81: Guns

Ira Glass

Dear friend, it's true. If there's even the slightest possibility that you'll have to use your gun someday for self-defense, this is going to be the most important letter you've ever read. I'm not kidding. So please do yourself a favor. Go to someplace quiet, close the door, and tell everyone not to disturb you for the next 5 or 10 minutes. Done? Good. I'm only asking that you do this because I want you to carefully absorb and consider what I'm about to share with you. It really could save your life someday.

Well, this is an open letter from this issue of American Handgunner magazine. It's actually written by Ben Cooley, who's described as somebody with 13 years of experience in counterterrorism, hostage rescue, and SWAT training. It is a four-page single-spaced letter with lots of things underlined and bolded everywhere. It's actually a full-page ad. His thesis basically is that you have to have the fighting mindset. Naturally you have to have a gun, but in addition to a gun, more important than the gun, is what is going on in your head. Let me just read you a little bit here.

Hollywood will get you killed. Tragically, almost everyone alive today learns their so-called fighting skills from what they see on TV and in the movies. I say "tragically" because everything you see on TV and film is absolutely the opposite of what you should do in a real life armed confrontation. Yes, I know it's almost heresy to say it, but even Dirty Harry would get his head blown off if he tried these stunts in real life.

I've been reading gun magazines, and more than anything I've read in any of the issues of any of the gun magazines, this ad completely gets to me, and I've been trying to think about why. And I think the reasons are these. Number one, its central attitude, its central thesis is everything you know is wrong. Number two, it says Hollywood is trouble. Number three, it tells you that gadgets and fancy stuff cannot help you. What will help you, the only thing that can help you, is the right attitude. Number four, it says that all I need to do is buy a video for $97, and a gun, of course, but mainly video, and I'm set.

I read this and I have to say I want more. I want this. Which is not an easy thing to achieve with an ad, because the gap between gun owners and people who don't own guns, like myself, that is a vast gap in our country. It's two different cultures. But this ad, I don't know what. It's a thing about it's everything you know is wrong, can-do badassery. I get this ad. This ad bridges the gap.

And that is also the mission of today's radio program. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, we try to bridge the gap between Americans who love their guns and Americans who hate them.

Act One of our program, the NRA meets NEA. Our own Sarah Vowell goes out shooting with her dad and a gun that weighs 110 pounds.

Act Two, Fists and Guns. A gun control advocate, Geoffrey Canada, explains the pleasure and power of carrying a gun.

Act Three, Shooter, how somebody goes from victim to perp in one day.

Act Four, Potato Potahto, what it's like getting shot at. We hear from two people who drew completely opposite conclusions from the experience.

Act Five, Straw Man. We'll talk with a man who has put five dozen illegal guns into the hands of criminals for less money than you made this year. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, NRA versus NEA. Sarah Vowell says that growing up in Oklahoma and Montana, she did not agree with her father about guns. And then one day, back when she was mostly a music critic writing for Spin and all sorts of places like that, she tried to cross the cultural chasm that divides the gun haters from the gun lovers in this country.

Sarah Vowell

If you were passing by the house where I grew up during my teenage years, and it happened to be before election day, you wouldn't have even needed to come inside to see that it was a house divided. You could just look at the Democratic campaign poster in the upstairs window and the Republican one in the downstairs window, and see our home for the civil war battleground it was. I'm not saying who was the Democrat and who was the Republican, my father or I, but I will tell you that I am not the one who plastered the family truck with National Rifle Association stickers, that I have never subscribed to Guns & Ammo, and that hunter's orange was never my color. About the only thing my father and I agree on is the Constitution, though I'm partial to the First Amendment while he's always favored the Second.

I am a gunsmith's daughter. In our house, or as I like to call it, the United States of Firearms, guns were everywhere-- the so-called pretty ones hanging on the wall, Dad's clients' fixer-uppers leaning in the corners, an entire rack right next to the TV. I had to move revolvers out of my way to make room for my bowl of Rice Krispies on the kitchen table.

Now I even giggle when Dad calls me on election day to cheerfully inform me that he has once again canceled out my vote, but I was not always so mature. There were times when I found the fact that he was a gunsmith horrifying and just weird. All he ever cared about was guns. All I ever cared about was art. And there were years and years when I holed up in my room reading Allen Ginsberg poems, and he hid out in the garage making rifle barrels, and we weren't capable of having a conversation that didn't end up in argument.

I have only shot a gun once, and once was plenty. My twin sister Amy and I were six years old-- six-- when Dad decided it was high time that we should know how to shoot. Amy remembers the day he handed us the gun for the first time differently. She liked it. She says that she thought it meant that Daddy trusted us, and that he thought of us as big girls.

But I remember holding the pistol only made me feel small. It was so heavy in my hand. I stretched out my arm and pointed it away and winced. It was a very long time before I had the nerve to pull the trigger, and I was so scared I had to close my eyes. It felt like it just went off by itself, as if I had no say in the matter, as if the gun just had this need. The sound it made was as big as God. It kicked little me back to the ground like a bully, like a foe. It hurt. I don't know if I dropped it or just handed it back over to my dad, but I do remember that I never wanted to touch another one again. And, since I believed in the devil, I did what my mother told me to do every time I felt an evil presence. I whispered under my breath, Satan, I rebuke thee.

Now it's not like I'm saying I was traumatized. It was more like I was decided-- guns, not for me. Lucky for me, both my parents grew up in exasperating households where children were considered puppets and/or slaves. So my mom and dad were hell-bent on letting my sister and me make our own choices. So if I decided that I didn't want my father's little death sticks to kick me to the ground again, that was fine with him. He'd go hunting with my sister, who started calling herself the loneliest twin in history because of my reluctance to engage in family activities.

Of course, the fact that I was allowed to voice my opinions did not mean that my father would silence his own. Some things were said during the Reagan administration that cannot be taken back. I won't bore you with the details. Let's just say that I blamed my father for nuclear proliferation and Contra aid, while he believed that if I had my way, all the guns would be confiscated, and it would take the commies about 15 minutes to parachute in and assume control.

We're older now, my dad and I, and the older I get, the more I'm interested in becoming a better daughter. First on my list, figure out that whole gun thing.

Not long ago, my dad finished his most elaborate tool of death yet, a cannon. He built a 19th century cannon from scratch. It took two years. After tooling a million guns, after inventing and building a rifle barrel boring machine, after setting up a complicated shop filled with lathes and bluing tanks and outmoded blacksmithing tools, the cannon is his most ambitious project ever. I thought that if I was ever going to understand the ballistic bee in his bonnet, this was my chance. It was the biggest gun he ever made, and I could experience it and spend time with it with the added bonus of not having to actually pull a trigger myself.

I called Dad and said that I wanted to come watch him shoot off the cannon. He was immediately suspicious. He seemed nervous when I told him I wanted to record it, but I had never taken an interest in his work before, and he would take what he could get.

I flew home to Montana. He loaded it into the back of his truck, and we drove up into the Bridger Mountains.

Sarah Vowell

I should mention that it is a small cannon. It's as long as a baseball bat and as wide as a coffee can, so it's heavy. 110 pounds. We get to the mountain. My dad takes his gunpowder and other toys out of this adorable wooden box on which he has stenciled Pat G. Vowell Cannonworks. He plunges his homemade bullets into the barrel, points it at an embankment just to be safe, and lights the fuse.

I've given this a lot of thought, how to convey the giddiness I felt as the cannon shot off, and I wish there were a more articulate way to say this, but I'm telling you, there isn't. It's just really, really cool. My dad thought so too. It's also loud, louder than I can possibly convey over the radio. No, let me amend that. If you want to understand how loud it was, in a moment, not yet, but when I say, turn the volume on your radio all the way up. Ready? Now.

[CANNON FIRES]

It was so loud and so painful, I had to touch my head to make sure my skull hadn't cracked open. Here's something my dad and I share. We're both a little hard of hearing. Me from Aerosmith, him from gunsmith. Hey, turn it up again.

[CANNON FIRES]

Just as I was wondering what was coming over me, two hikers walked by. We forced them to politely laugh at our jokes for a while, and Dad set the cannon off again so they could see how it works.

Sarah Vowell

Then this odd thing happens. When one of the hikers says, that's quite the machine you got there, he isn't talking about the cannon. He's talking about my tape recorder and my long radio microphone. I stare back at him, then I look over at my father's cannon, and down at my microphone, and I think, oh my god, my dad and I are the same person. We're both smart-alecky loners with goofy projects and weird equipment. And since this whole target practice outing was my idea, I was no longer his adversary. I was his accomplice. And what's worse, I was liking it.

I haven't changed my mind about guns. I can get behind the cannon because it is a completely ceremonial object. It's unwieldy and impractical just like everything else I care about in the world. Try to rob a convenience store with this 110-pound Saturday night special, you'll still be dragging it in the door Sunday afternoon.

[CANNON FIRES]

I love noise. I make my living writing about it, and I'm always waiting for that moment in a song when something just flies out of it and explodes in the air. My dad is a one-man garage band, the kind of rock-and-roller who slaves away at his art for no other reason than to make his own sound. My dad's an artist, a pretty driven idiosyncratic one too, and he's got his last Gesamtkunstwerk all planned out. It's a performance piece. We're all in it, my mom, the loneliest twin in history, and me.

Here's how it goes. When my father dies, take a wild guess what he wants done with his ashes. Here's a hint. It requires a cannon.

Sarah Vowell

I'll do it too. I don't know about my mom and my sister, but I'll do it. I'll have my father's body burned into ashes. I'll pack this ash into paper bags. The morbid joker has already made the molds. I'll go to the mountains with my mother and my sister, bringing the cannon as he asks. I will plunge his remains into the barrel and point it into a hill so he doesn't take anyone with him. I will light the fuse, but I will not cover my ears, because when I blow what used to be my dad into the earth, I want it to hurt.

[MUSIC - "FATHER DEATH BLUES" BY ALLEN GINSBERG]

Ira Glass

Act Two, Fists and Guns. Drive-by shootings and tragic assaults where one teenager shoots another for a jacket or a pair of Nikes are such old news that we forget how we got to this point. Geoffrey Canada grew up in a tough neighborhood in the South Bronx before guns were commonplace in teenage culture there. He's also been a gun owner himself. We wanted to talk to him about that, but first, a few words about the days before guns.

In 1971, well before the explosion of handguns on the streets of New York City, I bought a handgun. I bought the gun legally in Maine where I was in college. The clerk only wanted to see some proof of residency, and my Bowdoin College ID card was sufficient. The gun was exactly what I needed. It was so small I could slip into my coat pocket or pants pocket.

I needed the gun because we had moved from Union Avenue to 183rd Street in the Bronx, but I still traveled back to Union Avenue during the holidays when I was home from school. The trip involved walking through some increasingly dangerous territory. New York City was going through one of its gang phases, and several new ones had sprung up in the Bronx.

One of the gangs liked to hang out right down the block from where we now lived on 183rd Street and Park Avenue. When I first went away to school, I paid no mind to the large group of kids that I used to pass on my way to the store or to the bus stop back to the Bronx. The kids were young, 14 or 15 years old. At 19 I was hardly worried about a bunch of street kids who thought they were tough, but over the course of the next year the kids got bolder and more vicious. On several occasions I watched with alarm as swarms of teenagers pummeled adults who had crossed them in one way or another. Everyone knew they were a force to be reckoned with, and many a man and woman crossed the street or walked around the block to keep from having to walk past them.

And I crossed the street also, and there were times that I went out of my way to go to another store rather than walk past a rowdy group of boys who seemed to own the block. On more than one occasion I rounded the corner only to come face to face with the gang. I could feel their eyes on me as I looked straight ahead, hoping none of them would pick a fight.

After having survived growing up in the Bronx, here I was scared to go home and walk down my own block. The solution was simple. I had a gun. I had a gun and an attitude. When I look back on the power the gun had over my personality and my judgment, I am amazed. It didn't happen all at once. The change was subtle. At first I continue to avoid the gang of teenagers. I crossed the street or turned down another block when I saw them.

But slowly, as I carried the gun with me day after day, my attitude began to change. I begin to think, why should I have to walk an extra block? Why should I feel that I have to cross the street or look down when I pass those kids? By the end of two weeks, I had convinced myself that all of the habits I had cultivated to avoid conflict with the gang were unnecessarily conciliatory.

My behavior when I went outside began to change. I stopped going out of my way, or crossing the street, or avoiding eye contact when I passed the gang. In fact, I began to do the opposite. I would choose to go to the grocery store on the side of the street where the gang was gathered. I would walk through them head up, eyes challenging, hand in my coat pocket, finger on the trigger. I was prepared to shoot to kill to defend myself. My rationale was that I was minding my own business, not bothering anyone, but I wasn't going to take any stuff from anyone. If they decided to jump me, well they would get what they deserved.

I was lucky that winter break. The time quickly came for me to go back to college and no member of the gang had felt the need to challenge a strange young man with fire in his eyes and his hand always in his coat pocket. I knew if I continued to carry the gun in the Bronx, it would simply be a matter of time before I was forced to use it. My behavior would become more and more reckless each day. I unloaded the gun, wrapped it in a newspaper, took it to the town dump, and threw it away.

Ira Glass

Geoffrey Canada reading from his book Fist Stick Knife Gun. Geoffrey Canada says that the kind of fistfights that he grew up with ended in the Bronx in the 1970s. At one point in his book, he's told that one reason for the increase of handguns in the hands of teenagers is because the gun manufacturers, after saturating the market of white males, started to market guns to women and to young people.

Ira Glass

Geoffrey Canada is the author of Fist Stick Knife Gun, A Personal History of Violence in America. He now runs one of the most ambitious programs in the country to help children in neighborhoods like the one he grew up in, the Harlem Children's Zone, which is remaking 100 blocks in central Harlem, and his model the Obama administration is planning to use across the country.

Coming up, what it's like getting shot, and what it's like to sell guns to criminals. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, guns and the people who love them. We are at Act Three of our program. Round three, Shooter. This next story I think is the quintessential gun story because it is both about the fear of guns and the desire for them, the pleasure people take in them. A Chicago playwright named Bryn Magnus told this story on stage here in Chicago. As a kid growing up in Wisconsin, Bryn Magnus was terrorized by a bully named Dennis Schultz who used to beat him up all the time.

Bryn Magnus

So he would pound on me really bad, and I would take it year after year, and I would get pretty good at looking wounded so he would stop sooner. But anyway, one day I was with his cousin Kurt Schultz and Marky Welkirk and a couple of other guys at Kurt Schultz's house in his bedroom, and we were smoking pot and listening to Pink Floyd. And the door kicked open, and it was Dennis, and he had his father's Luger pistol.

And he turned and he said, Smokey, Smokey, and then he shot Kurt Schultz in the head. And Kurt flipped over the chair he was sitting in back like that, and we all totally freaked out, and I dove out the window. I just felt glass shattering around me, and I started running. And as I was running down the street, I heard Dennis Schultz scream, get your ass back here, faggot. And I was like oh God, I've got to get away from this guy.

Anyway, I'm running, and he had come out of the room after me through the window. And I was running down the street, and I heard a shot, and I heard the bullet whistling past me, and I was running as fast as I could. And then I didn't hear the shot that hit me. I just felt this sting in my back, and it kind of looked like this. The shot spun me around, and I landed, and he came running up to me, and he stood over me with the Luger. And he said-- I don't even know what he said actually, because I had by this time soiled my pants, and I was really shaking. And this was no act. I was really frightened.

And he just shot me like five times in the stomach, and I felt each time it hit me. I felt it striking me, and I looked down, and it was like wax. He had taken the bullets out of these bullets and dripped in wax over the gunpowder and put them back in this Luger. And he had done this act of terrorism, which I thought was really exceptionally creative.

Instantly conscripted my next door neighbor, Chris Williams, to steal his father's .38 Police Special from his bedroom that night, and we spent like hours making these bullets. We'd take the lead out of the bullet, and we'd drip a little-- well, first we'd dump a little of the gunpowder out, and then we'd drip a little wax in there, and then we'd put a little ketchup or fake blood in there, and then we'd drip a little more wax on top. And we had it all figured out.

And so then we would go out into the countryside on these country roads in Wisconsin that had these really twisty, turny things. And we would scope it out. We'd watch the cars go by, and make sure that we had the sight lines all right, and then we would enact these great scenes where one of us would have the gun and the other would be running or standing there like, oh no. So the car would come around the corner and hit us with its light, and it would be like this boom, and ah, and fall. The car would screech to a halt, and then we'd get up and run away, and it was really a great time.

And we did one where we were standing in the road, and I was the one who got shot. And usually what happens is the car stops like 1,000 yards before he gets to you and then waits until nothing's happening, and then slowly goes past. Well this car drove right up, and it was a police car. And these cops get out, and they have strong flashlights, so they can see us laughing in the bushes.

And they come over to us, and they weren't too afraid, because by that time we were so afraid. They didn't think that we were going to do anything with this gun, but they said, what are you kids doing?

And we told them what we were doing, and he said, oh yeah? Let me see. So I said, OK. So I had Chris set up, and we got all set, and these cops were standing there with their flashlights on us. And Chris shoots me, and I fall to the ground doing my thing. And there's this moment of silence, and the cop goes, yeah, that's pretty good. Do you guys do parties?

Ira Glass

Bryn Magnus recently finished his screenplay, not yet produced, about a morally invisible banker.

Ira Glass

Act Four, Potato Potahto. Now the story of two people nearly killed in gun attacks, two people who drew very different conclusions from their experiences. The first one we're going to hear from is Mike Robbins, a Chicago police officer, who in 1994 was shot 11 times. One bullet that ripped through his abdomen is still lodged an inch from his spine. A quick warning before we begin. Some of this might not be suitable for small children.

Robbins was working in the Gang Crimes Unit for the Chicago police. He and his partner answered a call about a gang disturbance. Shots had been heard. They drove down a dark alley. Robbins was driving, and somebody ran up to his side of the car.

Ira Glass

This is Suzanna Gratia Hupp, a chiropractor in Texas and a gun owner.

Ira Glass

Mike Robbins came out of the experience a firm advocate for stricter gun control. He got rid of his own guns and began speaking around the country about the issue. Suzanna Gratia Hupp meanwhile became a visible and important spokesperson in the fight to change the gun laws in Texas to allow concealed weapons. Soon after her side won and concealed weapons became legal in Texas, she was elected as a state representative.

Ira Glass

Act Five, Straw Man. The guns that are used in crimes are the guns that give guns a bad name. And where do those guns come from? Well, most of us assume that they're stolen, but in fact, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, only 10% of the guns confiscated at crimes are stolen. Where do the rest come from? 60% are purchased legally. Tori Marlan wrote about this when she was a staff writer at the Chicago Reader.

Ira Glass

For an article in the Chicago Reader, Tori Marlan interviewed a straw purchaser who bought guns for guys in his neighborhood between 1988 and 1990, and then he was caught. He served 13 months for dealing firearms without a license. She agreed to re-interview him on tape for This American Life.

Ira Glass

This straw purchaser was interviewed by Tori Marlan. Only 14 of his guns, out of over 60, have been recovered by police.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike. Senior editor for this show, Paul Tough. Contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Alex Blumberg, Rachel Howard, Laura Baggett, and Brian Reed.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Today's program was first broadcast in 1997. Mike Robbins, the police officer who you heard in Act Four of the show, died a decade after that first broadcast. He died in 2008. He was 57. He volunteered with kids in Chicago and remained a vocal activist for stricter handgun control until his death.

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who describes the first time here at public radio this way.

Sarah Vowell

The sound it made was as big as God. It kicked little me back to the ground like a bully, like a foe. It hurt.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life.

Announcer

PRI, Public Radio International.