NEUROTIC HANDGUNNER


Wherein, feeling blue, I return to the Coast Gun Shop.


I saw The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind last night. The flick deals with patterns of behavior and the corruption of memory. Kaufman and Gondry play a narrative trick on us early in the movie: We see Jim Carrey leave someplace to head home, and in the next scene we see him arrive back at his apartment, but we later learn we have traveled back two years in the life of the character between those two scenes.

I become more attentive to patterns in my own life as I grow older and feel increasingly dissatisfied with my slow pace of accomplishment. Nothing unique about that, of course. The only folks who worry about aging must be the ones who aren't happy with how they've used the years they can never get back. We mark the passage of time through rituals; birthdays and holidays; things that occur repeatedly at regular intervals, forming patterns that are impossible to miss. But it seems to me that there may be more insight to be gleaned from an examination of the patterns formed by uncommon events in our lives.

Like visits to a gun store.

Having been reared on binge diet of violent 80s action flicks, I admit to an ingrained fascination with handguns. I don't own one. I don't intend ever to own one. I've been to a pistol range exactly once, in college, when I went with a couple of my fellow campus cadets. The guys I went shooting with that Saturday afternoon were all headed for careers in law enforcement. I fired several magazines' worth of ammo from a 9 mm semiautomatic, plus one cylinder-load -- six shots -- from a .357 Magnum revolver. I enjoyed myself, but I never sought out the opportunity to shoot again.


At the time, I denied these movies, which I still enjoy, had any influence on me at all.

Politically, I'm on the side of the debate generally branded as "anti-gun," though with God-knows-how-many-millions of handguns already in circulation in this country, the issue seems largely moot to me. That said, in the year 2004, I'm sure I'm still far more likely to be shot dead on the streets of Los Angeles than I am to perish in a terrorist attack. But I digress, and then I digress within my digression.

I took my car in for an oil change today. Usually I drop it off, but today I decided to wait. I always wonder when I pick up my car from service if they really rotate the tires when I ask them. They do. Anyway, next door to the Midas is Coast Gun Shop. I must have looked like I didn't belong there, because one of the two owners, Mike -- his full name, according to his business card, is Michael Harms, which is funny considering he sells guns for a living -- anyway, Mike looked at me and said "Yes, Sir?" as soon as I walked in. I told him I was just killing time. Another clerk was telling a customer about the safety features on a Smith & Wesson .40 caliber semi-automatic. He said something to the effect that the pistol was already compliant with new safety laws that would take effect over the next several years. I used that as my opening, asking Mike to tell me about these new refinements to the gun. One of them was a notch cut into the slide so that anyone handling the gun could see whether a round was chambered without pulling the slide back to check. The other was a mechanism that prevented the pistol from firing if the magazine was removed.

Mission accomplished: As Mike was explaining these features to me, he unlocked the display case and handed me the gun.

As much as I despise the purpose handguns are devised for, I understand why some people love them. For one thing, they feel great -- the S&W .40 I handled was reassuringly heavy. They're also mechanically ingenious. The basic design of the semiautomatic pistol hasn't changed much since John Moses Browning invented it in 1911. The force of the same explosion that propels the bullet through the barrel and towards its target also pushes the slide backward, ejecting the spent shell casing through a port on the gun's side. When the slide snaps back into the firing position, it strips the next round from the magazine and pulls it into the chamber to be fired. Like I said, mechanically ingenious. But then so is a stapler. So is a yo-yo, for crying out loud. What makes guns so special? I've been asking myself this question for years, and the only credible-seeming answers that ever come to me are always the same two: 1) The iconic role of the handgun in all those cop movies I watched as a kid, and 2) The fact that handguns are designed to kill human beings, which gives them an awful, hypnotic power. I suppose this second reason might dissipate through familiarity if I handled guns all the time, but given the way the few gun owners I've known act when they're handling their weapons, I suspect not.

When Mike offered the pistol to me I handled it the way I knew I should: I was careful not to point it at him or at myself, and I rested my finger on the trigger guard, not the trigger. I then decided to demonstrate my comfort with this awful, fascinating, hypnotic, reassuring object by pulling the slide back. As it was, of course, unloaded, it locked in the open position. Mike had to point out the magazine-release catch to me. I removed the magazine and slapped it back in again, just like Magnum, P.I. I found the slide-release on my own; it was right under my thumb. Ingenious. I had to press down on it with more force than I expected to snap the slide closed again. On most semiautomatic pistols, the motion of the slide snapping forward -- in addition to bringing the next round up out of the magazine -- leaves the hammer cocked. This means that the trigger-pull for subsequent shots is much lighter than for the first, another example of Browning's mechanical artistry. Looking down at the cocked handgun in my fist, I asked Mike if there was a decocking lever. He pointed this out to me, too. I wanted to take aim at some imaginary target with this unloaded pistol -- an impulse the prospective customer who'd handled it before me had indulged -- but I felt like I was pressing my luck just by holding it. I handed it back to Mike.

Now it was time to engage in conversation. I'm a little ashamed to say this felt like sociological experiment to me. I felt certain than any words we exchanged would be freighted with political certainties of which no meaningful discussion would be possible. I am fully aware this was a manifestation of my prejudices, not Mike's, though I must say he did not disappoint.

I started off by remaking that I thought the can't-fire-if-the-magazine-is-out gizmo was a clever idea. I' m always surprised, I said, by how many people don't understand that a semiautomatic can still have one round in the chamber even if you take out the clip. (I guess they haven't seen as many Bruce Willis movies as I have.) But Mike just shook his head sadly. No safety device or law will ever overcome human stupidity, he said. I agree with this, as far as it goes. Mike left unspoken the corollary that all gun laws were a futile attempt to do this very thing. Once again, it's possible this last part was my inference rather than his implication, but I don't think so.

Mike told he would be teaching a gun-safety course for children at his church that Sunday. He planned to show a gun-safety video for children narrated by an actor he said the kids would know. "Barney?" I thought. "Jason Priestly," he said solemnly.

Now, I never watched "Beverly Hills, 90210," but I'm pretty sure it hasn't been on the air since I was in college. Your average eight-year-old is probably about as likely to know Jason Priestly as he is to know Charlton Heston . "Yeah, I wouldn't expect the kids to know Charlton Heston," I told Mike. He laughed, and said, "You could just tell them it was God." I laughed, too. "Moses," I corrected him. Only later did I remember that I own a two-CD set of Mr. Heston reading selected Old Testament scriptures.

I asked Mike what he knew about TacFire, the Tactical Firearms Training Institute . It's a storefront with a banner in the window on Main Street in midtown Ventura. I've passed it a hundred times but I've never seen anyone in there. Mike said it was a place that specialized in, yes, tactical training, largely for police but open to anyone who wanted to -- as Mike put it -- "win a gunfight."

At this point I succumbed to what I believe to be one of my least admirable qualities: the impulse to agree. My mouth was running now. I said that I thought any gun-buyer unschooled in firearms to take a course like that. "Though I agree with you," I was careful to say, "I don't think it should be mandatory." In actuality, I do think that any gun buyer who can't prove he's had police or military firearms training ought to be made to pass a safety course. We do it before we'll let people drive a car, don't we? And though cars can and do kill people, they, unlike handguns, are not intended for that purpose.

Mike responded by talking about tactical gun courses for women. He said that women gun owners who heard someone breaking into their house should be taught to get their gun and a flashlight, and then to wait for the intruder to come through the door. "They don't have to give any warning now," Mike said. "They can just shoot." My mouth continued on autopilot: "He made his choice when he kicked in the door or pried open the window," I said, feeling a little like Dirty Harry and a lot like big fake. I'm not sure why. I don't think it's necessarily a tragedy if a woman kills someone who breaks into her house -- provided he actually is an intruder and not just her son or daughter sneaking in after curfew.

Perhaps I felt like a fraud because I was remembering the last time I visited this gun shop. It was for the same reason I went today; to kill time while I was having my car serviced. It was three years ago, 40 months ago to be exact, and I remember this because it was the week after the 2000 presidential election, which you may remember was accompanied by a hint of controversy. I went into the gun store on that November day to kill time, yes, and to handle a firearm, yes. But mostly I went there to eavesdrop. As usually happens in ideological matters, I found exactly what I was looking for. I remember hearing someone say, "The Democrats are going to keep asking for recounts until they like the result." We now know that forecast proved to be as accurate as Dick Cheney's assessment of the Iraqi arsenal.

That was 40 months ago. I think the country has changed more in that time than I have, but in self-examination, a degree of myopia is unavoidable. One thing in certain: If I'm in the same place 40 months now as I am today, I'll be really depressed. I'll be in my thirties. Whether or not I'll think of that as a bad thing depends entirely on what I choose to do with what's left of my twenties. But barring some catastrophic societal slide into bedlam that frightens me to contemplete, I still won't own a gun.

Posted: Fri - March 26, 2004 at 11:11 AM        

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