with a gun.” It’s a mantra among concealed carriers, but
evidence is sparse. A 2014 study by the F.B.I. found that, in a
hundred and sixty “active shooter” incidents from 2000 to 2013,
armed citizens who were not security guards stopped the “bad
guy” on one occasion (when a patron shot an attacker at the
Players Bar and Grill, in Winnemucca, Nevada, in 2008). Unarmed
citizens, by contrast, stopped active shooters on twenty-one
occasions. In recent years, scholars have found that concealed
carry may be altering society in measurable, and unwelcome,
ways: in 2014, a study led by the Stanford law professor John J.
Donohue III examined the effect of concealed-carry laws on
crime, using data from 1979 to 2010. He found that the laws led
to “substantially higher rates” of aggravated assault, rape,
robbery, and murder.
For the past decade, the most reliable business in Gun Valley
has been concealed carry. But, nearly a century after Jonathan
Mossberg’s family began to profit from the gun business, he is
betting that this is about to change.
On a warm morning in northern Connecticut, Mossberg brought me
to a private shooting club. He was wearing loafers, khakis, and
a blue-and-white oxford shirt. O. F. Mossberg & Sons, founded in
1919 by Jonathan’s great-grandfather, is one of the world’s
largest makers of shotguns. When he was sixteen, Jonathan
started work at the company, and by the time he left, in 2000,
he was vice-president of acquisitions.
He took a twelve-gauge shotgun from a long black plastic case.
Sixteen years after Ed Shultz’s attempt to build a smart gun all
but drove him into hiding, Mossberg thinks that times have
changed. His invention, which he calls the iGun, is synched to a
ring that he wears on his right hand. “You don’t swipe it,” he
said. “You don’t do a retina scan or anything like that.” He
loaded three shells, put the gun to his shoulder, and fired
three rounds toward the far end of a trap-shooting range. He put
the gun on his other shoulder, and said, “Left hand, no ring.”
He pulled the trigger and nothing happened.
Mossberg first started talking publicly about his smart gun last
year, and he braced for hate mail. Officially, the N.R.A. does
not oppose the development of smart-gun technology, but it
frames the idea as fanciful or dangerous. (On its Web site, it
says that the government would exploit the technology to “allow
guns to be disabled remotely.”) “But I got literally almost no
hate mail,” Mossberg said. “I got maybe three negative ones.”
Mossberg hopes to get his technology into a handgun—and then get
the gun into the hands of prison guards, air marshals, and
parents. An ordinary Mossberg shotgun sells for about three
hundred and fifty dollars. He figures that his gun will cost up
to two hundred dollars more. “I get e-mails every day. ‘Where
can I buy it? What’s your stock symbol?’ I answer them all very
politely. ‘We’re trying to raise money.’ ” The big gun companies
aren’t interested. “They’re doing so well now that they really
don’t have to care.” No C.E.O. wants to be the next Ed Shultz,
and ever since the 2005 law immunized gunmakers against lawsuits
they have little incentive to develop new ways of reducing
accidents or misuse.
Many smart-gun advocates believe that the only way the guns will
become available is if military and police agencies agree to buy
them, which would spur companies to invest in the technology. In
April, the Obama Administration announced that the Justice and
Homeland Security departments are preparing standards that smart
guns will need to meet for government contracts. Valerie
Jarrett, a senior adviser to the President who is in charge of
the project, told me that it had a personal relevance. “My
grandfather was shot and killed with his own handgun,” she said.
“He was a dentist here in D.C. He was an avid hunter. He kept a
gun in his office, because, as a dentist, he kept opiates in his
office. One day, two people broke in and pulled out a toy gun.
He pulled out the real gun and they proceeded to take his real
gun away from him and shoot and kill him.” She went on, “We’re
not saying that smart-gun technology is going to save every
life. But, if it saves a few, why wouldn’t we take those steps?”
A smart gun would not prevent most gun deaths, but it could have
a powerful effect on six hundred or so accidental gun deaths
each year—including an average of sixty-two, each year, that
kill children under fourteen. During one week in April, four
toddlers shot and killed themselves. Another, a two-year-old
boy, found a gun on the floor of a car and shot through the back
of the driver’s seat, killing his mother. The statistical story
of American gun violence is less about “active shooters” and
“sheepdogs” than about impulses and cruelties of fate.
The chances of being killed by a mass shooter are lower than the
chances of being struck by lightning, or of dying from
tuberculosis. The chance of a homicide by a firearm in the home
nearly doubles the moment that a firearm crosses the threshold.
Dave Grossman’s vision of “armed people everywhere” has a
seductive certainty, but having a gun at hand alters the
chemistry of ordinary life—the arguments, the miscalculations,
the perceptions of those around us.
If the American gun business stays on its present course, its
market will likely continue to consolidate into the hands of a
smaller, more dedicated community. That will widen the gap
between those with a “combat mind-set” and those without,
between “friends” and “enemies.” If Donald Trump reaches the
White House, he will bring with him a moral logic of concealed
carry. If he falls short of the Presidency, his admirers will
have gained, at a minimum, fresh evidence of their encirclement.
As the pro-gun and the anti-gun worlds grow further apart, it
gets harder for each side to understand the intentions of the
other. They are, more than ever, like two groups squaring off in
the dark, convinced that the other wishes them harm. |
