Grappling with Guns

Dad, my brother, and I were in Dad’s Duster driving out to the marsh in the middle of the Iowa farmland. The marsh had been preserved through the effort of groups like Ducks Unlimited and The Nature Conservancy, groups that were willing to negotiate with government and farmers to provide sanctuary for animals.

Dad had picked my brother and I up at the regular time on Sunday afternoon, and on this particular week he chose where we would go.

Farmers don't like wet depressions in the land. It provides a place for water to run, and that means erosion. It can also act as a filter, showing the kind of damage farm chemicals can do to the earth and the plants, animals, and ultimately, people.
My father loved the marsh - loved listening to the crickets and the sound of the wind sweeping through the grasses. My brother and I preferred going to the air-conditioned mall rather than walking the barbed wire perimeter of the marsh with the sun beating down on our straw hats in the muggy Iowa heat, but on this day I was skimming a hunting magazine I had purchased at the Waldenbooks in the aforementioned mall and debating the merits of hunting as a sport with my father.

"I think a lot of men take up hunting or fishing because they like to be out in nature, but they can't justify being there. They feel like they have to be doing something," my dad said.

I was in the middle of a tirade of questions. Before, when I was obsessed with motorcycles, the questions had been on the order of:

"Dad, would you ever buy a motorcycle?"

"Well, if I lived alone and wanted to travel and a motorcycle burned less fuel than a car."
"What kind would you get?"

"Probably one of the smaller road bikes."

"Like a Harley?"

"Probably not a Harley."

"What kind?"

"Maybe a Honda."

"A stunt motorcycle?"

"Probably not a stunt motorcycle or racing motorcycle."

"Why not?"

"I would want something that would be safe. Something that would get me to where I want to go. Something that’s environmentally sound."

We were talking around two different issues. My father was talking about wishing he were free. Wishing he could reject God and Family for the open road. He was already lonely. I, on the other hand, was talking about my grand child-like Obsession with whatever interested me the most at the time. Like I said, that day we were in the Duster and I was obsessing about hunting.

The magazine straddled my lap, an article about hunting pistols framed a photo of a .357 magnum with a scope mounted on top.

As a kid I had mixed feelings about scopes. I had mixed feelings about anything that might potentially impede proof of one's actual skill.

"A hit should be a hit with the naked eye," I thought, "That was the sportsman's way."
My dad was into birding and photography. He liked stalking things as much as the next guy, but his shot took only a moment of an animal's life, not the whole thing.

"But you eat meat," I said, flipping the pages of my magazine.

"Yes, but society is set up so I don't need to kill it myself," he said.

"But if you had to, would you hunt with a bow or a gun?"

"I would hunt with whichever allowed the animal to suffer the least."

We were waiting for the video of the Veishea riots to start, giddy with anticipation. It is a tableau worth remembering: twelve teens around a table in powder blue shirts with silver police badges, seven of them with flashlights strapped to their belts. All want to be heroes.

Officer Ling leaned against the wall casually aiming a remote control at the TV he had rolled into the room on a cart. Ling was in his early 40's. He was a presence in a room like a linebacker: quiet and slow, but ready and capable of pushing you down and cuffing you in one smooth, elegant gesture. For him the video wasn't something in the future to anticipate, but something from the past on which to reflect. He had been there next to squad car 401, the car now in the shop getting a new hood and window, the car with the three bricks in the front seat and the ten thousand shards glistening in the light from the street lamps and the light from flames two blocks away at the middle of the crowd.

I had seen Officer Ling in a lot of situations. I had seen him raid a warehouse with four other officers to apprehend a man who had broken in. The man had been spotted harvesting marijuana in the field behind the building and had forced his way into the building to hide. I had seen Ling at the ready, tailing two guys who had walked out of a whorehouse, watching for any reason to pull them over. I had also seen him as a support to myself after The Shooting. I had seen Ling doing construction work on the weekend because policing didn't bring in enough money to make ends meet. And I saw him on that day in jeans and a grey t-shirt, relaxing into the wall, aiming the remote at the TV, ready to reflect on the past while we, the Ames Police Explorers, waited in anticipation for our future.

The riot had started, not as a riot, but as a street party on frat row. Veishea, the annual celebration of Iowa State University's various schools and departments started with a parade and ended with several stomachs pumped at Mercy Medical.

That year the warmth of the evening and the number of partygoers drove keg stands from the third-floor fire escape to the sidewalk, and party goers from the yards and porches into the road.

At some point mob mentality took over. Partygoers broke into neighboring homes, stealing furniture and heaping it into a bonfire in the center of the four packed blocks.
A state of emergency was declared and the police and a fire engine pressed their way toward the flames under a hail of bricks, garbage and bottles.

I scooted another inch forward in my chair and Officer Ling pressed play.

1986

The Isaac Walton League on the outskirts of town was situated in a small valley on the Iowa landscape. Part of the Oregon Trail passed through the land and could still be seen where thousands of wagons had left ruts in the soil. The valley was small, maybe three hundred yards long and very steep on both sides. Hundreds of years ago Native Americans drove buffalo into the valley. The animals would charge down one side, then due to their weight be unable to use their velocity to propel themselves up the opposite embankment, allowing the Indians to shoot them from above.

When I was a freshman in high school, my science class went on a field trip to see the ruts left on the Oregon Trail and the archaeological dig the state university maintained for its students in the valley.

Had the land cooperated, the whole area would have been tilled under for farmland, but any tractor would have tipped over on the slope of the valley and it was far too large to be filled in.

To the South, the valley opened and flattened onto the plain of the South Skunk river basin. The hills on this end of the valley were too shallow to slow down the buffalo. There were no arrowheads, no stone knives lost while taking hides to be tanned for blankets or tee pees.

The land had no archaeological value, and the farmers had passed it over as well. In Iowa, a hill is too much hassle to deal with. Even disking the soil, a way of breaking the prairie with less erosion than tilling, leaves a bald fallow mound after a couple of years. This apologetic dip in the land made for a perfect shooting range.

On weekends my mother would take me out to shoot. She would sit on a bench in the shade and read books by John Michael Talbot and other Christian writers - histories of the Benedictines and books on faith, prayer and leading a religious life. Mom didn’t have the same aversion to guns that my dad had, and after the divorce, allowing me to maintain and shoot the rifle was one way of letting go of the marriage.

I would take a few paper targets, pin them to the wooden frames twenty-five yards out, load seven rounds into my clip, and slide the bolt into place. I would align the sights and steady my body for the shot.

Very quickly, I learned that shooting targets has nothing in common with the fast action shooting on TV. Shooting targets is meditative, calm and internally quiet. Shooting targets is about breath. Shooting targets is about patience. Shooting targets is about you, the shooter.

1988

“Please turn off your engine and remain in your car,” Eddie’s voice squawked over the loudspeaker as the driver’s door of the car in front of us popped open, smoke still sputtering from its tailpipe.

We had pulled over a blue Plymouth with expired plates near the local college campus. The engine cut out on the car in front of us, the door swung shut and the driver poked her head out the window to look at us, then pulled it back in.

Eddie swung his door wide and it bounced back toward him a little at the end of it’s reach. I slid out of the passenger seat, a little awkward with the unusual weight of a .38 revolver on my hip. Eddie swaggered slightly in his powder blue uniform as he approached the driver’s side of the stopped car.

I approached slowly, scanning the vehicle for any signs of foul play.

“Maam, are you aware that your registration has expired,” Eddie asked, bushing his thick glasses up on his nose. We were both sweating in the summer heat.

“No, oh I didn’t know,” she said, turning toward Ed, looking up at his unruly mop of blond hair.

“Gun,” I shouted and drew my pistol.

Neither Ed nor I knew anything about gun laws.

Strike that. I know that when hunting pheasant a driver may not keep a loaded shotgun in the passenger compartment of a car. I know this because my mother’s friend’s husband from church took my brother and I hunting while we were being watched one afternoon while my mother went to her weekend psychology class the college. He drove with the breach of his double barrel shotgun open to show it was empty, the barrel pointing down at the floor between the two front seats. I know that to carry a handgun loaded and concealed requires a permit from the Sheriff. I know shotguns and rifles may be purchased at age 18 with no felony record, history of internment in a psyche ward or current restraining order, while to buy a pistol the purchaser must be 21 and meet the same standards as well as pass an instant background check. I know that being surprised to find an unholstered pistol in the passenger compartment of a car during a traffic stop is not a good thing.

The handgun was sitting between the driver and passenger on the padded median next to a Big Gulp in a cup holder.

“Get out of the car,” I said.

The man complied.

“Spread your legs and put your hands on the hood.”

I dove into the passenger side, grabbing the pistol from beside the driver, then set it on the hood of the car. Eddie stood on the driver’s side pointing his pistol at the driver and, inadvertently, at me on the other side of the car.

“move back and put your hands on the trunk,” I said.

The man did what I said and I moved around behind him so I was pointing my gun on the diagonal toward him and Ed.

“Ask him if he has a concealed weapons permit,” Ed shouted at me, still pointing his gun at the driver.

“Do you have a concealed weapons permit?” I asked.

The man dipped his finger and thumb in his back pocket and produced an invisible card. He handed the card to me. I looked at it blankly.

“Is it real?” Ed asked.

“How should I know?” I shouted. “It’s invisible.”

The troop, standing behind Ed rolled with laughter.

The parking lots extend for almost a mile around the college football Stadium on thee sides. During games the lots would fill up and parking would spill out into the neighborhoods across the river that snaked through the plain creating a tenuous situation between many of the citizens and the university. During the week the lots would be vast and open, not being close enough to campustown for faculty or students to use them extensively.

That afternoon the Explorers took two patrol cars and a light blue Plymoth out to the lots to practice traffic stops. The point wasn’t to do things right so much as to teach us how much we didn’t know.

1987

Killer flipped on his lights and hit the siren so it chirped twice, two short bursts or the long wail that a cop car makes while in route to an emergency. The car in front of us slowed and pulled to the curb. Our patrol car glided to a stop two and a half feet behind it and four feet from the curb, offset from the stopped car to give Killer a protected zone in which to stand while talking to the driver of the stopped car.

"How did you get your nickname?" I had asked earlier that day.

We were working the South East quadrant of the city. Killer made a right turn onto Lincoln from Duff Street. The border that divided the East and West quadrants was the train tracks one block West of this intersection. We headed toward the industrial outskirts of town.

"When I was hired the Chief asked me to do some undercover work."

He slowed the patrol car as we approached an old seedy hotel with weekly rates listed on a hand-printed sign taped inside the office window.

"A couple of coke dealers were living in here."

The hotel ran perpendicular to the road, the front office on Lincoln with the rooms behind it, opening to an alley that divided the block. We pulled into the alley and rolled to a stop.

"I spent two months living here and hanging with those guys. They were part of a ring that runs drugs across the country. Interstate 80 is the main channel."

"So they call you Killer because you arrested those guys and broke up the ring?"

Killer laughed. "No." He laughed again. "One night when I was cleaning my gun it went off. I didn’t know there was a round in the chaimber. Neighbors called the cops and they ran an investigation. No one knew I was undercover except the Chief and I wasn't going to say anything."

I looked at Killer's open, gentle, friendly face and tried to imagine him undercover hanging out with the seedy, bitter, unfriendly-looking people I'd seen coming out of that hotel.

"Was anyone hurt?" I asked.

"No, it just punched a hole in two walls and a dresser. They found the slug in the neighbor's sock drawer.”

Later I found out from the parking cop the other reason people called him Killer. He brought in the most revenue from traffic stops, sometimes hundreds of dollars per day in citations, each delivered with a smile.

"Open your door, unfasten the seatbelt, and get ready to get out," Killer said as he opened his door.

He walked with ease toward the car he had pulled over, looking to make sure the trunk was shut and locked. He peered in the back window to be sure no one was crouched down in the seat, then greeted the woman driving the car. I unfastened my seatbelt and got out of the car.

"Good afternoon. May I see your drivers license?"

"Good afternoon, officer. Did I do something wrong?"

*The driver is digging for her license. She has black hair, straight, to her shoulders. Her hair is flecked with grey. She's wearing a loosely knit sweater. She's thin like a librarian or college English teacher. Her plate number is VAL 647. I repeat the words from the phonetic alphabet I will need if I anything goes wrong and the driver decides to flee the scene: Victor Adam Lincoln 647. Victor Adam Lincoln 647.*

I shut my door and approached the car from the right side, stopping by the back right tire of the vehicle to observe.

"Did you know your registration has expired?" Killer asked her.

I hadn't ever been invited out of the patrol car on a stop before. Every sensory mechanism was on alert to tell me if something was wrong. The driver apologized in a torrent of words. Killer smiled, handed the license back through the car window and told the woman to visit the DMV to update her registration and to apply the stickers to the plates on her car as soon as possible.

He waived to the driver and we returned to the patrol car as she pulled back into traffic.
I fastened my seatbelt with the solid metal click of a 1980's seatbelt. Killer turned to me.

"What I meant when I said 'get ready to get out,' was, 'stay in the car but be prepared to run if anything happens.' You don't have a vest. I do." He was referring to the half-inch of Kevlar under his uniform that would catch a bullet, even if at the expense of cracking a rib.

"Where should I run?" I asked. I imagined Killer down and me taking two bullets in the back as I fled down the street.

"Run to a house and call 911," he said.

I imagined Killer approaching the woman with the expired plates only to hear a pop and see a puff of smoke drift calmly out of the window, Killer reeling back, his hand flailing at his holster. I imagine myself ignoring the order to run and instead unhooking the 12-gauge shotgun from its rest inside the car. I imagine leveling the gun against the door, pressing the butt of the gun into my shoulder, praying the first cartridge is a nice, light load rather than a deer slug, the recoil of which would send me backward just about as fast as it would send the ball of lead out the barrel. I imagine telling the woman to hold still, put her hands in the air. I imagine taking the radio handset and calling in the code 10-33 emergency, 10-52 ambulance needed, and because I can't remember the code for person with gun, 10-96 mental subject, the code we all laughed about, and because we laughed, we remembered. I imagine the woman crying with her hands in the air as Killer moans, sits up and pulls open his shirt to show the bullet flattened, like on TV, to his vest.

I don't imagine the PR nightmare that would result from this had the scenario ever been realized.

1988

Squeaks was a Police Explorer from the Dubuque troop. She and I met at the National Revolver Championships held at Camp Dodge, Iowa. Several Police Explorer troops from around the state had been invited to the military base on which the annual competition was held to help out with simple things - organize tables for events and tell people where to go.

Squeaks was cute in a rough and tumble sort of way. The apples of her cheeks were round and plump. She had a cute button nose and her hair was a tangled mess, like a fifteen-year-old Janis Joplin. I was about a year younger than her, thin and gangly, an unlikely pick when boys outnumbered girls fifteen to one in every troop. She had the largest roundest breasts of any girl I had held hands with up to that time.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We weren't invited to the army base for romance - no one ever is.

When we first got there we took a tour of the grounds. We dropped off our bags in one of the barracks where we would sleep, and then jumped back in officer Holmes' minivan and drove down to the ranges. We passed the rifle range with its targets laid out at 50 and 100-yard increments for at least 400 yards. The rat-tat-tat of someone shooting an m16 with three round bursts enthralled us and we pressed our faces to the window as we passed.

Beyond the rifle range were the pistol ranges, blocked out with shooting lines at 10, 15, and 25-yard distances. In all, two hundred or more people could shoot at one time on the base, which would be filled with officers shooting all morning and afternoon for two days. More than ten thousand rounds would be fired during the competition, some in un-timed competitions for accuracy and others timed, placing the pressure of speed against the zone of accuracy.

Officer Holmes pulled up behind a couple of other cars parked on the grass by the third range down. We got out of the car a little stiff from being crammed together so tightly for the past hour on the road. Holmes waved to a short round man with a blue ball cap and dark sunglasses who was chewing gum and smoking.

The man took the cigarette out of his mouth, and waved. Several Explorers were sitting under an overhang to keep out of the sun while a couple of others examined the dune heaped up behind the targets at the end of the range to see if they could dig out any old slugs.

"Hey, y'all. Come over here and meet post 865," the man with the cigarette hollered at the explorers down range.

The kids dusted off their hands and walked back to the shade.

"How's it going, Doug?" officer Holmes said, shaking his hand.

Doug was a Staff Sergeant and in charge of the Dubuque Explorer troop.

"Good, good. How the hell are ya,'" Doug replied, looking past Holmes distractedly.

We went around the group and exchanged names. Two girls stood out in contrast to the crowd of gangly boys. Heather had joined our troup a month before and had mostly proven herself as one of the guys. She was great at directing traffic and she could hold her own when the teasing came around her way. The other was Squeaks. No one remembered her name after the meeting, but we all remembered her laugh. She was a real girl also, with a flirtatious distance from the boys and her long hair pulled up on top of her head in a messy knot to meet the requirements; no hair was to hang below the collar. The nickname was as far as teasing would go for her.

After introductions the other troop headed back to the armory to set up tables and chairs for training seminars that would kick off the event. I, along with the rest of Troop 865, cased the pistol ranges for any trash that might have been overlooked by the staff, but there was little to find. Some of the guys started a football game that quickly devolved into a game of catch due to the heat. We waited for the event to start.

To be continued.

“When you become a cop do you think you will carry a revolver or a pistol?” I asked.

Matthew lowered the Hardy Boys book he was reading, “I’ve been thinking I want to be a private eye instead of a cop.”

We were spending the afternoon reading in Matthew’s parent’s living room. We would spend hours reading and discussing mystery books, trying to see which one of us could figure out the mystery the fastest.

“I think I want to carry a Colt .45,” he said.

My book was laying on the table in front of me. I lifted the cover and let it drop.

“But the recoil is too powerful to maintain control if you want to shoot fast, and you only get seven shots. A nine millimeter carries like, ten or fifteen rounds,” I said.

It was a muggy hot summer afternoon not worth doing anything besides reading in front of oscillating fan on the couch.

“I would just make sure I hit the target,” Matthew said. “We should go swimming.”

“I can’t. I have my paper route,” I said. “Do you want to sleep over tonight? We can get movies at the library.”

“Yeah. Let me ask my Mom.”

When I joined the Ames Police Explorers in eighth grade I had several reasons. First, after my parent’s divorced my mother wanted me to have strong male role models. This meant the Boy Scouts where the play of Cub Scouts turned to discipline and discipline turned to manhood.
I hated the repetition and mental bluntness of the Boy Scouts. Nationalistically reciting the pledge of allegiance, standing in neat rows and saluting, sitting through boring meetings in the stagnant air of the Kiwanis’s club and working for merit badges alone with no father to guide, only increased my awareness of the separation the activities were supposed to fix.

The Police Explorers were different. Here was an opportunity, I thought, to really help people. I could learn to be a stabilizing force in an unstable world. I could walk the line between the good guys and the bad guys, and not only that, but I could do it with a gun at my side, itself a symbol of security and enforcement to those who didn’t have the flaw of criminality tainting their person.

It was an easy solution in my mind, and it gave me an out with my mother. I could quit the Boy Scouts.