Let It Bang Read online

  A year after the founding of Black Lives Matter and two years after the killing of Trayvon Martin, it pained me and intrigued me to see the plethora of bumper stickers, T-shirts, and license plates with Confederate flags and dangerous rhetoric such as HERITAGE NOT HATE. One T-shirt I saw proclaimed this message: I JUST BOUGHT A NEW GLOCK, AND I CAN’T WAIT TO TRY IT OUT ON THE NEXT TRESPASSER.

  Here’s another: A GUN IN THE HAND IS BETTER THAN A COP ON THE PHONE.

  And here’s one more: GOD MADE MEN, BUT SAM COLT MADE THEM EQUAL.

  The kind of people who buy those kinds of shirts made up the majority of people at the show, and I was decidedly not one of them.

  We came to a vendor with a brand-new Glock 26 on display. “You want that one?” Charles asked. “I’ll buy it.” The Glock 26 is a subcompact, concealed-carry, nine-millimeter weapon affectionately known as the “Baby Glock.” It’s a pocket pistol specifically designed for self-defense. For that reason, the magazine holds just seven rounds, as opposed to the seventeen of other Glocks, and its grip is just long enough for an adult male to wrap three fingers around it.

  The show features a list of twenty-one rules and guidelines. Among them is a warning to vendors: “You are urged, for your protection, to obtain and furnish identification for all sales.” The state of Oklahoma does not require that background checks be performed on gun buyers, and that’s as Wanenmacher wants it to be. Despite the fact that 92 percent of Americans favor background checks for all gun sales.

  Charles knows that anybody who wants a gun will get a gun. But he’s not afraid of a background check. He reached for his wallet to pay for the Glock. He was prepared to run this play the way the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives drew it up. He presented his I.D. and had a pen ready to fill out the Firearms Transaction Record for over-the-counter purchases. He was ready to allow the seller to give that information to the FBI, which would run it through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, known as NICS.

  The number of background checks performed by NICS has nearly doubled, from 11.2 million in 2007 to 21 million in 2015. Polls indicate that 14 million guns were sold from 2008 to 2011, while 20 million were sold from 2012 to 2013. Over 9 million guns were sold nationwide in 2015, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. But think of how many people don’t report gun sales because they don’t trust the government, journalists, or even nonpartisan polling and research institutions. And some states are slow to update even the data they do collect.

  But when Charles offered to show the seller his driver’s license, the seller waved away the gesture. “Obama ain’t gonna know,” he said. In fact, sellers have the right to waive this check, in accordance with the federal Firearm Owners’ Protection Act of 1986, as long as they do not derive most of their income from selling guns. A number of states have, however, established laws making background checks mandatory for the purchase of any firearm at a gun show. But many more, including Oklahoma, may never join those states requiring this sort of vetting. So it did not matter that Charles was more than willing to abide by societal precautions meant to keep guns out of the hands of people who might do harm. The sellers themselves weren’t.

  Charles didn’t seem the least bit fazed by what had occurred. He and I continued to walk through the gun show, having a look around. But I was keenly aware that I was carrying a Glock in a box, among people who, I knew well, could be armed, card-carrying members of the Heritage Not Hate clique. Charles and I encountered a number of white men and women sporting shirts that read PROUD MEMBER OF THE BASKET OF DEPLORABLES and hats saying MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. They puffed their chests like they’d just whipped a bull moose’s ass in a fair fight. What was more startling—the number of Iron Eagle, SS, and swastika trinkets being worn and offered for sale. I couldn’t move when my eyes fell on a full-on Nazi officer’s uniform on display and for sale. That was one thing. It was quite another to see how many white folks were clamoring to look at it up close.

  I wondered, Has this been here all along? Is this the place where folks who hate me, and all other people who don’t look and believe as they do, feel no shame about showing it? I think I knew the answer before I consciously asked myself that question, but it scared the hell out of me all the same. It still does. I dwelled on that moment when, a week later, news surfaced about a flyer being circulated around the University of Oklahoma campus. It was titled “Why White Women Shouldn’t Date Black Men.” It alleged that biracial children “probably won’t be smart,” black men “are much more likely to have STDs,” and dating a black man “starts with rape and gets much worse.”

  I wondered how many of the thousands of people who visited Wanenmacher’s that weekend believed those hateful things? How many of them might’ve tried to do harm to me or Lizzie, had they known we were engaged? This is terror.

  Nearly all the people at the show seemed to be swapping, haggling, and hustling—all part and parcel of gun shows. Hell, when I was with Charles at another gun show, he saw a pink .22 rifle, the kind you might give to a Harley Quinn wannabe, and bought it because he just thought it was cute. He figured he might make it his truck rifle, the kind you keep on the gun rack in the back, just in case a doe crosses your path or you spot a coyote in the pasture. As Charles sauntered through the show, he had to fend off people asking You selling? How much? They just assumed he was selling because he was carrying the gun around with him. The scene reminded me of Jake and Elwood Blues, sitting in a posh restaurant and accosting a family at the table behind them: “Your women! I want to buy your women! The little girl, your daughters! Sell them to me! Sell me your children!”

  At Wanenmacher’s, I was both amused and horrified to see two old white men in a thoroughfare, gesticulating and arguing over an impromptu sell that seemed to be going awry.

  “Why’re you trying to Jew me down?”

  “Why don’t you just pay my asking price?”

  “You’re trying to give me a Mexican’s price.”

  Every gun show enables haggling and hustling. You’ll see folks with signs mounted on backpacks, strollers, oxygen tanks, and even the shirts on their backs, advertising a gun for whatever the asking price is. In this instance, the haggling apparently created a safe space for yet another sport: throwing around racial slurs.

  At the Wanenmacher’s gun show, folks ogled shotguns and rifles owned by dead presidents and generals. They haggled over the worth of various antique guns that no longer fired but held some value for someone who thought they were worth thousands. They bought their wives and girlfriends concealed-carry purses while purchasing for themselves calendars featuring half-naked (white) women holding exotic guns and one more banana clip for the assault rifle at home, because, well, you never know.

  I began picking up gun magazines, to bring myself up to speed on gun culture, but mostly for the pictures: Guns & Ammo, Concealed Carry Handguns, RECOIL, Gun Fighter, and Black Guns. Was that Black Guns as opposed to White Guns? Rainbow Guns? Polka Dot Guns? On the cover it featured a tattooed white woman holding an EraThr3 Anorexia Rifle with Leupold LCD viewfinder. In the end I couldn’t make it through a single article that day—gun-magazine prose read like an echo chamber. Readers didn’t have to worry about reading anything “politically correct,” and gun manufacturers didn’t have to think for a minute that product placement wasn’t the whole point.

  We left the gun show and got back into Charles’s truck. In the passenger’s side, I sat with the Glock, still in its box, laid in my lap.

  “Would you teach me how to shoot this thing?”

  This was the next step. I was ready to become a responsible, licensed gun owner. I needed to know what it meant to have a gun in my house and to have the audacity to carry it in public.

  “Yeah,” Charles answered, with a jovial tone. “Sure. Teach you how next week.”

  THE DAY I got back home with my new gun, still in its box, I set it on my bed and looked at it for some time. I hadn’t o
pened it at the gun show. I knew the gun inside the box had never been fired, and I knew it was mine. I didn’t feel proud. What I felt was something more like fear. Like the fear I was taught to have for the God of the Old Testament, the being who was so merciful, He drowned the planet, cast out a favorite son, and told a father to murder his son to prove his love. Fear, the way I was taught to feel it as a black man trying to earn an education, navigate among the police, stay out of jail, and stay alive. I knew that the first time I lost respect for that pistol no larger than my fist, it could kill me—or get me killed.

  I opened the box and picked up the Glock. I was amazed at how intuitive it was: the process of removing the empty magazine, putting it back, and racking the slide.

  Was it really that easy?

  A person with a gun tends to feel a lot like Superman with x-ray vision, laser sight, and Hulk-smash strength. Which is why telling that person not to use those super powers will generally result in the person looking at you like you’re the lunatic.

  I pointed the gun at the blank white bedroom wall in my second-story apartment and squeezed, feeling the hard click of the trigger, the soft tap of the hammer in an empty chamber. I put the gun back in its case, knowing that next week, the chamber would no longer be empty, and that this bit of polymer, plastic, and metal would no longer be an expensive paperweight, but a weapon so lethal, I wish we could un-invent it.

  5

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  Grandmomme

  AS I PREPARED for my odyssey into white gun culture, I knew that my having a gun would provoke white people’s fear. I had already seen the look on Charles’s face and those of some of Lizzie’s friends when she introduced me as the man she was dating: one-half bemusement, one-half How did this happen?

  I resented that look, and I resented that fear, and I knew they would only get worse once I had a gun. In this country, more than thirty Americans are murdered with guns every day. Fifteen of them are black. Black boys are ten times more likely than white boys to be thought of as older, and guilty; therefore they are more likely to be victims of police violence. Racial bias research shows that people believe “black men are more capable of causing harm in a hypothetical altercation and, troublingly, that police would be more justified in using force to subdue them, even if the men were unarmed.” For a black man in possession of a gun, this data might raise some worries about white folks’ misplaced fear. It gets even more problematic for a black man in the South.

  A Tuskegee University study put a number on how many black folks have been hanged or burned for sins real and imagined without due process and without trial. In 1892 alone, 161 blacks were lynched. Between the years of 1890 and 1965, years when the dastardly Jim Crow laws were on the books in the South, 2,911 blacks were lynched in this country. That means an average of 39 blacks were lynched each year, every year, for seventy-five years. Now couple those soul-crushing stats with these. In 2011, the year Charles bought me my gun, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 460 people who had died by “legal intervention” involving the discharge of a firearm. That likely underreports the actual incidents. But we do know that black people were, between 1968 and 2011, from two to eight times more likely than whites to die at the hands of law officers. Which means that the number of police shootings of blacks in that year—and certainly today—is nearly equal to the average number of black people who were lynched in this country at the height of “separate but (un)equal.”

  The pure malice and hatred behind the Jim Crow–era lynchings compelled the black journalist Ida B. Wells to write a pamphlet in 1892 called “Southern Horrors.” She chronicled many contemporary atrocities against blacks, and her report led her to a clear conclusion regarding black people and firearms: “The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well,” Wells wrote, “is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows, he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.”

  Into the twentieth century, white southerners continued to go to great lengths to prevent blacks from legally carrying firearms. Local ordinances and state laws gave local officials power to decide who had sufficient reason to carry one. In fact, amid the renewed racial tensions following World War II, Martin Luther King Jr., the same man who led the pacifist contingent of the civil rights movement, was denied a concealed-carry permit even after his house was bombed in 1956.

  King was noted for his nonviolent—and ultimately winning—approach to civil rights reform. Nonetheless, a small militia devoted to the cause protected his house. King’s friend and adviser Rev. Glenn Smiley called King’s residence “an arsenal.” But it was the likes of Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party that pushed the Second Amendment rights of blacks to the forefront of conversations about civil rights.

  When the Oakland police stopped the Black Panthers’ Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and others in February 1967, a cop asked about the handguns and rifles in their possession.

  “I don’t have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address,” Newton said.

  “Who in the hell do you think you are?” one officer asked.

  “Who in the hell do you think you are?” Newton stepped out of the vehicle, still holding his rifle.

  “What are you going to do with that gun?” a cop asked.

  “What are you going to do with your gun?” Newton replied.

  A crowd surrounded them by now. Police tried to shoo the bystanders away. Newton insisted that California law allowed citizens to observe an arrest, so long as they did not interfere with it. He was yelling now. “If you try to shoot at me or if you try to take this gun,” Newton said, “I’m going to shoot back at you, swine!”

  Espoused by the Black Panthers and the NRA alike, the Second Amendment, as it is written, guarantees the right of every American to keep a gun in the home and on his or her person in public. The Panthers pushed this idea further, taking the view that the Second Amendment afforded them the right to take up arms against a fascist government. For the Panthers, racist police officers acted as an extension of a fascist government.

  Six months after the incident with the Oakland police, there were thirty Panthers, four of them women. Each had a firearm of some kind—a .357 Magnum, a 12-gauge shotgun, or a .45-caliber pistol. Two years after the assassination of Malcolm X, the man who’d posed for an Ebony magazine cover in a black suit and tie as he held an M1 carbine, the Panthers famously took to the steps of the California legislature, on May 2, 1967. They were protesting the Mulford Act of 1967, which repealed a law allowing open carry in the state of California. Bobby Seale read this statement:

  The American people in general and the black people in particular must take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless. Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people. The time has come for the black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.

  This group of Black Panthers scared the 1960s version of the NRA so much, the organization voiced support for the Gun Control Act of 1968. Commenting in the NRA’s in-house magazine, American Rifleman, the group’s executive vice president, Franklin Orth, went out of his way to condemn mail-order sales of guns
. After all, Lee Harvey Oswald had killed President John F. Kennedy with a gun he’d ordered through the US mail. “We do not think that any sane American,” Orth said, “who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”

  Now, we know the reasoning behind the law was not gun control, but rather black gun control. As the historian David Babat writes, “The supposed aim of this bill was a reduction in crime, but an underlying motive was to keep black militant groups from arming themselves with readily available and inexpensive weapons.” And we now know that the NRA’s support of the Gun Control Act in fact led to a white gun-buying bonanza. My grandmomme, Peggy Jean Connor, had deep experience in how a black person’s gain in personal dignity and freedom was received by white people. They invariably viewed it as incitement.

  THE PEGGY JEAN Connor I knew while growing up sat through uncountable living-room screenings of Forrest Gump. When the VHS tape committed technological seppuku rather than suffer abuse from me and my little sister, Denise, any longer, Grandmomme consoled us while we cried (she probably inwardly rejoiced). She lived in her own home close to her daughter, my mother, and took Denise and me on errands all over Hattiesburg. We were delightfully known as “Jean’s grandbabies” then, as we are now. At the end of each errand-running session, she rewarded us with a treat of some sort—a toy we quickly lost interest in or a trip to the Hattiesburg Zoo. Grandmomme took me to and from baseball practice when both of my parents were at work; looked on as I learned karate with a ferocity I later learned was genetic; kept the playbills from the plays she watched me perform in; bought me a new suit for Easter every year until I was fifteen; spent way too much on my roller skates; paid for my ear piercings; never called me fat as a child, but rather “husky”; bought me all the books I showed even a casual interest in; took me to church on most Wednesdays and Sundays at Zion Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church; and refused to let me believe I was anything other than exactly the grandson she’d always wanted.