OFF THE WIRE
After falling victim to a string of traumatic crimes, Amanda Fortini considers a controversial means of protection ......
I’m not sure what to make of all this, but I’m relieved that the main focus of my course is safety. When John, the soft-spoken male half of “John and Connie,” the married couple running the clinic, takes out an unloaded gun to demonstrate proper handling, I flinch. “Be sure of your target and what’s beyond it,” he tells us, turning the muzzle toward the ceiling. “And always keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot.” Later, another instructor, a gray-haired grandmotherly type named Shirley who speaks with the patrician intonation of a 1930s movie star, reiterates the safety rules. “You don’t want to have an accident,” she says. “The people who want to get rid of the guns, that’s what they talk about.” She tells us she carries a revolver in her purse “in case sum’in happens.”
For hands-on shooting practice, we separate into three groups: pistols, shotguns, and rifles. On my way to the pistol instruction area, I stop to ask a tall man with an NRA belt buckle for directions. “The handgun clinic is that way,” he says, pointing over my head.
“I’m looking for pistols,” I say.
“Honey,” he tells me, with an indulgent smile, “pistols are handguns.”
Most of my classmates aren’t firearms virgins like me; they’ve shot with a husband, boyfriend, or father. I’m handed an unloaded gun. I hold it out at arm’s length, like it smells bad or is poisonous. I know it’s empty, but I’m afraid it’s going to go off. Our instructor is a native Montanan in his forties who seems overly preoccupied with political correctness (“Ladies,” he’ll say, “is it okay if I correct your stance…?”); the class was supposed to be taught entirely by women, but too many students signed up. Nervously, he shows us the correct firing position and how to “sight” the gun by looking down its barrel at the target.
“Put the ammo in,” he tells me.
I follow his directions. My hands start shaking. All that’s left to do is shoot the damn thing. I’m intimidated—I’m petrified!—but people are watching. Peer pressure always motivates me. I squint, hold my breath, and…fire.
Fuck.
My first thought is, I can’t believe how loud that was. I’m wearing earplugs, but you don’t just hear the firecracker noise in your ears; you feel it with your whole body. Even if, like me, you’ve never handled a gun, they figure so heavily in the entertainment we watch—from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit to Sarah Palin’s reality show to movie trailers and video game commercials—that firing one for the first time is a weird combination of startling and banal. Guns are (pardon the pun) loaded with so much cultural baggage that you think you know what to expect. You don’t. TV gunshots sound and act no more like real gunshots than construction-paper snowflakes resemble real snowflakes.
My next thought is, I want to do that again! I have an immediate, exhilarated reaction. Partly it’s that what I’ve just done initially frightened me, so there’s a sense of a limit overcome. For many people I know, guns remain unreal—the accessories of fictional characters, or at least of the Other, not you and yours. Yet to fire a gun is to realize you can do it: You can operate one, understand how it works. Shooting gives me a rush that comes from a feeling of (admittedly incomplete) mastery.
Plus, the sensory experience of target shooting—readying your stance, controlling your breath, focusing on the target—is so absorbing that I can’t indulge my free-floating worries. I can’t have a self-conscious intellectual reaction when firing a gun. It’s almost meditative. At one point I glimpse a woman in her sixties dressed in a white polo, creased khakis, and pristine white sneakers—attire for a day of golf at the country club; she’s brandishing a Glock. I have to stop myself from laughing with delight.
As I shoot, I again experience the strange, paradoxical sense of an act that’s familiar and unfamiliar at once. I’ve seen Clint do this; I’ve seen Arnold do this; I’ve seen Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton do it. Shooting a gun is like smoking a cigarette or drinking espresso in a café in Paris or having sex on a Caribbean beach: You’ve watched it so many times on-screen that you experience your own actions as an echo. It’s impossible not to feel like a cliché.
A revolver now rests on my nightstand. It’s small and sleek and black, a Ruger LCR. Weighing 13.5 ounces and no bigger than a half-sandwich, it’s easily slipped into a purse. I’ve tucked it not quite out of sight, among books I hope to read but maybe never will. Several weeks after buying it, I’m still wary, superstitious. I know the chamber is empty, yet I open it every so often to check.
After the clinic, I filled out the forms for a concealed-carry permit at my local sheriff’s office. The application asked for character references, and I gave the phone numbers of a few editors, amused at the thought of their bewildered reaction should someone actually call. In the section that asked why I wanted the permit, I wrote, “Personal and home defense, and because I sometimes drive alone at night when reporting.” In theory, that’s why I want it, and it’s satisfying to think I might be able to clobber an assailant, but in reality I don’t feel qualified or prepared.
Because, let’s face it, if I really could fathom pulling the trigger on an intruder or a looming attacker—on another human being—I’d keep the gun loaded. When you hear floorboards creaking as he creeps toward your bedroom, it’s unlikely you’ll have the time, not to mention the presence of mind, to fumble with ammunition. To quote the teacher of a subsequent class I took: “When you’re in trouble is not the time to start loading. It could cost you your life.”
I imagine what I would have done with a gun during any of my past brushes with crime. Would I have fired it? In the end, of course, I didn’t need to, but I wouldn’t have known that in the moment, only after the fact. This means I might have needlessly killed or maimed someone. And yet without a gun, without the luck that turned events so unaccountably in my favor, I might have been the one killed. My ambivalence hangs in the air, a kind of reproach.
“Every time I look at the gun, it scares me,” I tell my boyfriend, as I eye its insolent blackness, leering at me from the shelf next to my bed.
“It’s a gun,” he says. “It should.”
Unable to sleep, I got a prodigious amount of writing done that year. But I also spent an unhealthy number of hours staring into the inky blackness of the front yard. I’d listen to the susurrus of the trees and become convinced that someone was out there rustling and whispering, that I was blind to him even as he could see me. I’d hear twigs cracking, likely from cats or raccoons, and think that it was branches breaking beneath a prowler’s feet. More than once I called 911. What’s bizarre is that during those nights I never remembered the gun. I didn’t even know where R. stored it. It never occurred to me that a gun might quiet my blaring inner alarms.
Until last year, that is, when I moved to Montana to live with my new boyfriend, now fiancé. Montana is one of only 12 states that allow residents to carry a loaded gun in public—“open carry”—either on foot or in a vehicle, without a permit. (To carry a concealed weapon, you do need a permit, obtainable after completing a training or safety course.)
Firearms, in other words, are a seamless part of the culture here. I don’t see people examining fruit in the produce aisle at Albertsons with a gun in plain sight, but I have glimpsed quite a few guns idly resting, like a map or some other quotidian object, on the dashboard of a car. People also talk about guns casually and often, the way people in New York talk about long workdays and people in L.A. talk about yoga classes. My boyfriend’s father’s girlfriend, a sixtysomething former stewardess who lives in Jackson Hole, tells me she keeps a pistol in her car because she often drives long stretches, crisscrossing her way between Wyoming and Arizona. Another woman I befriended, a quirky, devoutly Christian two-time divorcée in her fifties, takes her teenage son to the shooting range on weekends instead of to the movies. Leaving a sporting-goods store one evening, I pass a young couple with a yellow Labrador. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” squeals the woman, who has frosted pink lipstick and a blond ponytail snaking down her back. “This is for my birthday, right?” She’s carrying a large box containing a shotgun. As Lindsay McCrum, a photographer who published the bluntly titled book Chicks With Guns, has said: “When you get outside of the blue-state cities, everybody has a gun.”
Montana’s tradition of private gun ownership has long included women. Think of petticoated saloon girls tucking tiny derringers into their garter belts, or Calamity Jane, who once called home the small town where I now live. Traditions aside, there are practical reasons why a woman living here might want to own a weapon. Reasons one and two are grizzly bears and rattlesnakes, which you can encounter on a hike. Then, too, the distances between towns are vast in this sparsely populated state, the weather harsh and capricious. I’ve often wondered, If my car broke down in a remote area (there are many places beyond the reach of authorities, other people, or cell phone service) and someone tried to harm me under the pretext of helping, would anyone hear me scream?
The question can trouble me at home, too. Unlike R., my fiancé doesn’t travel much, but when I have spent nights alone in the large commercial building where we live, I’ve looked out at the desolate wintry downtown streets, listened to the wind rattling the windows, and felt utterly exposed, vulnerable. In situations like these, I begin to think that having a gun in easy reach might not be the worst idea.
Last January, I sat riveted by the harrowing round-the-clock coverage of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting. The pundits focused on the breakdown of the federal background-check system: Accused gunman Jared Loughner had been suspended from college for mental problems, arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia, and rejected by the military after admitting to repeated marijuana use, yet his history came up clear when he purchased the gun. I agreed that the system had failed, but I was also absorbed by another concern. Among the bystanders was a woman named Patricia Maisch. While lying on the ground to avoid being shot, she saw Loughner, pinned down next to her by two men, reach into his pocket, pull out a “magazine,” fumble, then drop it. Maisch heard someone yell, “Get the magazine!” So she reached out and snatched it. “I was able to grab it before he could,” Maisch told the press. Had someone yelled the same to me, I wouldn’t have had a clue what to do. I didn’t know that a magazine is a detachable device that loads ammunition into a semi-automatic weapon, yet I live in a place where firearms are commonplace. It occurred to me that maybe my ignorance about guns was itself dangerous.
Around this time, I went to see my doctor. The receptionist, a doughy woman dressed in pastel scrubs, came out from her nest behind the front window to tell me, apropos of nothing, about an all-female firearms training course. Assessing me head to toe, she said, with an amiable nod that seemed to indicate she’d been analyzing me for a while: “You look like you need to learn to shoot.”
I could tell by her tone that she meant to be solicitous and maternal, but her comment unnerved me. A woman I’ve never met is telling me I look like I need to learn to shoot? What the hell? What did she see? Perhaps, I thought, she was referring to the fact that I’m not physically prepossessing—delicately built, with bird-bone wrists and arms. Or maybe she’d fixated on my all-black, un-Montana wardrobe and determined I needed some toughening up. I must have been emitting pheromones of unease, I concluded, the way some people signal fear to dogs. I didn’t want to be perceived as a human orchid. I decided to learn to shoot.
According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, 61 percent of firearms retailers across the country reported an increase in female customers between 2009 and 2010. If you go into one of these stores or flip through a gun magazine, you’ll encounter an industry pitched to women: There’s pink camouflage apparel, purses designed for concealed carrying, and candy-colored guns with names like “Lavender Lady” and “Pink Cougar.” (“Woe to the man who is shot by a pink gun,” my boyfriend joked.) Journalists and industry experts speculate that the rise in female gun ownership owes much to the economic downturn (and an attendant concern with rising crime), as well as to the suspicion that President Obama might pass legislation restricting firearms and/or ammunition sales.
The daylong class I opt for, called Women on Target, is sponsored by the National Rifle Association and is so popular that the first time I try to register, all the spots are full. I’m forced to wait another three months. When the day finally comes, I arrive at the range at 7 a.m. to find approximately 35 women of various ages, from twentysomething to 60-plus, sitting at the sort of long fake-wood tables on which bingo is played in church basements. (The bathrooms are labeled “Does” and “Bucks.”) Outside, at the rifle range, people are already shooting. Every time there’s a reverberating boom, a few women jump, startled. It sounds like we’re in a war zone.
Most of the women have come to this clinic so they can get a permit to carry a concealed gun for self-defense. An elderly woman tells me that she wants to stash one in her bag for shopping trips. “For the parking lot,” she says.
Whether having a gun actually makes one safer is something of a statistical morass. Gun-rights advocates are fond of citing statistics showing that criminals typically operate unarmed (by some estimates, guns are used in only 31 percent of robberies and 2 percent of sexual assaults), which thus gives an advantage to citizens packing heat. They note the work of researchers such as Gary Kleck and Jongyeon Tark, whose 2004 paper in the journal Criminology analyzed data from the National Crime Victimization Survey and concluded that trying to fend off an attacker either does no harm or makes “things better for the victim” than had she not resisted. Moreover, the pair found that “forceful” behavior, such as “threatening the offender with a gun,” decreases the risk of injury to the victim more than “nonforceful” resistance, like “stalling, arguing, and screaming from pain and fear.” In another study that seems to bear out the deterrent effect of guns, nearly 40 percent of 1,874 prisoners reported that they’d decided not to commit a crime because they suspected a potential victim was armed.
On the other side of the corral, the National Research Council’s 2004 review of the data determined that there’s “no credible evidence that the passage of right-to-carry laws decreases or increases violent crime.” And Duke University economist Philip J. Cook, coauthor of Gun Violence: The Real Costs, contends that studies show that guns in the home are “far more likely to end up being used to kill a member of the household (including suicide) than to kill or injure an intruder.”
