God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State (17 page)

However, we now live inside the logic that the NRA has created for us: in a world where so many bad people have guns, good people must arm themselves. When the killer came out of the church, leaving behind a lake of blood, a neighbor, Stephen Willeford, who happened to have been a former firearms instructor for the NRA, ran barefoot out of his house, carrying a similar assault-style weapon. He shot the killer twice, and then pursued him in a high-speed chase that ended with the killer’s suicide.

President Trump, who was in South Korea at the time, was asked whether the “extreme vetting” he demanded for visa applicants should also be applied to gun purchases. He replied that it would have made “no difference” in the murders in Sutherland Springs, except that stricter laws might have prevented Willeford from having the means to respond. “Instead of having twenty-six dead, he would’ve had hundreds more dead,” the president said. Shortly after the killings, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton said on Fox News that the best solution to future church killings was to arm the parishioners.

Even if stricter gun laws in Texas were clearly shown to make us safer, Texas politicians are so enchanted by guns that there’s no chance of that happening. There’s a locker-room lust for weaponry that belies the noble-sounding proclamations about self-protection and Second Amendment rights. In 2010, Governor Rick Perry boasted of killing a coyote that was menacing his daughter’s Labrador. Perry was jogging at the time, but naturally he was packing heat—a Ruger .380—and he dispatched the coyote with a single shot. The gun’s manufacturer promptly issued a Coyote Special edition of the gun, which comes in a box labeled For Sale to Texans Only.

The idea of jogging with a gun may sound uncomfortable and a little bizarre, but in this category Perry is not as goofy as Ted Cruz. In the midst of his presidential campaign, Cruz posted a YouTube video titled
Making Machine-Gun Bacon with Ted Cruz.
“There are few things I enjoy more than on weekends cooking breakfast with the family,” he informs us, as he stands at a firing range. “Of course, in Texas, we cook bacon a little differently than most folks.” He wraps a strip of bacon around the muzzle of a semiautomatic AR-15 (not an actual machine gun), and around that, a piece of foil. Then he fires away. Soon, grease is spattering among the shell casings. “Mmmm! Machine-gun bacon!” the senator says, as he snacks on the finished product. The object of the video apparently was to show a jollier and more human side of the candidate.

With more than a million Texans licensed to carry handguns, the state is actually far behind Florida, with 1.7 million. “I’m EMBARRASSED,” Governor Greg Abbott tweeted in 2015; “Texas #2 in nation for new gun purchases, behind CALIFORNIA. Let’s pick up the pace Texans. @NRA.”

On June 13, 2015, a gunman assaulted police headquarters in Dallas in an armored van that he had purchased on eBay. It was billed as a “Zombie Apocalypse Assault Vehicle,” and came equipped with gun ports and bulletproof windows. Police were finally able to disable the vehicle and kill the shooter with a .50-caliber sniper rifle (also available on the Internet). Governor Abbott discounted the event as an “isolated incident by someone who had serious mental challenges, as well as a possible criminal background,” without remarking that those alarming deficiencies had not prevented the shooter from purchasing powerful weapons. That same day, Governor Abbott went to a gun range in Pflugerville, outside Austin, and signed into law the bill requiring public universities and colleges to allow handguns on campus and in dorms. He did this despite the vehement opposition from the chancellor of the University of Texas system, William McRaven, the former navy admiral who as head of the United States Special Operations Command had overseen the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. The bill went into effect on August 1, 2016, exactly fifty years after the Whitman shooting.

When the students returned for the fall semester, a protest group called Cocks Not Glocks handed out more than 4,500 dildos. Some of them were huge and I think possibly lethal. There was a dildo-juggling contest and T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan Take It and Come. Although there is a policy at the university forbidding the public display of any image that is obscene, the administration sagely chose to let this issue reside in the domain of free speech. Supporters of the protest were tying the sex toys onto their backpacks, and others were planting them in the shade of the campus live oaks, where they looked like a forest of mushrooms after a heavy rain.

In the spring of 2016, I signed up to take a class at Central Texas Gun Works that would qualify me to carry a weapon. There were about thirty people in the class, including six women. Most of the day was spent learning the Texas general firearms laws, which are more nuanced and confusing than I expected. One can’t carry a gun in amusement parks, hospitals, sporting events, school buses, bars, a polling place, a court, a correctional facility, or “within 1000 feet of a correctional facility designated as a place of execution on a day of execution if proper notice is posted.” Private businesses, such as supermarkets, can ban guns from their premises; Whole Foods has done so, but Kroger has not.

One of the surprises is that if you have a handgun in your car and you’re drunk, it doesn’t matter if you’re unlicensed; but if you are licensed, you are liable to be charged with a Class A misdemeanor, which can mean a year in jail and a $4,000 fine. “A lot of my students decide not to get the license because of that,” our instructor, Michael Cargill, told us. He showed some cautionary real-life videos. A convenience-store security camera recorded a customer who happened upon a robbery in progress; the customer frantically pulls out his concealed weapon and plugs the clerk, not the robber. Another video shows a target shooter plunking cans off a log with a rifle; one bullet misfires and the shooter peeks down the barrel to see what’s going on, when suddenly his gimme cap is blown off his head. People do a lot of stupid things with guns, which is one reason I’ve always been wary of owning one.

Much of the law portion of this class was taken up with the consequences of shooting another person, which is what handguns are for, coyotes notwithstanding. It’s lawful to pull the trigger if someone has broken into your home or business or vehicle, or to prevent the commission of a serious crime. Like many states, Texas also has a “stand your ground” provision, which says that a person who is present in a place where he has a right to be also has the right to use deadly force if he reasonably believes it is necessary to protect himself or others. That was the defense in the acquittal of George Zimmerman in Florida after he killed the unarmed black high school student Trayvon Martin in 2012.

“Your life will change the moment you pull the trigger,” Cargill warned us. For one thing, you’ll be under arrest while the cops sort out whether or not to charge you, a process that can take several days. And there are personal consequences that are difficult to calculate. One of Cargill’s previous students did shoot an intruder in his home, a seventeen-year-old boy whose last words were “Would you call my mother?”

After we took a written exam, an ex-cop came into the class to sell us insurance for legal expenses in case we shot anybody. Several people signed up (I did not). Then we drove out to the firing range, an open pit behind the airport surrounded by mesquite trees and pin oaks. There was another class in the range next to us practicing some kind of tactical exercise, which consisted of loping along with a pistol and firing at metal targets—
Ping! Ping! Ping!
—then performing a barrel roll and grabbing a shotgun and blowing away a Bernie Sanders yard sign. That seemed politically off to me. Sanders was far more liberal on gun laws than any of his Democratic opponents in the presidential primary. All of my classmates arrived with their own weapons; I was the only one who had to rent one. Even the middle-aged women in the class brought along their Colts and Berettas and Smith Wessons. When my turn to shoot came, Cargill handed me a 9mm Glock.

I hadn’t fired a handgun in fifty years, since I was in high school. For a while, there was a snub-nosed .38 in our house; it was the gun my uncle used to kill himself. I don’t know why my father brought it home. I took it out in the country with some friends and we tried shooting bottles off a fence post, but it was not made for target practice. After a while, the gun disappeared from the house. I never knew what happened to it.

I chatted with some of my fellow students at the firing range, curious as to what had brought them here. The mixed group included an old bearded hippie, an ex-cop, a physical therapist. One woman with a SIG Sauer P226, the kind of pistol that U.S. Navy SEAL teams use, said she “just wanted to get out of my comfort zone.” There was an Asian man in a button-down shirt who was continually checking his email as he waited to shoot. He said that he had bought his semiautomatic pistol several years ago but never really used it. “So why’d you buy it?” I asked him. “That was back when Obama was going to take away our guns,” he said, as he briefly glanced up from his phone. “I thought I’d better go ahead and get one while I could.” (Obama termed the notion that he was planning to take away Americans’ guns a conspiracy theory.)

There was one guy I was especially curious about. He was burly and bearded and had tattoos spilling down his right arm. He wore a black T-shirt that said Stop Terrorism—Shoot Back. The fear of domestic terrorism is overblown, but it has certainly empowered gun advocates. “Innocents like us will continue to be slaughtered in concert halls, sports stadiums, restaurants and airplanes,” Wayne LaPierre, the leader of the National Rifle Association, said shortly after the Paris terror attacks in 2015. “But when evil comes knocking on our door, Americans have a power no other people on the planet share”—i.e., the Second Amendment. Such fearmongering has been extremely effective. Whenever there’s another mass shooting in Whitman’s America, gun sales invariably rise. In the decade between 2005 and 2015, more than 300,000 Americans were killed by guns compared with 94 who died in domestic terror attacks.

The man in the Stop Terrorism T-shirt was hanging around with a young couple; it turned out they had all moved down from Chicago together. I asked them what made them choose Texas. “The weather,” they said unanimously. They told me they had been classmates at Northern Illinois University in 2008, when a graduate student named Steven Kazmierczak burst into Cole Hall. An oceanography class was under way in the auditorium. Like Whitman, Kazmierczak was toting an armory of weapons, and he had the students trapped. Police later recovered fifty-four bullet casings and shotgun shells. Twenty-one people were shot, and six died, including Kazmierczak, who killed himself before the police arrived. As it happened, the shooter was wearing a black T-shirt that said Terrorist.

I asked the three of them if the Texas gun laws were one of the reasons they had chosen my state. “Not entirely, but it was a plus,” one of them said.

I knew from the few times I went hunting as a boy with my dad that I was a good shot. I liked the feel of the gun in my hand and the little kick when it fired, like a horse cocking its head when you give him your heels. We were shooting at a blue silhouette with the bull’s-eye at mid-sternum. I scored 246 out of 250. I began to think about what it would be like to own my own handgun.

According to a study published by Injury Prevention, about 35 percent of Texans own guns, close to the national average. I still have my old Remington .22 from my Boy Scout days on the top shelf in the hall closet, so I guess I’m included in that number. Despite the controversy that rages on this issue now, the incidence of gun ownership in the United States has declined from more than half of all households in 1982 to a little more than a third currently—the lowest it has been in almost forty years. And yet the United States still has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world—88.8 guns per 100 residents—and gun purchases are also at historic highs. The statistics are skewed by the fact that gun owners are acquiring significant personal arsenals. My Stop Terrorism—Shoot Back informant told me he has nine guns; that’s one more than the average gun owner possesses, according to
The Washington Post.
Our instructor, Michael Cargill, told us he was carrying three concealed weapons while he was teaching class. I couldn’t spot any of them.

I was at a book club recently in Austin where one of the members recalled being in a restaurant in Houston when President George H. W. Bush and the first lady entered. The Secret Service set up a metal detector that the other diners had to pass through. “They had a big bowl for people to drop their guns in,” the woman recalled, “and there were all these big-haired Houston women pulling pistols out of their purses.” I’ve never seen anything similar in Texas, but the reputation for a high rate of gun possession does affect behavior; in my experience, Texans drive far more courteously than New Yorkers or, my God, Bostonians, where the consequences of being a jerk may not be fatal. Part of me longs to live in a place where people are assumed to be disarmed, like England, which has very few guns and also hardly any snakes. The English don’t even have poison ivy. In Texas, it sometimes seems that every living thing can bite or poke or sting or shoot you. You always have to be a little bit on guard.

Speaking of snakes, I was down at the capitol one wintry day and ran into a group of Jaycees from Sweetwater, a West Texas town famed for its annual rattlesnake roundup. To promote the event, the Jaycees had brought a dozen rattlers and dumped them out on the chilly outdoor rotunda. The Jaycees were striding around in Kevlar boots. They would prod the lethargic creatures with hooked poles every once in a while to stir them to life, and the snakes would hiss and rattle and then return to their somnolent state. “They get a little lazy,” one of the Jaycees said disparagingly. A few tourists and staffers ventured out onto the patio, but most people were standing at the windows with their mouths open.

The spokesman of the Jaycees was Rob McCann. “We’ve been doing the roundup for fifty-eight years,” he told me. They find about four to five thousand pounds of snakes a year; one year, they gathered fifteen thousand pounds, and yet the number of snakes in Sweetwater never seems to diminish. “We hunt the same dens year after year,” the first man said. “You want to hold one?”

“Not especially.”

That evening I called our daughter, Caroline, who was in Chicago finishing her MFA at the Art Institute. I asked her how she was getting along. She was living near a country-and-western bar so she wouldn’t feel so far from home, but it wasn’t the same. “People here can’t dance,” she complained.

I mentioned that I’d just been to the capitol and visited the snake handlers. “Oh, I love Texas!” she said with a lack of irony that is hard to convey.