Let It Bang Page 6
I continued to follow along. I removed the spring and then the barrel from the slide. I learned that this was as far as I would ever need to go: just four parts—the magazine, the slide, the spring, and the barrel—need to be removed from a Glock to begin cleaning it. This, I later learned, is called a field strip. It’s so easily done that, once you get the hang of it, it becomes a sort of parlor trick. I eventually found another video of a man field-stripping his Glock .380 in nine seconds. Now I watched as hickok45 sprayed lubricant inside and outside his gun barrel. Then I listened to him talk about how picking a lubricant was a lot like picking motor oil: everybody has a favorite.
While hickok45 let the lubricant soak, he picked up a toothbrush and began to lightly brush it across the top of the receiver, the body of the pistol leading toward the pistol grip. He was adamant about keeping oil or lubricant off the brush and the receiver itself. “I keep it far away from that.” I used the toothbrush-like brush that came with my kit and flicked it across my Glock, which hadn’t been fired twenty times yet, while hickok45 talked about getting the corrosion off the receiver. I learned that corrosion and bits of lead, copper, or carbon can damage a gun—they can make it jam or render it inoperable. I watched him dip a Q-tip, something I did not have on hand, into a small cap of alcohol and lightly dab it into the crevices of the receiver that a toothbrush couldn’t reach—not unlike flossing your teeth.
When he was done with that, he picked up the slide and ran his toothbrush up and down its inside. I followed along, running my toothbrush up and down my slide, picking up only the lightest buildup of brown tarnish. Hickok45 repeated his use of the Q-tip inside the slide. Then he ran the toothbrush over the spring before moving back to the barrel.
This is when he reached for what is called his cleaning rod and a small piece of cloth. I had both in my cleaning kit. Following hickok45, I fixed the cloth to my cleaning rod and shoved it straight down the barrel, in the same direction that a bullet would fire. I pulled it out and ran it through three more times, with three more cloth patches. Hickok45 touched a tiny amount on the rails of the receiver, and on the tip of the slide, and then reassembled his Glock.
In fewer than fifteen minutes, he’d shown me the routine. It was so simple, I performed the task four more times—from disassembly to cleaning to reassembly—before I thought I might know just enough to be dangerous. Then I made a point of cleaning the gun three times a day for the next week, so it became a comfortable habit. A week before I’d first cleaned my gun, I was so afraid of it, all I could do was stare at it. Now it didn’t seem like the kind of lethal device that might leap from its box to dig straight into my jugular. It was more like a tool, and I was just beginning to learn to care for it. A tool I could even imagine starting to master.
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Waldo
IN OKLAHOMA, YOU must earn a handgun license to conceal-carry or openly carry your firearm. If I can see your gun on your person in the street and you have a license, you are operating within the law in Oklahoma. The same is true if your gun is concealed. However, you do not need a license of any kind to openly carry a firearm on your property.
The number of gun owners with a concealed-carry license has nearly tripled nationwide, from 4.6 million licenses in 2007, the year before Barack Obama was elected president, to 12.9 million in 2015. That’s an increase of a million new concealed-carry licenses a year. In 2014 alone, 1.7 million Americans received concealed-carry licenses. My own state, Oklahoma, counts 217,724 permits as of March 2015. Overall, 5.2 percent of the US population is licensed to carry a concealed firearm, with five states counting at least 10 percent of their respective populations as concealed-carry gun owners.
Since Oklahoma performs a background check on anyone who applies for a handgun license, charges money for processing the background check, and makes you reapply every ten years (at a maximum), you’ve got to really want to be right with the law to apply. I don’t like the idea of explaining how the law works to a police officer who might stop me. I’d rather have my handgun license on me, and show it right there. I’m a black man. I don’t leave the house without my walking papers.
So I took the eight-hour course, with a guy I privately dubbed Waldo, or Self-Reliant Man, since he seemed like the kind of guy who had read Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” enough to quote it. I passed my written exam. The Cleveland County Sheriff’s Department fingerprinted me. I sent my paperwork to the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation, and it sent me back an I.D. With that bit of plastic, I could inform anybody who needed to know that I was legally licensed to carry a loaded concealed firearm everywhere that device for ending life was permitted. But I wasn’t ready to exercise that right because, frankly, I still couldn’t hit a bull’s-eye at ten yards. To learn more about this skill, I again consulted YouTube.
I watched videos about things like sight alignment, sight picture, pumpkins on posts, and aligning the three rectangular men. I watched videos about proper stance, breathing techniques, and the best way to grip a gun. I watched videos about letting the bang of the gun surprise you and how important it is to think about squeezing rather than pulling a trigger; how a squeeze is more akin to a pleasant hug and a pull more of a yank. I watched videos about ammunition, learning how the weight of a full or half-full magazine can balance or imbalance a weapon. I learned how to figure out which of my eyes was the dominant one and the importance of creating an isosceles triangle with my arms with each shot. I read and read again The Gun Digest’s Book of the Glock to try to internalize the workings of my pocket Glock 26.
I started traveling twice a week to the indoor pistol range in my town, Norman, Oklahoma, where I’d taken my concealed-carry course. I’d take my unloaded pistol from beneath my bed, still in its case, a box of Winchester nine-millimeter ammunition I kept in a locked box in the closet, and store both items beneath the driver’s seat of my truck. I walked into the building, which was a long rectangle, with a small foyer and a meeting room adjacent to the range itself. In the foyer, I paid the ten-dollar range fee and bought a target for a dollar. I opened a door to my left, stepped onto the range, and procured a stall. I unloaded the pistol box, ammunition box, and earmuffs that I always left in the truck, and went about the business of loading and firing.
But after two solid months of nearly no progress, I became frustrated. I was enduring the occasional quizzical look and snide comment from other patrons too. The ones that stuck bit through to the marrow of who I am. Ain’t you supposed to be shooting a basketball? and Hold it sideways, it’s more your people’s style were two of the less clever barbs along those lines. But the one that pissed me off most was more direct.
“You any good with that pistol?”
This came from an elderly white man passing by my stall. He hadn’t seen me shoot. He was hanging on to what little hair remained around his ears and wore a work shirt, blue jeans, and beat-to-shit black orthopedic shoes. He carried a bag the size of a small backpack over his shoulder. It looked just big enough to hold something small enough to kill a room full of people in mere seconds.
Searching his face, I found that he was sincere, so I answered his question.
“Not really, no.”
I tried to smile about it, to smile through it, as he walked down the corridor to an open shooting bay. Still in stride, he called back over his shoulder.
“Well, keep at it. You can’t get any worse.”
I knew he meant encouragement, but I felt angry that I’d become someone to fucking console at the gun range. I couldn’t have that. I needed to become so diabolically methodical about what I was doing, so fiercely fantastic, that I could inspire in others the f
ear that they inspired in me, simply by murdering paper targets. I learned several things about myself that day. I wasn’t nearly as scared of being a victim of gun violence as I was of this utterly visceral need to radiate machismo. I learned—machismo aside—that I needed to keep digging. I needed to find better and more purposeful ways of shooting, rather than shooting for shooting’s sake.
I needed a teacher.
Someone who was willing to suffer me enough to teach me what I needed to know about marksmanship, defensive shooting, and gun safety. Because my life is a romping Greek tragicomedy, I had no choice but to chortle ruefully when I learned that the best person in the Cleveland County area to teach me what I needed to know was the guy I had privately dubbed Waldo, who’d taught my concealed-carry course. I dreaded asking him for help.
At the counter at the range, I asked if Waldo was available. The fella behind the counter smirked and called out over his shoulder.
“Guy out here wants a private.”
Waldo emerged from an office door behind the counter and looked me up and down. “When do you want to start?”
I couldn’t help smiling. We set a date and time—Monday the following week. Thus began my formal education on skillful use of the thing that could have put an end to Medusa, Cerberus, and Typhon and still have two in the magazine for Charybdis and Scylla—each.
WHEN WALDO MET me in the lobby of the range, he snatched a paper target and then escorted me out to the range proper while asking me about my history of shooting. I explained that I’d been coming to the range pretty steadily but had had no formal training. He asked whether any living, breathing person not on the Internet had given me any instruction whatsoever. I told him that the extent of my education outside YouTube had come from a father-in-law whose most direct verbal instruction had been Don’t hold it like this. Waldo nodded. I felt he understood where I was coming from. He hung the paper target on a pulley rope and then he set about looking my gun over.
I saw how careful and pensive he was as he looked inside the empty magazine well of the gun and then slid the slide back three times before locking it in place and peering down the slide as if searching for an answer to a question that had plagued him for weeks. Satisfied, he put the gun back in the case and inspected the magazine I’d loaded with five rounds. Then, one by one, he took the rounds out and put them beside the gun in the case. Next he was on to the ammunition I’d brought. He glanced at the box, reading it, and then pulled out a round and gave it to me.
“Let me see you load it.”
I took it from him, knowing I was probably going to embarrass myself. I managed to get the single bullet into the magazine without much incident. He paused and nodded.
“OK, I can see why you have a problem loading.”
He’d seen me load only one round, and I hadn’t told him a single thing about how I was having the toughest time forcing bullets into a magazine less than half the size of a full-size Glock’s. Though I’d tried to remember how I’d seen Charles do it and had watched hours of right-wing white guys on YouTube who could just punch the little jacketed bastards in there, I still had trouble.
“Your fingers are strong enough,” he said. “You’re just not using your whole thumb.”
Waldo showed me how to properly position my fingers to gain a greater grip on the slippery metal bullet and place it in the magazine in such a manner that it couldn’t first slip away. I followed suit and was astounded at how much easier it was to put the bullet in the magazine. In only a couple of minutes, I’d filled a gun’s magazine for the first time in my life. In that same lesson, Waldo showed me how to set my feet so that I was never off balance when the gun fired. He demonstrated not only how to align my sights properly but how to correct misalignments. He’d diagnose why I’d missed where I’d expected to hit. He taught me how to use the pad, the pinch portion, of my index finger to squeeze the trigger. He showed me how to inhale and exhale with the trigger squeeze.
In that first lesson, I didn’t shoot a target that was more than three yards away. Waldo placed an emphasis on working through the fundamentals rather than striking the X in the middle of the target every time. I never shot more than three rounds without taking a rest. I learned I was making myself tired by shooting several rounds in one session, and as a result, I got lazy about form. Resting just five minutes allowed my body and mind to recover from the intense focus and strain I put on it with each squeeze of the trigger.
Before the lesson was over, Waldo picked a brass casing off the floor and had me pack up and follow him into an empty room. Once there, he sent me home with a drill I’ve come to believe has done the most to make me a marksman. It had to do with trigger control and focus. Waldo had me step behind him as he, once again, checked my empty gun. He reset the action and then pointed the gun straight out in front of him, with his right hand, at a blank white wall. With his left hand, he balanced the brass casing on top of the front sight, so that it stood atop the end of the barrel of the gun. This itself is a feat. But then he methodically squeezed the trigger. When I heard the hammer strike the gun, the brass casing still hadn’t moved.
The point of the exercise is to maintain an easy but sustained trigger pull without jerking the weapon. To remain steady, calm, and aligned, so that the firing of the gun comes as a surprise. Most new shooters have a problem with anticipating the recoil of their handgun, even when trying their damnedest not to do exactly that. When Waldo had me perform the drill—mounting the brass for me after I couldn’t do it myself, in my first four tries—the brass fell off as I pulled the trigger, as if a stiff breeze had knocked it over. This was also a lesson in being a craftsperson who doesn’t blame the tools.
“When you can do that several times without the brass coming off,” Waldo said, “you’re a shooter.”
So this became part of my routine, part of my new obsession. I spent fifteen minutes twice a day for two weeks just trying to mount the brass on the narrow front sight before I could do it without incident. And I spent a full month watching the brass fall off as soon as I felt the pressure release the firing pin in my Glock. Eventually, I could with some regularity pull the trigger without upsetting the brass, but not enough to do it more than twice in a row. Still, the better I got with that drill, the better I got at killing paper targets. I could see my groupings getting smaller. I learned how to focus the sight on the front barrel before slightly blurring the sights on the rear of the barrel to get a true and accurate picture of where I was aiming.
I could see my mistakes as soon as I made them, and I could correct them. I was beginning to feel in control of this firearm. I was beginning to believe it was an extension of not just my arm, but my will.
I learned the difference between marksmanship, which has everything to do with focus, precision, and consistency, and defensive shooting, which is purely about primed responses to the danger at hand. I did not just want to be a good marksman. I wanted the knowledge of self-defense so many other Americans claim they want, claim as the reason for walking around with a gun. They know how to use one, or so they would have the rest of us believe. I wanted to know what they know or, at least, think they know. In a self-defense situation, I learned, I was not going to have time to draw, align my front and rear sights, control my breathing, and then fire when ready. Many confrontations take place with only an arm’s length between attacker and victim. With just a moment to act, I’d already have to know how to draw from a concealed-carry holster, sight down the barrel, and rapidly pull, rather than squeeze, the trigger, aiming at my attacker with the goal of leaving the fight alive. Making an effort to kill was not as important as getting to safety and protecting any loved ones present.
The better a marksman I became, and the faster at drawing from the holster, the more I came to believe that too much could go wrong in such a situation. What would happen if I didn’t get my shot off first? Or if my attacker stopped my hand as I made a move toward the gun at the front of my pants by raising my shirt with my
left hand? What if the gun was knocked from my hand or ended up in the hands of my attacker? Worst, what if I killed that person? I couldn’t believe killing another person under any circumstances could be a small thing. I don’t know that I could bring myself to do that—no matter the danger.
The defensive-shooting part of my education was the most difficult and, ultimately, the most instructive. I learned what it takes to be prepared to take a life in self-defense, and that I wanted no part of it. I was my Grandmomme’s grandson.
8
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White NRA
THE NATIONAL RIFLE Association’s NRA Family website has published an article about Davy Crockett. In it, we learn what a crack shot Crockett was, using a rifle he nicknamed Old Betsy. He was so good that when, as an unknown from back east, he hit the center of the bull’s-eye from one hundred yards at a shooting contest in Little Rock, Arkansas, folks called it a chance shot. There was no way the boy from back east could be that good from that distance.
But this was Davy Fuckin’ Crockett, soon to be known as King of the Wild Frontier and shit. He took offense. So he shot again. This time, though, no hole could be seen in that target. Folks in attendance clearly thought the man’s true skill could be called having none at all. He’d simply been lucky the first time. But Crockett walked up to the target and searched it with his finger, whereupon he found what he was looking for. Satisfied, he turned toward the dubious crowd. “Tell you what. If you don’t find two bullets, you can use me as the target the next round.”