You might not suspect it if you see me flat footing down the sidewalk in my rumpled duds, but I am legally authorized to carry concealed upon my person a handgun, a stun gun, a billy club, and various knives.
If you're looking for an NRA sticker on my truck window, you won't find one.
If you're looking for my underground bunker, you won't find one.
If you're looking for my stockpile of ammo and weapons, you won't find one?at least not one that will last beyond the first wave of zombies, or several deer-hunting seasons.
And frankly, if you're looking for my concealed weapon, you probably won't find one.
But I have reserved the option.
We can all recite (or screech) the cases for and against gun control. I have nothing to add in either respect, at least nothing that will look punchy on a placard or nifty on a T-shirt. I'm pro-gun the way I'm pro?potato fork. I use both to gather food for the year, with the caveat that if you break into my house, I won't be waiting at the top of the stairs with a potato fork.
Actually, I can't even live up to the braggadocio of what I just wrote, but more on that shortly. After years of political tussling, my home state of Wisconsin now grants properly permitted citizens the right to carry a concealed weapon. Back when the fight was at its fever pitch, I took to the habit of saying that the only thing I found less compelling than the arguments for conceal/carry were the arguments against it. I also said that if the law ever passed, I'd apply for a permit on the simple ground that I might as well avail myself of all options.
But why? What motivates guys like me?who live in a relatively safe area and are neither running scared nor itching for a fight?to even consider traveling armed at all times? In a 2012 study from the University of Texas at Austin, sociologist Angela Stroud, Ph.D., put the question to men who possessed concealed carry permits, and the answers fell into three categories: "(1) to protect their wives and children from violent crime; (2) to compensate for lost physical strength as they age; and (3) to make them feel more secure in places they feel vulnerable."
Regarding reason 2, I'm not the man I used to be, but I was never really Rambo in the first place, so I'm not sure it applies. But the other two reasons have some traction and may be part of the reason why, one evening, I went online and printed my concealed-weapon application. It was a simple form including instructions to supply "proof of training," followed by a long list of acceptable options. First was "hunter education program." Toggling over to the state Department of Natural Resources site, I brought up my file, and there it was: my hunter's safety certificate, completed back in 1977?when I was 13 years old. I slipped a copy into an envelope along with a scan of my driver's license and a check for 50 bucks, walked to the end of the driveway, dropped the packet into the mailbox, and raised the red flag.
Seven days later I opened the mailbox again, and there it was: my license to carry a concealed weapon in Wisconsin.
My father forbade me and my brothers to possess toy guns or to pretend to shoot each other with our fingers. He also raised us in a religious sect that banned movies and television, so we were hardly immersed in the dreaded "culture of violence." And yet whenever I visited friends, we dove straight for the plastic pistols and went full-on O.K. Corral. Even before I took to reading war stories and cowboy books in third grade, I was so desperate to have a toy rifle that I cobbled one together from a yardstick and part of a drawing easel and proudly showed it to a friend on the kindergarten school bus.
I first squeezed the trigger of a real gun sometime around the age of 9 or 10. My father's arms were around me, steadying my aim. According to some experts, his presence then shaped my feelings about firearms now. "That's an emotional connection that is often left out of the conversation," says Stroud. "One thing that stuck out in my interviews was how deeply meaningful guns can become for boys who have these experiences with their fathers. I think a lot of anti-gun people don't really understand gun culture and what it means to grow up in a place where young boys?more than girls?have guns and hunting as a part of a family experience. They have positive associations with using guns and with being out shooting."
Sure enough, I remember how eagerly I would look forward to those times when Dad would cut out of work to set up a line of pop cans on a log for us to "plink." My father was a quiet man who drilled me on safety and had no patience for swagger, but at some level I saw his willingness to take me shooting as a prelude to manhood. "You were learning what it means to be a man, and you still want to advertise that fact," says Frank McAndrew, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Knox College in Illinois who researches human social behavior. "Especially if you grew up in a rural area, guns are part of that image. Just like having a pickup truck or any of the other trappings of manhood. So if you're walking around without a gun, somehow you're not complete. It's kind of like if you were forced to drive a Volkswagen Beetle instead of a pickup truck. It's emasculating."
What McAndrew doesn't know is that I own two pickup trucks.
Also a Volkswagen Jetta.
Maybe I'd better get a bigger gun.
You might not know from all the fear-fueled in-your-face "man card" bluster, but there are legions of us out here who have guns and have always had guns, and we attach to this all the dramatic significance of having silverware. Once when I was standing beside my brother John at his sawmill, our fire department pagers went off and called us to stand by with the county SWAT team. "We have a report of a man holed up in his house with a gun," said the dispatcher. John looked at me quizzically. "Hmmm. . ." he said. "That's me every night!"
Today I own three rifles, one shotgun, and one revolver. This is likely low-average for my geographic peer group and way low for my immediate family, and it leaves me in Ted Nugent's dust along with all the rest of you. I'm hardly a gun nut, not even in the hobbyist sense. I can't rattle off ballistics or model numbers or muzzle velocities. I can break down and reassemble my firearms for cleaning, but if I dismantle trigger mechanisms, springs might start flying.
That said, I do a modest amount of target shooting every year to keep in trim between hunting seasons, and I recently joined the rest of the family in firing my brother-in-law's AR-15 during a get-together. When my brother John and I were young, we would shake up beer cans and then shoot them, reveling in the foamy explosion.
"Men love guns for all kinds of different reasons," says McAndrew. "The mere act of handling and firing a gun is biologically rewarded. We get a testosterone rush. That's pleasant. It's the same as when you win a tennis match, or achieve something at work where you won out in a competition against a guy for a job. Your adrenaline levels go up."
To verify this, McAndrew and his colleagues checked the testosterone levels of 30 male college students before and after the students played with either a gun or a children's game for 15 minutes. The men who'd played with the gun had significantly higher readings. And that, McAndrew says, boils down to one conclusion: "Shooting guns is fun."
But what made it fun to pull the trigger in the first place? Perhaps it began, as so many quirks of human behavior begin, with evolution.
In a 2010 study review, David Puts, Ph.D., a researcher at Penn State, concluded that the manufacture and use of weapons probably helped our knuckle-dragging male ancestors score the best dates and even "monopolize multiple females." Puts cites research postulating that evolving females consciously selected those men who were best equipped to provide protection from rape and to shield offspring from harm, but he doubts many women will be interested in a man simply because he's packing a big pistol. "Happily," says Puts, "times have changed."
Sometimes a gun is just a gun.
We live at the terminus of a dead-end country road. Crime in this area is very low, but I have more than once returned home after midnight to find strange cars parked at the turnaround. When I beamed them with the headlights, they took off. Who knows? Could've been some kids necking and drinking, or could've been someone casing my place.
Even with a few friends in the sheriff's department, I have no guarantee that anyone will be able to arrive in time should I, or my wife and daughters, call for help. So it does not seem all that unreasonable that I keep a 12-gauge shotgun at hand in the bedroom?although that gun is pretty long and was not designed for working in tight spaces.
The one time I ever took up arms against an intruding human was when I was roused from sleep at 3 a.m. by the sound of someone rattling the side door to my garage. I grabbed the shotgun from beside my bed, rolled off the mattress, and quickly made my way to the screen window that overlooks the space between the house and the garage. I got there just in time to catch a glimpse of two figures entering and pulling the door shut behind them.
I could hear every word they said, and in a matter of minutes it became clear to me that these were not top-flight theft ninjas: They were looking to steal gasoline and, lacking flashlights, were searching for the unleaded using their cigarette lighters.
When I'd been entertained long enough, I stood with my shotgun at the ready and hollered, "You boys better HIT THE ROAD!" After some drunken back-and-forth between themselves, the two men departed.
I leaned the shotgun against the wall and went back to bed. In the morning I realized that I had completely forgotten to remove the trigger lock. Basically I was standing there with a 12-gauge baseball bat.
According to his website, Dan Marcon is a corrections officer with a degree in police science who served 5 years in the military and worked for a private security firm. According to me, he is the walking, well-armed personification of the phrase "brick shithouse." We met when I took his Wisconsin/Non-Resident CCW class that?via some baroque interstate "reciprocity" arrangements?will expand my concealed carry rights to as many as 35 states.
I enjoyed the class. Marcon knows his stuff and is an energetic instructor. When I asked him why people enroll, he said, "They want it for protection, because society is going south fast. The violence?the everyday violence in towns that never really had violence, where people weren't locking their doors, like the area where we're from [Marcon and I grew up near each other], now they have to lock their doors. One worry is the influx of people who have no jobs, who are on drugs or under the influence of narcotics, people who find the easy road to take from someone who has." When Marcon really gets going, he'll tell you that Hitler got his start by taking guns away.
That isn't my perception of the current situation, and that isn't my reading of history. But then again, I once listened to a Ph.D. type equate John Ashcroft to Himmler and Goebbels. Then, in the time it took to refresh her wine and cheese, she informed me that I shouldn't fear registering my guns with John Ashcroft's government.
We're all afraid of something. I have no illusions about the violence real guns can do, and the price we pay for their pervasiveness. While working as an EMT, I once cared for two gunshot victims in one day. The first was a police officer who had responded to a domestic complaint and was shot by an assailant. We did everything we could, and then I held his hand as we raced for the hospital. He squeezed my fingers to let me know he could hear me. Just as we turned him over to the surgeons, we were paged back to the scene to pick up the shooter, who had subsequently blown off one side of his own skull. He died in the back of the ambulance. The physician who came out to the ambulance bay to make the call told us the officer had died in surgery.
This single incident hardly qualifies me as a combat-hardened vet, but I carry vivid visions of those wounds in my memory, and even more the sense of irretrievable finality wrought by gunshots. Several years later I was called to provide medical support to a SWAT-style emergency-response team as the men took down an active shooter. I remember the adrenaline surging as I hunkered with two other EMTs in the front of the ambulance waiting for the "go" command. Suddenly a shot rang out. I responded by ducking my head and hollering, "Fuck!"
In short, I ain't looking for a fight.
Transitioning from keeping a trigger-locked shotgun stashed in the closet to carrying a loaded handgun downtown is a big step. And should I really be allowed to carry a firearm at the farmers' market after forgetting to unlock my weapon while accosting burglars? On the other hand, no matter how long the odds, I stubbornly resist the idea of being forced to rely on hope and timing as the only means of self-defense for my family?including in a public setting.
Perhaps the most responsible thing for me to do would be to take more training from Dan Marcon. You wouldn't know it from the bellicose posts on his Facebook page, but in his classes, Marcon stresses the "Nike defense"?no matter what kind of weapon you're packing, whenever safely possible, run away from trouble. Amen to that; unless cornered by circumstance, I much prefer to live like a peaceable fraidy cat.
When it comes to firearms, there's a lot of big-belly bluster going around. This leads me to think of my father, and about how he showed me the perforated pop cans, quietly leading me to understand the deadly responsibility at hand.
I don't know yet if I'm going to carry. But I'm sure not going to advertise the fact on my T-shirt.
In fact, I'd prefer that you wonder.
My one revolver is a Ruger Super Redhawk.44 Magnum with a 7-inch barrel. Bought it during a stretch of trouble with some bears. I can carry it, but I'll be danged if I can conceal it.
Recently my brother John's wife bought him a.357 that he carries holstered at his waist. It's a tidy little hammerless revolver with a laser sight. I decided to price one out.
On a sunny spring afternoon, I went to a local gun shop, a place where you can also get your transmission fixed. The owner, Larry, and I went to high school together. I told him I was writing a piece about guns. With a pistol on his hip he smiled and said quietly, "Well, as long as you get your facts straight."
Larry didn't have the.357 in stock, but I noticed a youth-size.410 shotgun in the rack. No matte black pistol grips, no pink inlays, just a serviceable little firearm. This year my 12-year-old daughter asked me to enroll her in a hunter's safety course. The.410 is a good starter gun with very little kick. And the youth model is much shorter. Not the greatest stopping power, but easier to handle in a confined space.
Say, for instance, the upstairs hallway.
Larry rang it up, and I headed home to the family.
