|
"Get the News to Protect Your Freedom" |
. Providing News, Commentary And Events That Affect Constitutional Rights Since 1997. |
Life in Los Angeles
(Original Web Source Unknown)
Editor's Note: This article originally was published in Esquire magazine
in September 1981, filled, "Letter from an Angry Reader." It was written
by Chip Elliott in response to a column by Adam Smith in the April 1981
Esquire issue, which denounced handgun ownership. The article was also
quoted by President Ronald Reagan when he addressed a national
convention of law-enforcement officers. Because this article is an
outstanding discussion of the importance of owning handguns, OUTDOOR
LIFE Editors felt the piece should have a much wider distribution, and
thus we are proud to reprint it here.
Dear Sir:
In regard to Adam Smith's April column, "Fifty Million Handguns": Come
off it. Smith laments the fact that large numbers of people are prepared
to defend themselves with handguns. He can't really accept the fact that
we are living in a world where personal self-defense is a necessity.
Didn't he read the article in the February Esquire called "Shooting to
Kill"' about middle-class citizens who are determined to shoot to defend
their lives? Did he or you think that was a joke? That it was made up?
I went from being- where both of you seem to be at this point to
carrying a 9 mm. Smith & Wesson automatic in 10 weeks. My wife is a
psychiatrist. Very attractive, very easy to intimidate, very abstracted,
a likely target for muggers both outside, because she's lost in her
thoughts, and at home, because punks think doctors keep drugs in their
houses (they don't). She has a gun too, a .38, and she knows how to use
it. We are not hillbillies: we are people who went to Radcliffe and
Stanford, respectively. Appalling, huh? It used to appall us too, until
we were forced to realize that our lives, both as a married couple with
a deep commitment and as individuals doing important and meaningful
work, were worth protecting. In the spring of 1976 we were living in the
San Francisco Bay area. My wife was doing her psychiatric residency. I
had just walked out on the advertising business and was working on a
novel. That spring, Peter Brook directed a play called "The Ik," a
hair-raising piece created by the troupe of the International Center for
Theater Research from Colin Turnbull's anthropological study called 'The
Mountain People." Sponsored by the French government, Brook and his gang
made a six-week American tour and played Berkeley.
The play cast in theatrical bronze the lives of a tribe of hunters in
Uganda who had been displaced from their centuries-old hunting grounds
by the creation of a national park and a game reserve. What followed was
an utter disintegration of their social structure, and it turned every
Ik-including members of the same family-into mortal enemies seeking,
each alone, food.
The play's premise is that what we call human values are actually
luxuries-qualities that only emerge and exist under the best and calmest
of conditions. It was a spooky production and great theater, but I did
not see how it could possibly relate to America in the late '70s. Two
years later we moved to Los Angeles. We did not move to the glamorous,
movie-struck Los Angeles of The Ginger Man, and the Beverly Hills
Hotel---though I would be lying if I said the thought had never crossed
our minds. We moved to the Los Angeles of the Nuart theater, the Fox
Venice, the Jung Institute, a city with the sense of being in another
country with American hamburger overtones. And, of course, the sea. Not
the beach, the sea.
Our friends Boris and Ute--a Yugoslav sculptor and a German painter-had
just bought a house in Venice, and we quickly rented a house nearby on
Electric Avenue. Electric Avenue yet! Whooee! It was dirty pink with a
gray-green roof, and its outstanding feature was an 8 x 30 glassed-in
porch. A grown man in good condition could have torn this house down
with his hands, but I loved it because it swayed when you walked through
it. It was like being on a weather-beaten but seaworthy closed-cabin
schooner.
Venice at that time seemed like Sleeping Beauty after a century of
trance: musty, dusty, and long stagnant, but with the promise of
awakening magic. On that porch I intended to write a new "Three-penny
Opera," to invent at least two or three new Sally Bowleses. I would
knock the world on its ear.
More friends quickly turned up: Rene and Renata. European graphic
wizards; Carolyn and Chris, a mime and an actor who wanted to get away
from off-Broadway and into movies and television; a middle-aged
Australian writer and adventurer and his half-Irish/half-Mexican wife
with her wall-to wall cheekbones and her head full of D. H. Lawrence and
Denise Levertov and many others.
My beloved French Lop rabbit, Nicole had a yard to romp in. We quickly
discovered a sensational wine from a local vineyard, a county-fair
prizewinner that sold for $3.38 a gallon at the local Safeway. Our days
quickly became ordered: group breakfasts, work all day, talk all
evening, lights out 10 p.m. My wife took a job as staff psychiatrist for
a county mental-health clinic in downtown Los Angeles. We settled in in
a hurry. There was no time to lose. We were going to re-create the world
not of the '60s but of F. Scott Fitzgerald's friends Gerald and Sara
Murphy in the years 1922 and 1923. We would throw a two-year-long
working party.
But it quickly became apparent that all was not as it seemed in Venice.
For starters, we had moved to the intersection of turfs of two rival
Mexican gangs. We got along with them. When they shot at each other as
they did less than a week after we had moved in--they shouted to us in
Spanish to get out of the way. We did.
There were other clues. Walking, I would occasionally see brown spots on
the sidewalk that, from my experience as a police reporter, I could
recognize as bloodstains. I would notice this the way you might notice
a
scruff of feathers where something has gotten a small bird: a tiny
memorial to violence One morning, as I was sitting on the wobbly
glassed-in porch, I watched a gang of black teenagers pour gasoline all
over a parked car and set it on fire. This was at 10o'clock in the
morning. Broad daylight. A few days later I heard of a robbery two
blocks from where we lived: A woman came to the door of a house and
asked to use the telephone, said it was an emergency. When the man
opened the door, her hench-men came in right behind her. The three of
them stabbed the man to death and left his wife barely alive. In the
next block a woman was raped twice after her nose and jaw were broken.
Just to be on the safe side, after a kitchen-table powwow, we went to a
gun shop on Pico Boulevard one Saturday morning and bought a .38
snub-nosed revolver. After all, this was Los Angeles, land of Joe
Friday. Strange things happened here. Sharon Tate had once had a very
bad evening here. But a gun! Who had ever owned a gun? I picked the
revolver up after the normal 15-day waiting period and wrote the guy a
check from the Santa Monica Bank. It cost $160. It seemed like a lot for
a silly object. I would rather have bought a painting. We put the
revolver under the comer of our mattress and there it stayed. For 10
days.
One night we went to the Fox Venice to see "Forbidden Planet"-you know,
the movie about monsters from the id. When we returned, the door had
been broken in. The stereo was gone. The television was gone. The
paintings and cameras and typewriters were gone. The dressers had been
ransacked, the bed had been torn up and the revolver taken; the birdcage
had been torn off the wall and the parakeet set free for a while until
the cat got it and ate it, leaving the remains; is on the floor where a
rug had been. All the jewelry was gone, such as it was. Including my
Cartier watch. I had earned that watch, you know? I had saved for it
just as surely as I had saved the money for a house or a car or a couple
of new suits. That ended my romance with Cartier watches. There was an
enormous black market for them in Los Angeles, but I don't want one now.
I wear a Thirties Gruen Curvex now, a sister to the watch Bogart wore in
"Casablanca. " It's worth about the same as a tank watch but very few
people know what it is.
It took the police two hours and forty-five minutes to show up. Our
revolver, which had begun as a museum piece, a curio, as far as we were
concerned, had now entered the underworld. We were unprotected now, and
we felt so. We reported the gun stolen, of course. Serial number and all
that. Big deal. Five months later, it was used in an assault against a
Los Angeles woman. I made up my mind that the way to handle a gun in a
dangerous situation was to never let it out of my sight. Our friends
were robbed, burglarized. Carolyn, of her sewing machine, her
typewriter, her clothes. Another couple, of all their photographic
equipment, used not as a hobby but for their livelihood. Easy-going
Boris bought a 12-gauge riot gun and hid it in the trunk with his 16-mm
movie equipment so no one would steal it. And a huge black shepherd dog
to protect the trunk-. Someone broke in anyway and slit the dog's
throat.
We bought a new revolver, a.38 Special Smith & Wesson and had the hand
grips filed down so my wife could hold it easily. The two weeks while we
waited for the permit to go through were the most terrifying of my life.
It turned out that my wife's work for Los Angeles County was more like
a
Clint Eastwood movie than a medical practice. One of her street patients
quickly fastened on her and began writing her death threats with sexual
overtones. There was no place to put him away because there was no money
for any serious treatment, and there were no available psychiatric beds
in any of the local hospitals. She began carrying the .38 in her
briefcase along with her patient's caseload and progress notes. We
quickly developed a pattern: when she came home at night she would park
her car and blow the horn; I would go outside and escort her into the
house.
It dawned on me for the first time that we might be killed. That it was
possible we would die here.
I bought a second handgun, a 9-mm automatic that would fire as fast as
lightning. I phoned around, discovered where to go to practice with it
and I practiced.
A word about revolvers versus automatics: If you don't know much about
all this. a revolver is better because it is a simple mechanism. You can
see if there are cartridges in it. I also went to the police and got a
carry-permit. A carry permit is not as difficult to obtain as a lot of
people would have you believe. You have to give a good reason for
wanting the permit. You have to not be a felon and not have, for
example. 1,100outstanding parking tickets. If you are a crackpot,
someone will sniff it out and you will not be issued the permit. One
night I was awakened by a noise on the street. I got up, peeped through
the dining room curtains and saw a gang of teenagers taking the fog
lights off my car. I raised the curtains and knocked on the window. The
sight of a 33-year-old naked guy is not going to frighten very many
people anymore, but the sight of a 33-year-old naked guy with an
semi-automatic did the trick. They fled.
Our lives settled down again. We cut a safe into the floor of our dining
room and hid our remaining valuables in it. It was never discovered,
even though they took the Oriental rug that covered it. We went to a
wedding in San Francisco on a Friday night. The week before, I had
prepped the house as you might prepare for medieval warfare: 2x6 boards
bolted into door frames with lag bolts six inches long. That sort of
thing. Anything we had left that was slightly portable, my wife's doctor
bag, pair of binoculars, our passports and checkbooks, I threw into
suitcases, which I put into storage.
When we returned from the wedding, there was no back door, and no
doorframe, only an enormous hole, with smashed edges leading into a set
of empty rooms. We were left with a bed, some pots and pans, and a
bookcase. It was one of our more memorable Thanksgivings. On the 17th of
December in 1978, I saw a woman mugged for her purse. I watched her run
screaming after her assailant until she collapsed, crying in the street.
On the 18th or 19th of December, my wife was at a meeting, everybody
else was doing something, and I walked alone to the Venice Sidewalk Cafi
for some dinner. It occurred to me that is was silly to put on a
shoulder holster just to go out for a beer and a sandwich, but I did it
anyway, although I have never been threatened physically, ever, except
in foreign countries.
Walking home about 6:30 at night, just of the corner of West Washington
Boulevard and Wesminster Avenue, I was confronted by five young,
well-dressed uptown brothers. Black. Okay, lets get that right out
front. They could just as easily have been white. We were directly under
a streetlight and less than 50 feet from an intersection thick with
traffic.
I was not dressed as a high roller. I am not a high roller. I don't look
like a robber baron or a rich dentist. I look like exactly what I am, a
middle aged guy who's seen a little more than he needs to see. I
thought, what are these guys doing? Their leader pulled a kitchen knife
out from his $200 leather jacket. His mistake was that he wasn't close
enough to use it, only to threaten me. He smiled at me and said, " Just
the wallet man. Won't be no trouble."
That was a very long moment for me. I remember it as if it just
happened. I remember thinking that it was one of those moments that are
supposed to be charged with electricity. It wasn't. It was hollow,
silent and chilly. I looked at this guy, and his companions and at his
knife, and I thought: Don't you see how you're misreading me? I am not
a
victim. I used to be a victim, but now I'm not. Can't you see the
difference?
I pulled the automatic, leveled it at them, and said very clearly, "You
must be dreaming."
The guy smiled at me and said "Sheeeit," and his buddies laughed, and he
began to move toward me with the knife.
I thought, this guy is willing to kill me for $35. I aimed the automatic
at the outer edge of his left thigh and shot him. He dropped like a high
jumper hitting the bar and yelled "Damn" three times, the first one from
amazement, I guess, and the second two higher pitched from pain. He
yelled at his buddies " Ain't you gonna do nuthin'?" They did do
nothing. I backed off and I walked away, right across busy West
Washington Boulevard with the gun still in my hand. I remember thinking,
shouldn't I call a doctor? And then I thought, would he have called a
doctor for me? And I kept right on walking.
I am not a macho guy. White water to me is club soda. I haven't been
skiing in 10 years. Anything I order from L.L. Bean ends up on the
dining room table and then in a box in the basement. I am never going to
shoot a zebra and have it made into a rug, okay? I was not coming on
like James Bond, and I was not being territorial or aggressive. I was
simply protecting my right to walk around town with a lousy $35 in my
pocket and not be afraid for my life.
I walked home. I felt terribly strange, but it was a strangeness I could
identify. I realized that what I was doing, in our current state of
affairs, was a cultural procedure no different from going to the grocery
store or getting a haircut or buying a shirt. And that I had balked over
it and felt strange because it was a new procedure, something that I was
doing for the first time-not unlike dealing with one of those 24-hour
banking devices with the code numbers and the buttons-and that if I
wanted to stay alive, it was possible I would have to get used to it.
I am not proud of this. I didn't swallow it easily, either. More than a
year passed before I talked about with anybody, not even my wife. But I
did it. And I could do it again if I had to.
What happened to us of course, is that we got hit in the face with
time's swinging door. The world changed sometime between 1975 and 1980,
and we had a couple of tough years getting from one Pullman car to
another. We were lucky. We lost more than $11,000 of what we owned, but
we weren't killed. We adapted. Now the guns are a normal part of our
lives. We accept them, just as we accept the seven motors of suburbia.
They are a necessary convenience, like the washing machine or
refrigerator or one of those devices that zaps mosquitoes with
electricity.
Sometimes I think, this is a stupid, abhorrent, exasperating situation.
And it is. But we've adapted to other stupid, abhorrent, exasperating
situations: 20 percent interest rates. Iran. And now we've adapted to
this one.
Let me tell you have we've adapted. We dress low-key, we don't flaunt
anything, we keep loaded guns in the house, and we don't keep them
stashed in some drawer where we can't find them if we need them. We keep
them right out in the open, and we always know exactly where they are.
The difference is in that exterior framework of protection and our
attitudes towards it: it is something that was not necessary when we
were younger, and it is something that most of us, Adam Smith included,
still carry on about. We don't even think it's too bad anymore; we're
beyond that. We accept it as a fact of life until our fellow countrymen
get it out of their head that they can do as they please, that there is
no such thing as social responsibility, that they have a right not to
behave. Because the way we see it, if they have the right to mug us, we
have the right to shoot them.
I used to believe that these people had some justifications on their
side. I used to feel that I ought to have some compassion for them, and
I did. I used to believe that a job and some credit would put them on
the right path. It isn't true. I also used to believe that much of the
human wreckage-the millions upon millions of people with emotional
damage could be repaired. That isn't true either. They can't be, for the
most part, because the effort necessary to straighten out a single one
of them is enormous: four or five years perhaps of therapy, in an age
where there is no time for anything but emergency medicine.
Let's face it. Some of these people are poor. Some of them are driven
crazy with desire for stuff they will never be able to afford. But not
all of them are poor, not by a long shot. A lot of them make as much
money, or a great deal more, than you or I do. They do it because it's
easy. They do it becausafford. But not all of them are poor, not by a
long shot.
Let's talk for a moment about John Lennon. Adam Smith brought him up,
I'm particularly interested in this one because John and Yoko had
something very similar to what my wife and I have: two equal people who
happened to be able to witness each other's life to the fullest possible
extent, the grand passion, the real thing. Now it's gone. When all is
said and done, the real tragedy of John Lennon is that he dinosaured
out. He ought to have known better. He stayed in the house for four or
five years, and when he came out again the world had changed. He could
have had a bodyguard, for Christ's sake. He could have lived in the
country. He did not have to stay in New York City and rub people's noses
in it with his $150 million and his blue jeans. The clown who killed him
did it for fame, not money, obviously. But if someone is willing to
stick a knife in me for $35 and not bother to find out what blood type
I
am, you can just imagine what they are willing to do to someone who has
real money.
I think a lot about John Lennon. You know what I think? I think, Jesus
Christ, if it's this bad for my wife and me now, what will it be like if
either of us ever becomes well known?
More to the point, let's talk about Adam Smith's friend Michael
Halberstam, I did not know Halberstam, but I liked his work. He
surprised a burglar in his Washington, DC, home and was shot. Halberstam
figured all of this out in the very last seconds of his life. He didn't
like being killed. He must have thought it was pretty damned unfair. He
was furious. In his last few moments, rushing adrenaline and pouring
blood, he got in his car and ran down his assailant.
You know what? If he had made this discovery even slightly Earlier, long
enough to buy a weapon and wait for the permit to go Through, he would
very likely be alive right now.
Now listen to me a minute. The guns themselves don't cause all this.
What causes it is that people think they can have the American dream by
sticking someone up for it. They think that there ought to be a huge
equal society out there. Equal shares for everybody. Forced equal shares
if necessary.
What is true is that we are entering a time of vast restratification.
The United States is becoming more European , but it is a Europe of a
different century. We are moving toward a culture in which we'll have
cooks, chauffeurs, maids, carpenters, brew masters, vintners,
industrialists, bankers, machinists, hat makers, shopkeepers and kings
and queens of a sort. And, of course, we'll also have highwaymen,
cutthroats, and thieves. Think of it in terms of a vast panorama, a huge
cross section much like the world Balzac, Hugo, and Dumas described.
Think about Dickens. Read Weber's The City. Read Pirenne's The Economic
and Social History of Medieval Europe. None of this is new. What is new
is that we're experiencing it. What was new was the social structure in
America of the past three or four decades, which has collapsed.
To have any kind of culture or civilization in a world like this, it is
going to be necessary to stop talking about things like prisoner's
unions and start talking about the concept of crime and the definition
of the word "criminal."
It would be nice also to talk about police. But if you'll read these
books, you'll find very little mention of police. What you will find are
numerous references to people who wore swords and pistols whenever they
went anywhere.
People now fashionably put down the '70s, but it was a time when many
people reached a level of personal success and satisfaction that may not
be achieved again in our lifetimes. By comparison, we are in the pit,
and I don't mean the floor of the commodities exchange. In many ways the
'70s gave us a glimpse of what life may be like in 125 years. But it's
like the Dark Ages now. Each time there is a major- change, it is
necessary, to gain a clear understanding of what the changes are, what
skills still hold, which ones need to be discarded, which new ones need
to be developed. Now, about those 50 million handguns: taking them away
will not automatically give us a society like England's or Holland's. We
are just not like that. It would be nice if we were. That's why
Americans run away to Europe. What might help is a good set of disc
brakes on people's behavior here. But anything that might put such
desperately needed stops on people's personal "freedoms" is perceived
out there in the streets as a violation of civil liberties, of
constitutional rights. That is, it is a "right" to mug, rape,
burglarize, murder, and commit arson for the insurance money. So there
you are: a nation of pirates.
I would like to see impossibly tight gun registration laws, but I
secretly scoff. Anyone who's honest can get through any registration
process we can come up with. Anyone who's not honest won't bother. The
way guns get into the criminal underworld is that they are stolen. That
makes registration a useless exercise.
As for the manufacture of all those devices and all those bullets,
during World War 2 the United States became "the great arsenal of
democracy. " It is a damned good thing for the English that we were,
too, or they would be holding Oktoberfests right now.
Do you really think the rest of the world sees us as insane because we
bear arms? Try going to one of the South American countries. Try going
into a country in which only the government has weapons. Try watching
armed soldiers carrying their semiautomatic carbines around the airport
gates and the customs offices, while the people have none. You want the
wealth redistributed? Try it under those circumstances.
Don't talk to me about the saintly Japanese either. Everyone says they
have a very low crime rate. No one really knows. It could be because
they are very big on making each person responsible for himself and also
to his fellow countrymen: a sort of "One for all, all for one" attitude.
They are sublimated like mad and they are rich because of it. It looks
good on the surface, but just below that surface is a caldron, and if
you look close you can see it. They have a history of barbarism that
goes back for centuries and that we could never hope to match.
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the first thing I thought of was,
now I'll never get to go there. Try putting yourself in Afghan shoes: no
matter what you think, from your current vantage point, with a cellar
full of good vintage wines and a wall full of Wittgenstein, if you lived
there and the Soviets came trucking in with tanks and occupational
forces, I am willing to bet you would hock your house, your automobile,
your Baume & Mercier watch, or your ass on the street for a good gun
and
the bullets to put in it.
So much for international relations; on the home front, suffice it to
say that as long as we live in a society in which a large constituency
thinks it can do whatever it damn pleases--no sense of morality asked
for or required--then those of us who have the middle-class work ethic,
those of us who believe the Freudian epithets of work and love, will be
seen as potential victims by the flocks of hustlers and lurkers who are
out there. It is sometimes tough to get a job. It is also, right now,
easier to rob people than it is to work for money. It's easier because
it can be gotten away with. These people believe no one will stop them.
They're right. No one will. Not the police. Not the courts. Not the
penal system. No one but the growing number of us who have decided we
will not be victimized again. Ever.
We moved from Venice in 1979. Our old friends blew away to various other
places. Their dreams, like ours blew away too. We moved to a condominium
in Culver City. Very uptown. Top floor. Surrounded by Russian olive
trees and flaming bougainvillea. Three swimming pools. Jacuzzis at every
turn, an underground parking lot and tennis court. We didn't have
anything to put in our place, but still it was pretty.
People were robbed in the parking lot. People were mugged on the tennis
court. There was a rape nearby and then another. My wife began carrying
her. 38 again when she walked from our place to the car. We were
burglarized again. We didn't even call the police,
One night we went to West Hollywood to see the movie "Watership Down".
We sat through it twice and couldn't understand why neither of us could
stop crying. Sometime after that, we packed up, a simple matter, believe
me, and drove East. We parked my rabbit, Nicole, who had survived Venice
by digging a bole and hiding in it, in a picnic basket so we could sneak
her into motels.
While we were looking for a house and staying in a motel, a white
teenage boy and his girlfriend knocked on the door of nearby room and
asked to use the telephone. Inside, they held the couple at gunpoint;
tied them to chairs with wire rope; took their wallets, clothes,
luggage, traveler's checks, and car. We slept peacefully that night. If
they had come to our door: they would have been surprised.
Now we live in a big old house in the Midwest, Big enough for each of us
to have a studio in the house. Huge yard, ravine and so on. The
neighbors are friendly. A lot more friendly than we are, because we have
memories we're trying to forget. It's not completely safe here, but it
is a notch or so better than other places we've lived. We keep the guns,
loaded, in the house, but we don't have to carry permits anymore and we
don't carry them around as though it were 1880 . . . or 1980.
I've stopped going to target ranges to practice. But I still keep my
hand in. as they say. Because every time we leave this sublime
neighborhood and enter the world of hotels and airports, we enter into
a
world of imminent danger--an area where the law is no recourse. So we
remember how to use the guns, and try to forget that we have had to use
them or ever will again.
When President Reagan was shot. I was outside painting a trellis. Some
neighborhood children told me. At first I thought they had seen a
documentary on JFK. It seemed as far away to me as the moon . . . or the
"forbidden planet." But it isn't.
Are human values luxuries? Could be, right now. If so, I lead a pretty
luxurious life. I've paid for it, though. And the price was too damned
high, because those human values used to come free. Part of the American
package. Although sometimes I wonder if something so precious could ever
have been--or be-free. So you can fuss and bitch, Adam Smith, all you
like, and you can rail at the hillbillies in the NRA. But the next time
someone breaks into your house or your apartment, the next time someone
busts the window of your car and rips off your FM radio and your 35
mm-camera, the next time some woman you know gets raped and busted up
and you have to visit her in the hospital and try to cheer her up, the
next time you are totally freaked out after coming up against a gang
halfway between the restaurant and the car, sit yourself down and do
'some serious considering about who has the right to do what to whom.
Often this stuff has to touch people personally before they think of
self-protection, and often by then a tragedy of far more epic
proportions than getting knocked off for a Sony stereo receiver has
occurred, I hope that doesn't happen to you. You have a right to carry
on merrily with what you're doing.
Whenever I'm perplexed, upset, need some stillness, you'll find me out
in the yard somewhere, pulling thistles out of my rosebushes, digging in
the dirt. That's where I am today.
Let us know, you guys, when you figure out that sociopaths may be worthy
of your concern but not your life.. The rest of us would like to come
out of hiding.