Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

^{CHAPTER THREE} THE LETHAL LANDSCAPE

BEFORE ADVANCING ANY FURTHER, I SHOULD first make my bias clear, for bias more than any other force shapes debate about guns in this country. I am not opposed to guns, not even handguns, provided the owners acknowledge the monumental responsibility conferred by ownership; provided too that they invest the time necessary to become safe, proficient users and to store those guns in a cabinet strong enough to hold burglars and toddlers at bay. When I see rural road signs perforated with large-diameter bullet holes, I realize responsibility is not something universally practiced by America’s gun owners. I now ask the parents of my daughter’s playmates if they own guns and, if so, how they store them. If they store them loaded, even in a locked cabinet, my children do not play at their homes. Period.

I can appreciate the lethal appeal of weapons and the fine craftsmanship evident in such premium handguns as the Colt Python and, yes, the Smith & Wesson Model 29 used by Dirty Harry. When I go to gun shows, as I do now in my capacity as a federally licensed firearms dealer, I am drawn, as are most of the rest of the browsers around me, to pick up the guns spread so invitingly across the exhibitors’ tables, especially the notorious weapons, the fully automatic AK-47s and MAC-11s, the Sten guns and pistol-grip Mossbergs. As a creature of the James Bond era, I am particularly fascinated by the silencers, which can be acquired by anyone with a clean record willing to pay the $200 federal transfer tax covering such devices. At gun shows, the urge to touch is strong and has caused many dealers to spread a soft black mesh over the guns on their tables. I confess to at least thinking the words “Make my day” or “Hasta la vista, baby” on my rounds, although I do not own any guns and, as a parent of two resourceful children age five and three, have no plans to buy any. I am content to let hunters hunt and can certainly appreciate the fun of getting out into the wilderness on a crisp autumn day in the company of one’s friends, although I confess the charm of “blooding,” or dumping a pail of deer viscera over the head of a novice hunter on the occasion of his very first kill, still eludes me.

Where I run afoul of the tenets of the National Rifle Association is in my belief that people should be allowed to acquire guns only after going through a licensing process at least as rigorous as getting a driver’s license. As things stand now, a blind man can buy a gun. I hasten to add here that I mean no offense to the sightless. It just seems to me that anyone who buys a firearm ought first to be asked to prove he or she can see well enough to distinguish between a burglar and the paperboy. When I first mentioned this notion in print, I took it to be an unassailable position. I soon heard from two irate souls who accused me of stereotyping the blind. One of my critics wrote: “I know several blind persons (men and women) who have guns—for all the reasons anyone else might own them. These people represent the same cross section of sensitivity to the issue… and they demonstrate behavior as responsible as that of anyone else.” The author accused me of believing “that blindness should be prima facie disqualification for owning a gun.” Such a belief, he wrote, was “totally unsupportable on any basis other than unreasonable discrimination.”

Nonetheless, I stand my ground.

Where I further risk abrading the prickly sensibilities of the gun camp is in my belief that a federal firearms dealer’s license of the kind I now possess should be the hardest, most expensive professional license to acquire in America, instead of one of the easiest and cheapest. I cross the friend-foe line too in my belief that America is currently in the midst of a gun crisis that can no longer be considered just a manifestation of that good old frontier spirit but instead has become a costly global embarrassment.

That a handgun crisis does exist should be well beyond dispute by now, given the bleak slag heap of statistics on gunshot death and injury now casting its shadow over our society. These statistics could kindle outrage in a stone but have failed, somehow, to shake any tears from America’s gun industry and the gun culture that supports it.

Over the last two years firearms killed almost 70,000 Americans, more than the total of U.S. soldiers killed in the entire Vietnam War. Every year handguns alone account for 22,000 deaths. In Los Angeles County, 8,050 people were killed or wounded in 1991, according to a report in The Los Angeles Times—thirteen times the number of U.S. forces killed in the Persian Gulf war. Every day, the handguns of America kill sixty-four people: twenty-five of the dead are victims of homicide; most of the rest shoot themselves. Handguns are used to terrorize countless others: over the next twenty-four hours, handgun-wielding assailants will rape 33 women, rob 575 people, and assault another 1,116.

A relatively new phenomenon, originating in the mid-1980s, is the inclusion of young children on the list of urban gunshot homicides. In 1987 a team of researchers from the UCLA Medical Center and King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles found that until 1980, King/Drew hadn’t admitted a single child for gunshot wounds. From 1980 to 1987 the center admitted thirty-four. The study, published in the American Journal of Diseases of Children, included a macabre one-page table that listed the children’s injuries, the relationship of the shooter to the victim, and other data that sketched the true horror of gunshot wounds, a horror ordinarily spared us by reporters pressed for time and news space who concentrate on the dead and dismiss any other victims as simply being wounded. The children, ranging in age from one to nine, were shot in the head, neck, chest, leg, and rectum. A five-year-old lost a hand. A three-year-old, shot in the rectum, endured a colostomy. Other children on the list lost fingers, eyes, and brain tissue, with at least one—an eight-year-old girl—consigned to an institution most likely for the rest of her life. They were shot by grandfathers, robbers, cousins, snipers, friends, and in a particularly cruel twist, by gang members seeking to exact revenge on an elder sibling by killing a younger brother or sister.

No one knows how many people in all incur nonfatal gunshot wounds each year. The most common estimate is that there are five nonfatal wounds for every fatality, or more than 150,000 injuries a year. No one knows for sure, however, because no federal entity keeps track. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, responsible for monitoring injuries from virtually every other consumer product, does not tally gunshot injuries because its founding legislation explicitly excluded firearms from its jurisdiction. One might assume this circumstance came to exist after a pitched battle between the Commission’s backers and the National Rifle Association. The story is less dramatic, but far more disappointing. The sponsors excluded guns because they feared such a battle, and the damage it might do to the rest of the proposed legislation. There was ample reason for this fear, however. The firearms industry and gun lobby have a vested interest in suppressing detailed information on gunshot injuries and accidents, especially when such numbers are linked to specific models of firearms. Accurate statistics would be invaluable to bereaved families seeking to win negligence suits against gun dealers, distributors, and manufacturers. A true tally of nonfatal injuries, moreover, would by itself change the contours of the national debate over guns by providing a more realistic picture of the widespread prevalence of gunshot injury. That Congress should carve an exception for firearms is all the more remarkable given that guns comprise the one class of mass-market product designed from the start to kill.

The nation began arming itself in earnest in the roaring sixties amid student protests, Cold War terror, race riots, and assassinations. Over the most tumultuous years, from 1967 to 1968, the number of handguns annually made available for sale to civilians in the U.S. rose by 50 percent—by some 802,000 pistols and revolvers—to 2.4 million, the greatest single annual leap in American history. In 1960, there were 16 million handguns in America; ten years later, the total had risen to more than 27 million. As of 1989, according to a study by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), there were 66.7 million handguns and 200 million firearms of all kinds in circulation in the United States.

If these guns were controlled by a legion of sober adults, we might have far less to worry about. One study of eleven thousand teenagers in ten states found that 41 percent of the boys and 21 percent of the girls said they could obtain a handgun whenever they wished. A July 1993 poll of students in grades six through twelve conducted by Louis Harris for the Harvard School of Public Health found that 59 percent said they could get a handgun if they wanted one; 21 percent said they could get one within the hour.

Handgun access among children is not strictly an urban problem. The Harris poll found the degree of access to be surprisingly constant between rural, suburban, and urban communities. More than 60 percent of children who lived in cities said they could get a handgun if they wished; 58 percent of suburban kids claimed they could too. A University of North Carolina study of adolescents in suburban and rural communities in the Southeast found that 9 percent of the boys actually owned a handgun. Boys typically received their first firearm—usually a shotgun or a rifle but seven percent of the time a handgun—at the age of twelve and a half. More than a fifth, however, received their first guns at the very responsible age of ten.

Kids have begun using their guns against each other. From 1965 to 1990, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the rate at which children age ten through seventeen were arrested for homicide increased by 332 percent, despite a slight drop in that segment of the population. Anyone inclined to dismiss these figures as reflecting merely the high rate of homicide in the nation’s black urban neighborhoods would be profoundly mistaken. The incidence of homicide arrests of white children increased in the same period by 425 percent.

Increasingly, you don’t need to own a gun or be the intended target of someone else’s gun to get shot. As guns have proliferated, the rate at which bystanders are wounded and killed has soared. In 1985 stray bullets killed four New Yorkers; in 1990 they killed forty.

Gun merchants and hobbyists steadfastly protest that guns aren’t the problem and, even if they were, that gun ownership is explicitly endorsed by the Second Amendment of the Constitution—the much misquoted “right to bear arms” clause—and is therefore as much a part of the American way as, say, voting. A comparison of international homicide statistics proves that guns do indeed set America apart from the rest of the developed world.

In 1987, America’s civilian guns were used to murder 3,187 young men age fifteen to twenty-four, accounting for three-fourths of the annual homicide rate in this demographic group of 21.9 per 100,000 people.

In Canada only seventeen young men were murdered with firearms, for an overall rate of 2.9 per 100,000.

In Japan, with 0.5 homicides per 100,000 people, eight young men died in gunshot homicides—as many killings as New York police encounter on a single busy weekend.

What accounts for the difference? Incidence of poverty, surely. Racial division. America’s frontier history and the myths it conjured. The influence of television and movies.

And the sheer number of guns.

It is easy to challenge any study that purports to show a direct relationship between firearms proliferation and the rate of violent crime. Which came first, the challenge goes, the rise in gun sales or the crime rate? Did the increase in the number of guns encourage more people to commit crime? Or did the increase in crime drive more people to buy guns to defend themselves? The ease of making this challenge and the impossibility of ever fully defending against it have allowed the gun camp to obscure the debate over firearms distribution, when in fact there is an abundance of credible evidence that where there are more guns, there are more deaths from guns. The NRA’s sloganeering notwithstanding, the evidence suggests that guns do indeed kill people.

A landmark study in King County, Washington, which includes Seattle, found that a gun kept at home was forty-three times more likely to be used to kill its owner, a family member, or a friend than an intruder. A Pittsburgh psychiatric hospital reported that the mere presence of a gun in the home more than doubles the odds that an adolescent member of the family will commit suicide. In 1987, Dr. Garen Wintemute, a researcher with the University of California at Davis Medical Center, plotted the annual firearm homicide rate per 100,000 people for the years 1946 through 1982. On the same graph, he plotted ATF’s estimates of the number of new firearms made available for sale each year. The two lines track each other over the page with the eerie precision of a pair of figure skaters, both peaking around 1974, both dipping in 1976, both rising to another peak, both falling in concert toward 1982. (The rates of both have increased since then.) A 1986 study from the National Institute of Mental Health found similarly striking correlations between the increased proliferation of firearms and the rate of gunshot suicide among people age ten to twenty-four.

One of the foremost researchers in this forbidding territory is Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at Earl Warren Legal Institute of the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied the issue since the 1960s. He established that although handguns only account for about a third of the guns owned in America, they are used in more than 75 percent of gunshot homicides and 80 percent of firearm-related robberies. “On average,” Zimring reported, “rifles and shotguns are seven, times less likely than handguns to be used in criminal violence.” In one of his early studies he reviewed records of 16,000 violent assaults in Chicago to see whether the attacker’s choice of knife or gun influenced the outcome. He found, first, that in seven of ten cases where the victim died, the attacker inflicted only one wound. That is, the attacker did not repeatedly stab or shoot the victim to make sure he was dead. The major difference among these attacks was that “an assault with a gun was five times more likely to result in a fatality than an assault with a knife.” Zimring described the heightened danger posed by the attacker’s choice of a gun as an “instrumentality effect” attributable to the inherent lethal character of guns.

In one of the most compelling studies of the impact of firearm proliferation, Dr. Arthur Kellermann, an emergency-medicine physician at Emory University, and associates from the Universities of Washington and British Columbia studied the rates of homicide and assault in Seattle and Vancouver from 1980 through 1986. The cities are close to each other. They have similar economies and similar geophysical locations. Their populations have a similar demographic profile. Presumably they watch the same movies and many of the same TV shows. During the study period, they also had similar assault rates. They differed markedly, however, in the degree to which they regulated access to firearms. Vancouver allowed gun sales only to people who could demonstrate a legitimate reason for having a firearm. Seattle had few regulations. The researchers found that attackers in Seattle were almost eight times more likely to use a handgun than those in Vancouver. Seattle’s homicide rate, moreover, was five times higher, with handgun-related killings accounting for most of the difference.

The proliferation of guns continues, however. In the 1980s gun manufacturers feared they might have sold so many guns to American consumers that they had sated the market. Indeed, slack demand helped cause the failure of Charter Arms and drove Colt’s Manufacturing into bankruptcy. Gunmakers, cheered on by the National Rifle Association, sought to improve their prospects by pitching guns—handguns in particular—as the only sure way to protect ourselves against crime. The Los Angeles riots of 1992 proved a godsend. Millions of TV viewers watched a white truck driver beaten senseless by black marauders. They saw Korean businessmen, the new heroes of American enterprise, brandishing guns to guard their inner-city businesses in scenes that evoked our most favorite Wild West myths: a good man standing alone, gun drawn and squinting into the setting sun, waiting for nightfall and the next attack of the barbaric hordes, be they Indians, cattle rustlers, train robbers, or, in this modern transmogrification, black gang-bangers in the ghetto. The most striking images and the most beneficial to the gun marketers were those scenes played over and over again of a group of L.A.’s Finest retreating posthaste to their police cars and leaving the good settlers of Indian country to their own devices.

The NRA was quick to extract the obvious message of the riots: you better get a gun because no one else is going to protect you. A 1992 recruitment ad for the NRA featured blocks of text against photographs of looting, burning, and destruction. “WHAT WILL IT TAKE?” the ad asked. “Must your glass be shattered? Must your flesh and blood be maimed? Must your livelihood be looted? Must all you’ve built be torn down? Must your once-proud nation surrender to more gun-control experimentation while its citizens tremble behind deadbolts and barred windows?… What will it take before you stand up with the one group that will stand for no more?… We warned gun laws would fail, and they have. We said gun control is wrong, and L.A. PROVES IT.”

The newest targets for this sales pitch are women, considered especially receptive, the argument goes, because so many now are single heads of households and increasingly hold important jobs that require late hours and lots of travel. Gun magazines, such as the American Rifleman, published by the NRA, and Women and Guns, published by the Second Amendment Foundation, routinely carry stories about armed women who killed, wounded, or at least scared off their attackers. Such testimonials may require close examination, at least in light of one example printed in a 1989 issue of American Rifleman. The story described how a female cabdriver in Phoenix, Arizona, picked up a customer early one morning, only to have him hold a broken bottle to her throat and force her to drive to a deserted area. He took $70, then pushed the woman from the cab. “When her assailant ordered her to crawl in the dirt, [she] responded by emptying her pocket semiauto into him,” the magazine reported. “He died later in a hospital.”

By emptying her gun the cabdriver did indeed save herself, but not quite in the way this heroic account would have us believe. She later told the Arizona Republic how her enraged and wounded attacker then seized her gun, jabbed the barrel into her neck, and pulled the trigger—not once, but several times.

Had she not emptied the gun first, clearly her attacker would have done so.

The American Rifleman does not print tales of the risks associated with firearms ownership, such as the story carried by the Associated Press in October 1991 about a woman who shot herself in the face late one night. She blamed the accident, the AP reported, “on sleepy confusion between two objects she keeps under her pillow—her asthma medication dispenser and a 38-caliber revolver.” The dispatch then quoted the woman as saying, “I didn’t even know I had hold of the gun until it went off.” She survived with surprisingly minor injuries.

Gun manufacturers now peddle their weapons to women using advertisements that show guns juxtaposed with photographs of small children and that describe gun ownership as a necessary act of women’s liberation. A controversial Colt ad, run in 1992, featured photographs of two Colt pistols under a larger photograph of a mother putting her young daughter and her Raggedy Ann doll to bed. “Self-protection is more than your right,” the ad reads, “it’s your responsibility.” Even Davis Industries of Chino, California, gets into the act. “What with all the crime in the streets these days,” the Davis ad says, “a woman needs a bodyguard more than ever”—a rather ironic declaration, given that the company’s cheap handguns and those produced by its sister company, Raven Arms, are among the guns most often implicated in urban crime.

A Smith & Wesson ad shows a young woman intently firing the company’s LadySmith revolver at a shooting range. This is the newest incarnation of the LadySmith. The company produced its first LadySmith, a small .22 revolver designed for a woman’s hand, in 1902 and manufactured it until 1921, when it learned some disturbing news: the revolver had become the weapon of choice among prostitutes. Horrified, the company quickly halted production. The woman in the most recent ad appears under a headline that asks, “What Would Mom Think Now?”—a slogan clearly meant to evoke the famous or perhaps infamous Virginia Slims pitchline, “You’ve come a long way, baby!”

“We’re seeing the same thing we saw with promoting cigarettes,” said Dr. Wintemute, the University of California researcher. “An inherently hazardous product is being associated with images of equality for women, of liberation for women, of independence for women, with the added approach of using fear—which you can’t use to sell cigarettes but you can certainly use to sell guns.”

While tracking Nicholas Elliot’s gun I became convinced that anyone who wishes truly to understand America’s gun crisis and the culture that fuels it, especially anyone who intends to write about the subject, must first learn to appreciate the powerful appeal of firearms—the fun of pulling the trigger, feeling the explosive surge, and watching a portion of a distant target erupt for no visible cause. It is an appeal that crosses lines of class, race, and gender. Joyce Mays-Rabbit, a money manager in Los Angeles, told me that when she goes hiking and fishing in deep wilderness, she carries a .44, the handgun equivalent of a cannon. “When you start shooting a .44,” she said, “it’s a real power trip. The flames shoot out of it. It’s like playing cowboys and Indians as a kid. It’s not that you want to kill anything. It would be very similar to having a really hot car.”

I took the first step toward learning to shoot in October 1992 when I took a beginner’s course in self-defense shooting from a woman named Paxton Quigley, a near-celebrity among gun owners. Although I took the course when I was already well into my journey through the gun culture, I present it here as a kind of introduction, for it taught me worlds about why the shooting passion burns so bright. It demonstrated how guns can seem such a compelling solution to the helplessness so many Americans now feel in the face of what they perceive to be a wild surge in violent crime.

In the hands of so astute a marketer as Paxton Quigley, the concept of armed self-defense becomes nearly irresistible. She brings to the fray a carefully crafted image, that of a former antigun activist who saw the light after the rape of a close friend. In fact, she was a marginal activist at best—“a glorified gofer,” as one contemporary put it. And the rape was nowhere near as influential as Quigley’s realization that a book on armed self-defense by a former antigun activist might be a hot seller. E. P. Dutton published the book, Armed & Female, in 1989, and soon afterward Quigley began teaching women to shoot. Shooting became a vehicle for feminine empowerment. “By getting over their fear of guns and knowing they can take care of themselves,” Quigley told me, “they become more confident human beings.”

Although the message may at first seem novel, at its root it is nothing more than a repackaged and redirected version of the message broadcast repeatedly to Americans since the late nineteenth century by presidents, newspaper reporters, Hollywood producers, TV writers, novelists, poets, and painters: just as guns won the West, they will win you peace of mind on the wild and woolly urban frontier. One of Quigley’s students, Noelle Stettner, a Libertarian disc jockey from Gainesville, Georgia, synthesized this idea aptly when she told me she saw armed self-defense as “the last frontier of feminism.”

“Okay,” Paxton Quigley bellowed, “on the count of three, everyone say, ‘Get the fuck out of here!’”

Nineteen Georgia women stood in a circle inside the meeting room of the Cherokee Gun Club in Gainesville, Georgia. Inside the circle stood Quigley. As always, she had begun the course with a couple of hours of instruction on basic self-defense techniques and on helping the women to stop thinking like victims.

“I don’t want you smiling,” Quigley said. For a small woman she had a surprisingly powerful voice. She was petite, blond, and by anyone’s standard, drop-dead gorgeous. She wore a snug black blouse, a purplish tweed blazer with a peach kerchief in the pocket, and skintight jeans, with a gold chain looped a few times around her tiny waist. She moved within the circle in long concussive strides, the hard heels of her python-skin boots slamming the linoleum. “I want you to be angry, because women are basically fearful,” she told the group. “I want you to come from a strong position.”

The women screamed again, with considerably more conviction. The room erupted in laughter, war whoops, and scattered shouts of “Aw right!”

Although the message was serious, Quigley had designed the exercise to keep the mood light, part of her strategy for helping women shed their fear of guns and get them in the mood to shoot. Typically, most of the women who take Quigley’s beginner class have never shot a gun before. Here, however, all had done so except me and three of the women. Several in fact possessed concealed-weapons permits. One was an NRA pistol instructor, although she did not disclose this to her fellow students until the class had ended. When Quigley expressed her surprise at the level of expertise, one woman drawled with mock menace, “You’re in Georgia now.”

The smiles faded rapidly, however, when Quigley played a tape supplied by the NRA of a 911 emergency call placed by a Kansas City woman as a rapist made his way toward her bedroom.

The operator advised the woman to lock her bedroom door.

“He’s here,” the victim cried. “He’s in the room.”

She grew increasingly terrified until at last she screamed, “Who are you? Why are you here? Why are you here? Why?”

The line went dead, followed by the ominous flat chord of a dial tone.

The tape had a curious effect. “I was furious,” Linda Lovejoy, an Atlanta accountant, told me. “She should have been able to protect herself. The helplessness is what really got to me. She had no means of fighting back.” The tape struck Noelle Stettner, the disc jockey, the same way. “You start thinking, This stupid bitch’—to be honest.”

This is how Quigley wants her students to feel. “Obviously,” she told the suddenly subdued class, “if she’d had a gun, that would have helped the situation. She didn’t fight. At that point, you don’t ask, ‘Who are you, why are you here?’ She was a victim, a horrible victim. It’s awful to show, but you don’t want to be a victim.”

She then invited the women who’d brought their own guns to pull them from their purses, fanny packs, and locked steel gun boxes. To those who needed guns, she loaned top-quality Smith & Wesson revolvers.

Her choice of brand was no accident. Quigley received a monthly stipend from Smith & Wesson, as well as a supply of guns, in return for giving talks to gun groups, visiting gun dealerships to advise women on the guns they ought to buy, and of course helping to staff the Smith & Wesson booth at the annual SHOT Show, a huge trade show for licensed firearms dealers. She loaned me an expensive Smith & Wesson .357 revolver, black, with an elegant wood grip and red-dot sight. “Of course. What am I going to do, give you a lousy gun?” she told me later. “I want you to do well.”

After a series of loading and unloading drills, Quigley sketched the upper torso of a man. She circled the broad area between the sternum and shoulders known to combat shooters as the “center of mass,” the area where a bullet is most likely to cause enough destruction of tissue and bone and such catastrophic neural shock as to stop an assailant before he can complete his attack. This is a nice way of telling the women to shoot to kill.

“We’re also going to practice some head shots,” Quigley said. “It’s hard to shoot someone in the face because we think of the face as the person, as the soul—I hate to talk like this, but if you shoot someone in the face, you have a very good chance of stopping him.”

She led the class down to one of the Cherokee Gun Club’s outdoor ranges. Everyone wore safety glasses. Quigley carried a bullhorn so she would be heard through the earplugs and pistol earmuffs everyone wore as protection against the damaging roar of the guns. “To those of you who’ve never shot before,” Quigley said, a warm smile playing across her face, “welcome. You’ll have a wonderful time.”

Many of Quigley’s former students report that the act of firing a gun for the first time triggered a revolution in their lives. Michelle Sullivan, of South Pasadena, California, took her fifth course from Quigley in January 1993. She took her first early in 1992. “The first time I stood there with a loaded gun, I wanted to cry,” she told me. “I thought, is this what my life has come to—I’m standing here holding a loaded gun?”

Sullivan hit the target on her first shot. “It was like I walked up to a psychological barrier, crossed it, and everything was fine. It was a complete turnaround in thinking. Complete.”

Each of twenty targets was papered with the black silhouette of a man’s upper body. Clear plastic bags draped the silhouettes to protect them from the rain. Half the class stood along the firing line seven feet away.

The distance may seem absurdly close, but armed encounters often occur at that range, according to police firearms experts. Quigley had an additional motive for putting everyone so close, however. She wanted her students to hit the targets as often as possible to bolster morale. Aiming and shooting a handgun is not the easy matter TV cops and robbers make it out to be. Even at seven feet, many of the women taking the course missed the silhouette portion of the target and struck only the background.

After a few basic shooting drills, Quigley moved on to more advanced exercises, including one she called Mozambique—two shots to the body, one to the head.

“It’s awfully fun to do this,” she said.

She issued the command to begin shooting. There was a wild, prolonged crackle of gunfire. Sharp puffs of air from my neighbor’s gun tapped at my temple. Georgia clay erupted from the hillside beyond the targets.

“I hope we all got some good head shots in there,” Quigley said heartily, “because that’s what’s gonna stop him.”

She checked the targets to see how well everyone was doing. A few wildly spaced holes led her to suspect some students had been jerking the trigger instead of squeezing it.

“Squeeze smoothly,” she told the class, a sly grin again playing across her face as she moved along the firing line. “It’s really kind of a sexy move. I always say be sexy about it. Squeeeeeeze,” she murmured, “squeeeeeeze. Okay? That’ll kind of get your mind into it.”

We shot our guns one-handed, first with our dominant hands, then our weak hands. We shot while lying on our backs, an exercise intended to simulate firing while still in bed. One woman, supine on a muddy ground cloth, hit the target in the face with the first shot.

“Ooh,” another said in admiring disgust. “Right where it counts!”

More exercises followed. Empowerment was in the air.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?” Quigley exhorted. “You feel the power!”

When the class at last returned to the meeting room, Quigley asked her students one by one to tell their reactions to the course. The room took on the feel of a revivalist camp meeting. “Lisa,” Quigley said to Lisa Hilliard, an Atlanta bank executive who had never shot a gun before. “When you first walked in, I said, ‘Oh, God, she’s scared.’”

Quigley turned to the other students. “I could see it on her face. She was scared.”

Then back to Lisa. “How do you feel now, Lisa?”

Hilliard considered. “Great. I can’t believe how much fun it was. I mean, I just wanted to get through it; I didn’t expect to enjoy it.”

Quigley pointed to another woman. “Ginger?”

She was Ginger Icenhour, manager of a computer store in Tucker, Georgia. She too had never shot before but now professed to be ready to take on an assailant. “If he walks through that door, he’ll be surprised because I’m gonna shoot him.”

It is a tantalizing fantasy. Who among us hasn’t imagined walking down a dark street, being accosted by a bad guy, and reveling in his surprise as we draw our Dirty Harry Model 29s and blow him away? The myth of self-defense depicts the gun as a foolproof talisman capable of warding off trouble and restoring peace of mind.

But armed self-defense is a far more problematic venture than Quigley and the gun culture would have us all believe.

The NRA’s 911 tape, played by Quigley, was indeed powerful, so compelling the NRA played it at its 1993 annual meeting in Nashville. There is another tape, however, that Quigley could have played just as readily. It is the 911 recording of a ten-year-old Florida boy, Sean Smith, who called the emergency line just after shooting his eight-year-old sister. At first his voice is soft; he pleads for understanding. He could be any little boy trying to explain a breach of household rules.

“I didn’t know my dad’s gun was loaded,” he says.

“Okay,” the operator says.

“And I shot her.” The boy’s voice wavers. “I didn’t mean to. She’s dead.”

Even the dispatcher is startled. He snaps, “She’s dead?”

The boy loses all composure now. “Yes,” he cries, “please, get my mom and dad. Oh my God!”

The act of owning a gun for self-defense forces the gun owner to confront a paradox central to such ownership: to be truly useful for self-defense, a gun must be kept loaded and readily accessible at all times. “In other words,” Quigley wrote in her book, “an unloaded gun that is perfectly safe is perfectly useless.”

But a gun that is accessible to the parent is, by definition, just as accessible to the parent’s children or anyone else who visits the home, be it a jealous boyfriend or drunken spouse. Researchers fear the gun industry’s strategy of pitching handguns to women, particularly professional women and single mothers, will only heighten the risk to children. Even Quigley argues that certain households should not have guns, in particular those with a member who is alcoholic, takes antidepression drugs, or is prone to extreme bursts of temper—a sizable portion of the U.S. population. “If you have children at home,” she warned the Gainesville class, “really think about whether you should have a gun.”

Inherent in this last warning was the notion that women who did not have children should feel free to buy a gun. The warning, however, ignores the potential for collateral disaster that always exists in the presence of a gun. Women who live alone may have nieces, nephews, and grandchildren; their neighbors, friends, and lovers may have kids; the women may teach grade school, operate day-care centers, or baby-sit for friends, sisters, cousins, and colleagues. A study of accidental shooting deaths of children in California highlighted how a momentary lapse of vigilance by gun owners could quickly lead to tragedy, even in households that treated guns with exemplary care. In one case, the study reported, a six-year-old boy shot himself in the head with a handgun he found “in the purse of a houseguest.”

It is widely thought that Sarah Brady, chairperson of Handgun Control Inc., began her crusade against guns immediately after her husband, Jim Brady, was permanently injured in John Hinckley’s attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan. In fact, she told a writer for the New York Times Magazine, the pivotal moment came later, in 1985, when her five-year-old son found a .22 handgun in a pickup owned by a family friend and pointed it at her. At first Brady thought it was a toy, then saw it was real and loaded.

Parents, however, seem all too willing to ignore the risks and to assume that their own kids are responsible enough to recognize the harm guns can do and to learn to “respect” them. A June 1993 Louis Harris survey, also conducted for the Harvard University School of Public Health, found that only 43 percent of parents who owned guns kept those guns under lock and key. Another study found that 10 percent of America’s armed parents openly admitted they kept their guns not only loaded but also unlocked and “within reach of children.” The mere fact that a full 10 percent of respondents actually admitted courting tragedy in this way should itself give us pause. It raises the suspicion that many other parents do likewise but are unwilling to confess to a practice many gun owners would find reprehensible.

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

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

But would she always know exactly where it was?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somehow, we came to believe that guns really did win the West. But how was this notion instilled? Where did we lose the thread of history and pick up instead the silken ribbon of myth?

At times, surely, the early frontier lived up to its wild-and-woolly reputation, as when the Indian wars were in full swing, and when competition over the use of land led to bloody range battles such as the April 1892 Johnson County War in northern Wyoming. For the average resident of the frontier, however, life was more often marked by hard work, loneliness, and stupefying boredom. People rarely locked their doors, or for that matter, even bothered to install locks. Burglary was rare, rape close to nonexistent (although rape has always been, and undoubtedly was then, an underreported crime). Frank Prassel, an Old West historian, examined records of the U.S. District Court in New Mexico Territory dating to the court’s opening in 1890 and found that of its first twenty-six cases, twenty-two involved charges of “fornication” and adultery. Prassel observed, “The West’s lawless element obviously had something on its mind other than bank robbery and cattle theft.”

One of the great entertainments was the rare hanging, which attracted spectators from far off. Hangings were festive events at which the condemned man was expected to offer a remark or two. Moments before Jeremiah Bailey was executed in Abilene, Kansas, on January 5, 1872, he told the crowd below, “I am on the scaffold about to be launched into the other world. What has brought me to this? Let me tell you, and let these words ring forever in your ears. It was whiskey and the carrying of firearms. Whiskey and the bearing of pistols have ruined me.”

The proliferation of guns and alcohol throughout the West, with the added incendiary influence of gambling, made for dangerous conditions late on a frontier night, especially in mining towns whose occupants were primarily adventurous young men. According to historian Roger D. McGrath, who studied life in the mining towns of Bodie, California, and Aurora, Nevada, a chance remark, an old grudge, or an ill-advised challenge to another man’s ego could readily ignite an impromptu gun battle. If one of the parties died, his killer would typically be acquitted for having fired in self-defense. Ordinary citizens tolerated such “fair fights” among consenting hard characters. Anyone who stayed out late with armed, drunken men invited trouble.

Nonetheless, the homicide rate in many frontier towns was surprisingly low. Robert Dykstra, a specialist on Kansas cattle towns, found evidence of only forty-five homicides from 1870 to 1885 in the fabled towns of Abilene, Caldwell, Dodge City, Ellsworth, and Wichita. That works out to 0.6 killings per town per year, not quite the frequency Hollywood has led us to expect.

Citizens of the real West seemed far more appalled by the levels of violence back east. On March 19, 1872, the Missouri Republican called New York City a “Murderers’ Paradise” and reported that “New York… has settled down into the usual condition of chronic indifference, and the murdering business is carried on with an impunity which would be really amusing, were the matter less serious. Hardly a day passes that some one does not receive an eternal quietus at the hands of an assassin.”

Meanwhile, the novelists, pulp writers, and news reporters who comprised the nation’s media were busy confronting a creative challenge: how to rationalize the sheer excitement of the westward expansion, with its attendant gold and land fevers, and the mundane, harsh reality of ordinary frontier life. The answer came readily. Sheriffs became avenging angels, bar fights turned into ritualized duels in the hot noon sun. Dime novelists began transforming frontier characters into heroes even as the real flesh-and-blood figures went about the business of killing, robbing, or peacekeeping. Buffalo Bill Cody was the hero in 557 dime novels. Frank Tousey gave us the James Boys series about Jesse and Frank James even as the pair continued committing crimes. Edward Z. C. Judson, writing as Ned Buntline, turned Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok into the steely-eyed lawmen of contemporary myth. The first book about Billy the Kid appeared July 15, 1881, the day after Sheriff Pat Garret killed him. The book described Billy as wearing a dragoon jacket “of finest broadcloth” and a hat “covered with gold jewels.” Owen Wister’s The Virginian, published in 1902, became a best-seller and the prototype of the modern western. Wister gave us one of the most-quoted passages of literature when his hero, having been called a son of a bitch, replied, “When you call me that, smile!”

The press spared no exaggeration to populate the West with living legends. Between Dodge City and Tombstone, Deadwood and Sacramento, was a vast, bleak terrain whose immensity we can only begin to appreciate today when flying over such still-desolate territories as Nevada and Utah. The robberies, murders, and Indian battles that did occur were big news partly because that immense expanse of desperately lonely acreage generated so little other news.

The press rose to the challenge.

After Jesse James and two accomplices robbed a Kansas fair on September 26, 1872, the Kansas City Star applauded the deed: “It was as though three bandits had come to us from storied Odenwald, with the halo of medieval chivalry upon their garments, and shown us how things were done that poets sing of. Nowhere else in the civilized world, probably, could this thing have been done.”

Never mind that these chivalrous heroes shot a young girl in the leg.

After Jesse was murdered in 1882, the Kansas City Journal wailed, “Goodbye, Jesse!”

The National Police Gazette made a goddess of Myra Belle Shirley, known best as Belle Starr and commonly imagined as a beauty. (She was played by Gene Tierney in the 1941 movie Belle Starr.) The Gazette described her as “the Bandit Queen,” and reported: “She was more amorous than Antony’s mistress, more relentless than Pharaoh’s daughter, and braver than Joan of Arc.”

The true West of course was nothing like what readers in the East were instructed to imagine. Belle Starr, for example, was no Gene Tierney. Belle was a profoundly homely woman with a deeply pocked face who stole cattle and horses, robbed stagecoaches, and had a penchant for sleeping with killers and one of her two illegitimate sons. This boy, Ed Reed, later shot her in the back and, after she had fallen, shot her again for good measure, killing her.

Strip away the legends enshrouding the famous outlaws and what you find are pathological killers. Billy the Kid, far from being the glamorous James Dean–like character of popular imagination, was once described as an “adenoidal moron.” In a rare act of clear-eyed journalism, the Silver City New Southwest and Grant Herald observed: “Despite the glamour of romance thrown about his dare-devil life by sensational writers, the fact is, he was a low-down vulgar cut-throat, with probably not one redeeming quality.”

Clay Allison, one of the most feared outlaws, was by all appearances a psychopath. He was discharged from the Tennessee Light Artillery after being judged “incapable of performing the duties of a soldier because of a blow received many years ago.” This head injury apparently caused wild swings in his moods, “from mania to intense despondency.” He was alleged to have killed fifteen men in his career as a “shootist,” and to have cut the head off one of them and brought it with him to a bar. Fabled gunfighter John Wesley Hardin killed forty-four men, perhaps as many as seventy-seven, yet the power of outlaw myth was such that in 1968 Bob Dylan still felt able to describe him in the title song of his album John Wesley Hardin as a Robin Hood–like character who “was always known to lend a helping hand.”

The national myth-werkes reserved its greatest distortions for the lawmen of the West. Contrary to popular belief, in many frontier counties and towns, sheriffs and marshals often went unarmed. Rather than shooting it out all day with itinerant gunmen, they confronted the mundane duties familiar to any city policeman today. In Leadville, Colorado, in 1880, the twenty-two-man police force made 4,320 arrests, most for intoxication and disturbance of the peace. The real marshal of Dodge City was responsible for street repair and killing stray dogs, but we never heard a word about this on “Gunsmoke.” In that mythic realm, Matt Dillon courted Miss Kitty; the real marshal of Dodge had to contend with Big Nose Kate, Noseless Lou, and Squirrel Tooth Alice. Wyatt Earp and his friend Bat Master-son were adept con men and gamblers who also happened to be lawmen. They were known around Dodge as “the Fighting Pimps.” Earp abandoned his common-law wife, Mattie, who later committed suicide. In a letter to her surviving family, the attending coroner called Earp “a gambler, blackleg, and coward.”

In the mythic West even homicide became a clean, honorable affair that adhered to the Code of the West. In fact, frontier homicide was just as mean and gritty as urban murder is today. Ambush was often the tactic of choice, preferably when the target was stone-cold drunk. Morgan Earp, one of Wyatt’s brothers, was assassinated by a rifle fired at him through a window. A thief named Robert Ford murdered Jesse James by shooting him in the back of the head. The police officer who crept up behind John Wesley Hardin in an El Paso bar and shot him dead no doubt believed he was merely being prudent, given Hardin’s reputation. In one notorious attack, members of the John Daly gang in Aurora, Nevada, set out to kill William Johnson, the operator of a way station whose employee had killed a horse-thief friend of Daly’s. After running an errand in town, Johnson went to a bar where a member of Daly’s gang pretended all was forgiven and bought him a few drinks. When the bar closed, they moved to another saloon, where Daly and other members of the gang were waiting. The good fellowship continued until about four-thirty A.M., when Johnson left. Daly and three other gang members, including a man named William Buckley, ambushed him. Buckley knocked Johnson down. Daly shot him through the head. Then Buckley slashed his throat.

The strategy for such attacks may have been dictated partly by the fact—a fact one does not see mentioned very much in contemporary firearms ads that evoke the frontier—that the cowboy’s trusty six-shooter wasn’t all that trusty. Accidents and malfunctions were common. “Lawmen and outlaws alike knew the dangers and limitations of the revolvers they sometimes carried but rarely displayed,” wrote Frank Prassel. “Shooting would be avoided whenever possible, and when demanded it would often be done from cover or concealment.”

The Colt Peacemaker, introduced in 1873, is often called “the gun that won the West,” but it was so prone to accidental discharge that many U.S. Army officers carried the gun loaded with only five cartridges, with the empty sixth chamber under the hammer. On cross-country wagon journeys, firearms accidents sometimes proved a more serious problem than disease. On one journey, a pioneer mistook his mule for an Indian and shot it twice. Of the four men killed in the famous Johnson County War, two died from accidental gunshot wounds. In Bodie, California, Roger McGrath discovered, one man “accidentally shot himself in the jaw while inspecting a revolver that had misfired.” Even the West’s celebrities had their accidents. Clay Allison shot himself in the foot and eventually had to walk with a cane. Wild Bill Hickok accidentally killed one of his deputies. On January 9, 1876, Wyatt Earp’s revolver fell from his holster as he sat in the back room of the Custom House saloon in Wichita. According to the Wichita Beacon of January 12, “the ball passed through his coat, struck the north wall, then glanced off and passed out through the ceiling. It was a narrow escape and the occurrence got up a lively stampede from the room.”

Frontier celebrities also did their best to assist in myth manufacturing. They seemed extraordinarily aware of the great significance later historians would assign to their epoch. When Pat Garret published his rather exaggerated account of his pursuit of Billy the Kid, “his name became almost synonymous with western law enforcement,” according to Frank Prassel. Jesse James’s brother Frank, a member of the James Gang, toured the country with another outlaw, Cole Younger; they billed themselves as the “Cole Younger-Frank James Wild West Show.” Frank later opened the family farm to tourists, charging fifty cents a head. Bill Tilghman, a famous Oklahoma lawman, also toured the country and in 1914 made a film called The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaws. A former train robber, Al Jennings, eventually wound up acting in silent-film westerns, a career that lasted from 1908 to 1920.

The frontier figure who most influenced how America now thinks about the Old West, and indeed about guns, was William Frederick Cody—Buffalo Bill—a frontier scout turned master of self-promotion who first achieved fame in 1869 when Ned Buntline featured him in one of his dime novels. Cody’s fame was greatly enhanced in 1876 when, while serving as a scout during the Plains Indians wars, he encountered a lone Cheyenne brave. Cody’s horse stumbled, causing Cody to fall. As the brave charged, Cody coolly shot him dead, then scalped him and waved the scalp over his head. By winter, he was reenacting the incident over and over in a stage drama called “The Red Hand; or, The First Scalp for Custer,” in which he played himself.

In 1882, Cody founded “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” a traveling show consisting of dramatic scenes supposedly meant to capture real life on the frontier. Real life, however, wouldn’t have sold many tickets; Cody’s version consisted of stagecoach robberies, Indian attacks, buffalo hunts, and stunning feats of marksmanship. Cody was the star of the show. As if to dispel any doubt, one showbill noted: “The central figure in these pictures is that of THE HON. W. F. CODY (Buffalo Bill), to whose sagacity, skill, energy and courage… the settlers of the West owe so much for the reclamation of the prairie from the savage Indian and wild animals, who so long opposed the march of civilization.”

The scenes presented a grossly distorted view of the West, but to reinforce the illusion of authenticity, Cody included such props as real buffalo and a bona fide stagecoach. He even recruited the help of Indians who had fought in the Plains wars and participated in the slaughter of General Custer and his men. Sitting Bull, the Sioux chief, joined the tour in 1885 for a limited engagement.

The show was immensely popular. In 1885, Cody took his “Wild West” to forty U.S. cities. In 1886, the show reached New York. Staged in Madison Square Garden, the set included a reproduction of the town of Deadwood doomed to be destroyed in each performance by a mock cyclone. In a single week, the show drew two hundred thousand people. The following year, Cody took the show to London, accompanied by ninety-seven Cheyenne, Kiowa, Pawnee, and Sioux Indians (including the Sioux chief Red Shirt), one hundred eighty horses, eighteen buffalo, ten elk, ten mules, and a dozen or so other animals. He also brought Phoebe Anne Moses, a twenty-seven-year-old woman from Tiffin, Ohio, who had begun shooting when only eight years old to help feed her family. She performed as Annie Oakley. At one point during the “Wild West” ’s London engagement, Cody’s Deadwood stage careened about the exhibition stadium carrying three crown princes and five kings, including the Prince of Wales. When the Indians attacked the stage, Buffalo Bill himself came riding to its rescue, as always.

Richard Slotkin, author of the 1992 book Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, contends that from 1885 to 1905, Cody’s “Wild West” “was the most important commercial vehicle for the fabrication and transmission of the Myth of the Frontier. It reached large audiences in every major city and innumerable smaller ones throughout the United States. The period of its European triumph coincided with the period of massive immigration to America. As many immigrants testified, the ‘Wild West’ was the source of some of their most vivid images and expectations of the new land.”

Undoubtedly, the show also persuaded many Americans and immigrants that the gun was central to the building of America. The proliferation of guns on and among the actors would alone have made the point, but Cody’s showbill addressed the matter directly in a discussion titled “The Rifle as an Aid to Civilization.” “The bullet,” the program declared, “is the pioneer of civilization, for it has gone hand in hand with the axe that cleared the forest, and with the family Bible and school book. Deadly as has been its mission in one sense, it has been merciful in another; for without the rifle ball we of America would not be to-day in the possession of a free and united country, and mighty is our strength.”

Buffalo Bill and his contemporaries the dime novelists, pulp writers, and overly enthusiastic reporters also assisted in myth manufacturing in a more indirect, but possibly more significant way. They provided the plots that Hollywood would soon use to relay and reinforce the distortions of myth, among them the notion that when all else fails, a gun can save us. From the earliest days of the film industry, movie directors recognized the lasting appeal of the frontier. In 1903, Edwin S. Porter made The Great Train Robbery, considered the first western and an important precursor of modern narrative cinema. It was an immediate success, imitations quickly followed, and within five years the western became an established genre. The real frontier, however, was left further and further behind.

By 1925, William Hart had vividly established the good badman as a film archetype. Next came Tom Mix, who perhaps did the true West the gravest injustice by inventing the fancy cowboy with his tailored clothes, silver-inlaid boots, diamond-studded spurs, and pearl-handled Colt six-guns. No one ever walked into Tombstone, Arizona, in the late nineteenth century wearing such clothes, yet after Mix’s death in a car crash in 1940 a plaque was installed at the crash site that read: “In Memory of Tom Mix, Whose Spirit Left His Body on This Spot and Whose Characterizations and Portrayals in Life Served Better to Fix Memories of the Old West in the Minds of Living Man.”

The popularity of westerns rose steeply through the 1920s, then alternately rose and fell until the end of World War II when Hollywood revived the genre once again, this time with a vengeance. Fourteen feature-length westerns appeared in 1947; more than twice that number appeared in 1948. Forty-six westerns debuted in 1956 alone. All to some extent reinforced the notion that guns tamed the frontier. Some westerns did so by casting guns as central protagonists, as in Colt .45, Springfield Rifle, Winchester ’73, and of course, The Gun That Won the West.

Others portrayed gun violence as the only effective course of action against evil, as in George Stevens’s 1953 blockbuster, Shane. In the movie, Alan Ladd plays a gunfighter who rides into the middle of a conflict between homesteaders and the local cattle baron and soon takes the side of the homesteaders. Marian, the lead female character, played by Jean Arthur, loathes violence and guns. But Shane tells her, “A gun is just a tool, Marian. It’s as good or as bad as the man that uses it.” In Shane’s hand, clearly, the gun is a force for good. The underlying message, writes Richard Slotkin, is that “‘a good man with a gun’ is in every sense the best of men—an armed redeemer who is the sole vindicator of the liberties of the people,’ the ‘indispensable man’ in the quest for progress.”

The barrage of Hollywood westerns was soon matched, if not exceeded, by television westerns, which conveyed the same message, but now on a weekly basis. In 1959, the networks broadcast twenty-eight different series westerns, or 570 hours of imaginary frontier history, the equivalent of four hundred movies. And we loved them. In 1959, eight of the ten most highly rated shows were westerns:

Many of the TV westerns gave guns star billing, among them “Restless Gun,” “The Rifleman,” “Yancy Derringer,” “Have Gun Will Travel,” and “Colt .45,” whose theme song week after week reinforced the mythic role firearms played in establishing the nation:

One direct impact of all this fabrication was the kindling of a desire among many gun owners to experience the myth in some small way, sometimes with drastic and lethal effect. A growing number of gun owners now strap on low-slung holsters and participate in quick-draw competitions and “Cowboy Shoots.” An advertisement in the July 1993 issue of the NRA’s American Rifleman offered a $169.95 frontier-style holster called The Laredoan. Firearms manufacturers market guns to fill such holsters. In the “Wyatt Earp” TV series, which debuted in 1955, Hugh O’Brian, playing Earp, carried a long-barreled Buntline Colt, named for Ned Buntline, the dime novelist. Colt had halted production of the gun, but demand ignited by the Earp series prompted the company to reintroduce it. In 1982, Colt again merged fact and myth when it produced a “John Wayne-American Legend” commemorative edition of the Colt Peacemaker, complete with a gold-inlaid engraving of the actor’s face. In 1992, Colt introduced a new .44-caliber revolver, the Colt Anaconda. The gun embodied a modern design, but Colt nonetheless linked the gun to the company’s frontier heritage. The headline read: “The Legend Lives, Larger Than Ever.”

The master at marketing guns that evoke the Old West, however, is Sturm, Ruger & Co. of Southport, Connecticut. In 1953 its founder and chief executive, William Ruger, sensing that the advent of Hollywood and TV westerns signaled a marketing opportunity, introduced a line of single-action revolvers intended to resemble the old Colt Peacemaker, which Colt at the time no longer produced. Ruger sold 1.5 million of the guns. But the company had made them too authentic, to the point of retaining the old Colt’s propensity to fire when dropped. Sturm, Ruger halted production of the guns in 1973 when it introduced a line of similar revolvers equipped with a safety device to prevent such accidents. By mid-1993, however, the old guns had been linked to accidental firings that had injured more than six hundred men, women, and children, killing at least forty.

One case merged present and past, myth and reality. In the autumn of 1979, a young woman named Kelly Nix set out from Phoenix, Arizona, and headed for Tombstone to take part in the city’s annual “Helldorado Days,” a celebration of the city’s history. She was accompanied by her sister and her sister’s boyfriend. They stopped at a motel in Tucson. The boyfriend had brought his Ruger single-action revolver—the early version without the new safety device—and for reasons no one can explain was carrying the gun by the holster belt inside the motel room. The gun fell from its holster just as Nix emerged from the bathroom. The gun fired; the bullet struck her heart and killed her.

Ruger continues to introduce new guns intended for the same Wild West market. In 1993, for example, Ruger introduced the Ruger Vaquero, a single-action revolver resembling the Colt Peacemaker. Its 1993 catalog said the gun was “sure to be a hit with traditionalists and participants in Old West action shoots.”

Practicing for these action shoots can be profoundly hazardous. A report in Ruger’s product-liability log captures in a few terse words a lethal side effect of frontier mythology. A Canadian man had shot himself to death with a Ruger frontier-style revolver while twirling the gun and practicing quick draw. The log entry reads: “He was found with a western-style quick-draw holster around his waist and a stopwatch in his hand in front of a full-length mirror.”

How do we measure the deeper, psychic impact of a century’s worth of myth building? “It is quite impossible to conceive the cultural imagery which ‘Gunsmoke’ and its dozens of imitators have created,” wrote historian Frank Prassel. “Impact must be measured in tens of billions of viewer hours on an international scope, for such series are broadcast throughout the world in many languages. Yet it is here rather than in fact that the American derives his typical impression of the West.”

Guns and violence were integral components of all film and TV westerns. “…Since the western offers itself as a myth of American origins,” Richard Slotkin observed, “it implies that its violence is an essential and necessary part of the process through which American society was established and through which its democratic values are defended and enforced.”

The seamless barrage of dime novels, movies, and television conflated guns with history. In this milieu, any attempt to regulate the free flow of guns becomes nothing less than an effort to repudiate history. In 1970, historian Richard Hofstadter framed the central enigma of America’s enthusiasm for guns: “In some measure our gun culture owes its origins to the needs of an agrarian society and to the dangers and terrors of the frontier, but for us the central question must be why it has survived into an age in which only about 5 percent of the population makes its living from farming and from which the frontier has long since gone. Why did the United States, alone among modern industrial societies, cling to the idea that the widespread substantially unregulated availability of guns among its city populations is an acceptable and a safe thing?”

The best answer is a question: How could we possibly have done otherwise?

Gun manufacturers have little interest in saving lives, although they struggle to convey the image that they are the last defenders of hearth and home, that their guns will stand by you long after marauding gangs force the police into retreat. To imagine such beneficial purpose is to confuse corporate image with corporate imperative. The domestic gun industry, despite its privileged status as the least regulated of consumer-product industries, sold so many guns in America that it saturated the market and now must scramble for ways to open new markets. The industry relies on Paxton Quigley, and other outspoken sales promoters, including gun writers and the leadership of the National Rifle Association, to make guns more palatable to a society that reads daily of gunshot death and injury.

There is ample proof of the industry’s disregard for the health and safety of its customers. In a time when even children’s vitamins have childproof caps and electric drills have safety triggers, gun manufacturers still do not manufacture child-safe guns. Likewise, most manufacturers still fail to equip their handguns with loading indicators and magazine safeties. Sturm, Ruger & Co. has yet to order a formal recall of its original Peacemaker look-alikes, even though some 1.3 million remain in the hands of consumers. Instead of launching a campaign to buy back the guns, or even to publicize their real dangers, Ruger launched an advertising campaign that bemoaned the national decay of gun-handling practices and told customers the right way to handle the guns. An Alaska jury was so incensed by Ruger’s apparent disregard for safety, it voted a $2.9 million punitive-damages award against the company. The Alaska Supreme Court later limited the award to $500,000.

There is evidence too that manufacturers don’t see crime as being an entirely negative phenomenon. Why else would the now-defunct Charter Arms Co. engrave the barrels of a brace of husband-and-wife revolvers with the names Bonnie and Clyde?

The gun industry has long contended that only a small percentage of guns are used in crime, while at the same time resisting efforts to document the true number and to identify the most popular crime guns by maker, model, and caliber. As of 1989, rather late in the computer revolution, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms at last became able to provide some rudimentary statistics on which guns turned up most often in federal traces. Reports from the new database have already battered the NRA’s “guns don’t kill” stance, proving beyond doubt that certain guns turn up during the commission of crime far more often than others. The company whose handguns were traced most often from January of 1990 to December of 1991, simply because of the sheer magnitude of its production, was giant Smith & Wesson. However, when the frequency of traces is compared with each company’s production, S.W. Daniel, the company that made Nicholas Elliot’s gun, shows a tracing rate far higher. By 1989 the company had produced some 60,500 handguns and an untold number of accessories, including silencers and machine-gun kits. It fondly advertised Nicholas’s gun, the Cobray M-11/9, as “the gun that made the eighties roar.”

Condemned by police, ridiculed even by those who sell it, the gun has been inordinately controversial ever since its initial design by Gordon Ingram, a California engineer and gunsmith who sought to make a cheap, reliable submachine gun for close military combat. How that gun went on to become a readily available mass-consumer product—something S.W. Daniel once even gave away free in a monthly contest—provides a clear example of the culture of nonresponsibility at work in America’s firearms industry. It is but one example of how this commercial ethos governed the gun’s progress from conception to its use as a murder weapon in a Virginia Beach classroom.

“We’ve got technology running amok,” said Col. Leonard Supenski, the Baltimore County firearms expert. “No gun manufacturer ever decided in its R-and-D process that the product it was developing might not have any useful purpose for society and might in fact harm society. When Gordon Ingram began production and eventually tried to get into the commercial market, I’m sure the thought never entered his mind. The people at SWD don’t give a damn who gets those guns.”