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be repulsed? Before the instructor let us open our boxes, I expected anything
other than what I felt.
Sitting on a bed of dark-gray foam was the most radiant and powerful-looking thing I’d ever laid eyes on: a finely buffed
stainless-steel hand cannon sparkling under the classroom lights like a deadly jewel. It looked bigger than I remembered,
like it could take down a helicopter with one shot. Before this moment, if I had heard the word gun , my mind would have instantly free-associated a string of other distasteful terms like violence , danger , and stupidity . Now, I could only think of one word: MINE .
Slowly and quietly, I reached down to touch my new gun.
“I repeat! Open the case, but do not touch the firearm!” the instructor shouted into his microphone. My head snapped up. I thought I was busted, but I was apparently
not the only recruit with a hearing problem. The instructor’s words were booming across a roomful of would be assassins.
Sitting next to me, my friend Bill Peters didn’t seem quite as excited about his new gun. Bill had chosen the Glock. In addition
to being appreciably smaller than the Smith & Wesson, the Glock was made out of a dull black alloy called Tenifer, which made
it look like plastic. Bill gazed over at my weapon, then back down at his own. “I should have picked the Smith,” he said with
a sigh.
Bill looked truly unhappy, and I might have tried to talk him out of his buyer’s remorse if I hadn’t been waiting for chances
to kick him when he was down. This was because Bill hadn’t given me a moment’s rest since the semester began. He seemed to
think I was too laid-back to be a cop, and when he found out I’d once lived in California and had voted for Al Gore in 2000,
he vehemently warned me away from the job, claiming that I was a danger to myself and others. I attributed Bill’s needling
friendship style to his being from the Northeast—Long Island in particular, where the wise-guy mentality of the city met the
dumb-guy mentality of the suburbs. Wherever the Bugs Bunny impersonation came from, it was the prevailing disposition of the
NYPD, and it was starting to rub off on me. When I got an opening like this, I couldn’t resist.
“How much ammo does that thing hold?” I asked Bill.
Bill turned to me with narrowed eyes. “Sixteen rounds. Just like yours,” he said cautiously. “Why?”
“Then where does the CO2 cartridge go?” I said with a confused look—as if his weapon was designed for paintball.
For the briefest moment, Bill looked just as confused himself. “What the? Oh, fuck you, you prick.”
I’d never picked up a handgun before in my life, but I scored 94 percent at the target range after one day of practice, ranking
second in my company behind Moran, an army-trained marksman. To my surprise, I found that hitting a large, stationary object
with a semiautomatic weapon wasn’t all that hard. It was like taking a photograph—you just point and shoot. Oddly, though,
even from the cozy seven-yard mark, most of my classmates scattered their fire around the human-shaped silhouettes as if they
were trying to miss. And when we moved back to the twenty-five-yard position, their shots whizzed right over the stanchions,
sending up little puffs of dust as they made impact with the enormous dirt mound behind the target line.
A few days of practice and individual instruction brought nearly everyone up to speed on the mechanics of shooting. We got
all the help we could ask for in this department, but the legality of the instincts we were honing was given short shrift.
From what I could piece together from a number of partial explanations, “Shoot to stop” was the NYPD’s new official mantra
for gunfire situations, replacing the nasty old “Shoot to kill.” This seemed better. Rather than wantonly gunning down everybody
who seemed like he might be a perp, we’d simply stop him. Wait up, sir; I’d like to have
other than what I felt.
Sitting on a bed of dark-gray foam was the most radiant and powerful-looking thing I’d ever laid eyes on: a finely buffed
stainless-steel hand cannon sparkling under the classroom lights like a deadly jewel. It looked bigger than I remembered,
like it could take down a helicopter with one shot. Before this moment, if I had heard the word gun , my mind would have instantly free-associated a string of other distasteful terms like violence , danger , and stupidity . Now, I could only think of one word: MINE .
Slowly and quietly, I reached down to touch my new gun.
“I repeat! Open the case, but do not touch the firearm!” the instructor shouted into his microphone. My head snapped up. I thought I was busted, but I was apparently
not the only recruit with a hearing problem. The instructor’s words were booming across a roomful of would be assassins.
Sitting next to me, my friend Bill Peters didn’t seem quite as excited about his new gun. Bill had chosen the Glock. In addition
to being appreciably smaller than the Smith & Wesson, the Glock was made out of a dull black alloy called Tenifer, which made
it look like plastic. Bill gazed over at my weapon, then back down at his own. “I should have picked the Smith,” he said with
a sigh.
Bill looked truly unhappy, and I might have tried to talk him out of his buyer’s remorse if I hadn’t been waiting for chances
to kick him when he was down. This was because Bill hadn’t given me a moment’s rest since the semester began. He seemed to
think I was too laid-back to be a cop, and when he found out I’d once lived in California and had voted for Al Gore in 2000,
he vehemently warned me away from the job, claiming that I was a danger to myself and others. I attributed Bill’s needling
friendship style to his being from the Northeast—Long Island in particular, where the wise-guy mentality of the city met the
dumb-guy mentality of the suburbs. Wherever the Bugs Bunny impersonation came from, it was the prevailing disposition of the
NYPD, and it was starting to rub off on me. When I got an opening like this, I couldn’t resist.
“How much ammo does that thing hold?” I asked Bill.
Bill turned to me with narrowed eyes. “Sixteen rounds. Just like yours,” he said cautiously. “Why?”
“Then where does the CO2 cartridge go?” I said with a confused look—as if his weapon was designed for paintball.
For the briefest moment, Bill looked just as confused himself. “What the? Oh, fuck you, you prick.”
I’d never picked up a handgun before in my life, but I scored 94 percent at the target range after one day of practice, ranking
second in my company behind Moran, an army-trained marksman. To my surprise, I found that hitting a large, stationary object
with a semiautomatic weapon wasn’t all that hard. It was like taking a photograph—you just point and shoot. Oddly, though,
even from the cozy seven-yard mark, most of my classmates scattered their fire around the human-shaped silhouettes as if they
were trying to miss. And when we moved back to the twenty-five-yard position, their shots whizzed right over the stanchions,
sending up little puffs of dust as they made impact with the enormous dirt mound behind the target line.
A few days of practice and individual instruction brought nearly everyone up to speed on the mechanics of shooting. We got
all the help we could ask for in this department, but the legality of the instincts we were honing was given short shrift.
From what I could piece together from a number of partial explanations, “Shoot to stop” was the NYPD’s new official mantra
for gunfire situations, replacing the nasty old “Shoot to kill.” This seemed better. Rather than wantonly gunning down everybody
who seemed like he might be a perp, we’d simply stop him. Wait up, sir; I’d like to have
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