PREFACE: SHOOTING GUNS IN THE DESERT CAN SURPRISE YOU

“We do not teach people how to shoot; we teach them how to think,” Mike, the second-in-command at one of the nation’s largest firearms training institutes, tells me over an early dinner. We are at a country club twenty miles north of the gun range where I just spent the last two days firing two hundred rounds of ammunition and learning how to safely carry and operate a handgun.

A tall, distinguished-looking man who bears a slight resemblance to former president George H.W. Bush, Mike is wearing a yellow polo shirt, neat, clean khakis, and a belt with a holstered handgun and two full magazines. As we sit in front of a beautiful Rocky Mountain backdrop, the tops of which will be covered with snow in a matter of months, I take a big swig of coffee and search for a tactful way to ask Mike the question that has been swirling around my brain since my first day of training at the firearms institute.

I blurt out, “I still don’t understand why you’re lying to your clients.” A silence falls over our table. As Mike looks away from me, I look directly at him and wait for him to respond.

Forty-eight hours earlier, I had boarded a plane to learn how to shoot a handgun from the best instructors in the business. The opportunity arose through my friend Sam (not his real name), who, in the course of my writing this book, has become my guide to the world of firearm enthusiasts. Sam invited me to travel to the Southwest and experience a two-day elite firearm training course with people he described as the best instructors in the world. “I will take it with you, and then after, you can interview all of the trainers,” he said. “They all hate the NRA.” He had arranged for the range to comp me the two-day course and rental equipment, plus complete access to the other students, instructors, and its leadership team.

Sam, a white, boyish, fast-talking ex-Marine and hardcore gun enthusiast, had passionately pitched the idea to me by phone months earlier: “You’ll love it and really get a taste for what it’s all about, meet some great people, and I’ll do it with you.” Fashioning myself an open-minded and adventurous person, I jumped at the chance. Surround myself with six hundred armed Americans and thousands of rounds of ammunition for two full days of gun shooting in a hot desert? Sign me up. What could go wrong?

So there I am, a city slicker who hasn’t sat behind the wheel of a car in three or four years, driving my fully insured economy rental car literally into a desert at sunrise one Friday morning in October. I’m blasting a local hits station with the windows rolled down, singing at the top of my lungs in an effort to wake myself up enough to handle a handgun. Yes, I’m belting out Sia while doing seventy down a dirt road without another car in sight.

As I get closer, I turn off the radio, make the right turn, and take a deep, deep breath. Ahead of me, I see a line of cars about thirty deep and a large sign displaying the logo of the institute. Next to it is a larger placard:

WARNING

UNSAFE TO ENTER WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION

LIVE-FIRE TRAINING AREA

RISK OF SEVERE BODILY INJURY OR DEATH

I have arrived!

Before I know it, I’m on a five-hundred-acre compound in the middle of the mountains. I drive up to the parking lot, suddenly overcome by the vastness of this place, and pull into a spot.

Sam meets me and tells me that more than six hundred people will be taking twenty different classes at the institute that day, most of which involve handguns and rifles. After lunch, classes on automatic machine guns will be available.

My eyes grow wide at the idea of even being near a machine gun. I smile at him and look around to see people carrying coolers and equipment, behaving as if they’re at an amusement park or some kind of sporting event. This is my first feeling of panic, of being found out as an interloper—or, worse, a spy—in a foreign world. We move into a line for equipment rentals, and Sam points out the people in the best tactical outfits and reviews their looks. Finally, something I can get into.

Sam himself is decked out in a slick black shirt, which accentuates his military build, and inverted cargo pants with pockets that expand into the leg, an outfit suited for concealed carry, he tells me. Everyone around us is wearing a variation of this military-style clothing, and I realize that these are specialty clothes designed for recreational firearms shooting. Some even have custom hats with their names embroidered on the front and back, as if they’re actually serving in the military. These folks are really hardcore. “It has really become a lifestyle,” Sam says to me.

I glance down at my jeans and bright red sneakers and realize I’ve made a horrible mistake. As if reading my mind, he says, “You’re fine!” and starts to examine the “kit” the young attendant has just handed me, making sure I have everything I need.

We move forward toward a long row of tables where staffers are inspecting all weapons and ammunition. “It’s his first time here,” Sam says. “Magazines, two hundred rounds of ammunition, safety goggles, electronic ear protection, holsters … you got it all,” the inspector says, mostly for my benefit. I smile and make a mental note that those things that hold the bullets are called “magazines,” not “clips,” and oh, by the way, it’s “rounds,” not “bullets.”

“Okay, lift your hands up,” the attendant says, and before I know it, he and Sam are putting a belt around my waist and sliding the ammunition holder and the gun holster onto it. The inspector confidently drops a Glock 17 into the gun holster on my right side—the firing side—and I’m carrying a firearm for the very first time in my life.

As Sam and I start to walk away, I try to decide if I feel any different. Suddenly, the inspector calls out after us. “Wait, are you the Sam?” he asks. Sam turns around and smiles.

“I’ve seen your videos and stuff,” the inspector enthusiastically tells him, becoming a starstruck fan girl right before our eyes. “Thanks for everything you’re doing to protect the Second Amendment,” he adds, shaking Sam’s hand. There it is, I think, the very first reference to the bitter political fight over this issue. It’s always simmering just below the surface, isn’t it?

We follow a mass of students into the building next to the inspection range. I gasp. The room is humongous, lined with tables from wall to wall, a raised platform with a podium in the front and two projectors. It seems to fit about four hundred people, and by the time we walk in they’re almost all seated, with their hats on, looking at an instructor delivering welcoming remarks.

Everyone has an introductory packet that includes an itinerary and a form releasing the range from liability if the training results in “physical or emotional injury, paralysis, death, or damage to myself, to property, or to third parties.” I sign the forms and comfort myself with the thought that holding the range liable for injury in the court of Twitter is still a viable option.

The speaker at the podium dutifully reviews every sentence in the liability form and gives us some basic safety guidelines. Sam, meanwhile, is decoding the gun-specific terms with whispers in my ear, and I nod along. I glance at the agenda. It is very full—and very precise. Almost every minute of our day is meticulously planned. This, if nothing else, puts me at ease.

Ten minutes later, Sam and I drive out to our assigned range. I see a mound of rock behind the man-shaped targets. The ground is composed of pebbles, though the area near the targets has lines of concrete to mark distances of three, five, and fifteen feet away from the target. This is where we will be shooting from, I reason.

Sam and I sit down in chairs next to each other. I look up and see four instructors—three men and one woman—standing in front of us. Sam hands me sunscreen, and it hits me that we’re going to be outside in the desert heat all day long. I’m wearing a hat I’ve borrowed from the institute with my name written on two pieces of masking tape, on the front and back, a mandatory piece of clothing that will protect my face—from both the sun and other far more dangerous things. The hat will enable the coaches to yell at me if and when I do something wrong. I begin slathering the sun protection on my arms and face as the instructors introduce themselves and briefly tell us about their experiences with firearms, from military training to civilian instruction to law enforcement.

“This is a self-defense course. We will teach you how to defend yourself with a handgun, should the need ever arise,” one of the mustached male instructors tells us. He is a jovial guy with a stocky build; he peppers his remarks with jokes as though he’s doing some kind of gun stand-up comedy routine. The instruction on the range will be as scripted and smooth as the registration process, I suddenly realize. They sure know how to put a newbie at ease.

Our class of forty-four is about evenly split between first-time and returning students. Most are white middle-aged men, but about 20 percent are women. There are families with children as young as ten or twelve outfitted with the same gear that I’m now wearing—and probably better shots. Seeing a Glock strapped to the waist of a twelve-year-old is a little like seeing a young boy put on his father’s suit jacket: it’s cute, but you don’t want him walking out the door like that.

The stocky jovial instructor reviews the different parts of the firearm and its functionality. We are not allowed to touch the guns that are harnessed to our hips until we understand these basic fundamentals—e.g., never point the muzzle of the gun at anything you do not intend to shoot!—and we review some key processes using our “finger guns.” We start with the fundamentals. Loading, unloading, aiming. The instruction is very even. Smooth. Methodical. It is clear that the coaches are operating from a memorized script, and I assume that if I were to walk over to the range next door, its group of instructors would be saying the very same thing at the very same time.

Once everyone is comfortable, we walk out to the three-foot line on the range and are told that for the next two days we will be divided into two rallies and partnered with a student coach who will help us move through the instruction and correct any basic mistakes we make.

Sam and I decide that we want to shoot at the same time, so I pair with Tim, a fifty-something Asian man who has taken the course before and is staying at the institute for two additional days to study rifle shooting. I sheepishly explain to him that this is my first time shooting a gun and that I hope he has a lot of patience. He smiles at me kindly and promises to help instruct me.

I’m learning how to take the firearm out of the holster and put it back in, and how to load and unload ammunition. Before I know it, I am standing fifteen yards in front of the target, wearing eye protection and electronic ear protection, about to fire my very first round. Tim is standing behind my right shoulder, walking me through all of the steps I have to go through to make sure my firearm is safe enough to shoot.

Chamber check, magazine check, insert magazine, run the slide, chamber check, magazine check, aim, let the slack out, push.

Finally I push the trigger, and hit my target somewhere below the waist. An instructor comes over to me—another mustached man who served in Vietnam—and reminds me of the proper way to pull a trigger in order to exert maximum trigger control. He tells me I’m pushing the trigger too hard in anticipation of the shot and aiming too low as a result. I have to first take the slack out of the trigger, then continue applying pressure until the firearm goes off. The surprise of the moment will prevent me from inadvertently shifting my aim in anticipation of the shot. The instructor asks me to take several more shots, but I struggle to place the steps in sequence and my rounds land all over my target.

“Dude, you just shot a gun, from the holster! Did you ever think you’d do that?” Sam asks me.

I’m not sure. I am feeling somewhat exhilarated by the experience, but I have no great desire to do it again. I’m also tired and hungry and definitely overwhelmed. This is far more complicated than I imagined. Shooting here is a series of choreographed maneuvers. Trying to do all the steps right and in sequence is a mental struggle. I’m overwhelmed by the sheer number of things I need to remember.

Chamber check, magazine check, insert magazine, run the slide, chamber check, magazine check, aim, let the slack out, push.

As we break for lunch—exactly at 12:30 as the agenda predicted—Sam leans over to me and says that I have already completed more firearm instruction than most states require for a concealed-carry permit. I feel stunned. I would never trust myself to use a gun in a stressful real-life situation, yet millions of Americans who own weapons have less knowledge about how to properly fire and use a firearm than I do! The thought of this scares me, and I turn to the only thing that will comfort me in this moment: a chicken nugget sandwich with fries from the food truck parked on the property.

Over lunch, an instructor named Bridget gives us a presentation on “firearms in the real world.” I nod along, and then something Bridget says startles me.

“Sooner or later, we are all asking to be targeted, asking to be picked off,” she says. The people around me, those who are listening, do not seem alarmed and I look up at the PowerPoint slides that are guiding the lecture to find a color-coded alert system.

•  Condition white: you are an easy target.

•  Condition yellow: you are alert, less likely to be targeted.

•  Condition orange: you know in advance what you are going to do when danger comes.

•  Condition red: you are facing a specific threat and know exactly how to take it out.

•  Condition black: the bad guy has crossed a line and you are going to take him out.

“You want to spend most of your life in condition yellow,” Bridget says, “and remember to develop your combat mind-set.” She urges us to explain this to our friends and co-workers, to educate them about the criminals and murderers who are roaming our streets, hiding behind every bush and building, ready to jump out and threaten us. “We all know what the world is like today. All you have to do is turn on the news. The more of us who’re paying attention, the safer our world will be, the safer our communities will be.”

I fight to suppress a jolt of anger. I had come here because Sam and Mike had assured me of its unique place in gun culture. Mike had described it in an early email arranging the trip as a facility that is “an intelligent option between the far right and far left logic on this topic.”

But here was an instructor telling six hundred mostly white, middle-aged attendees who’d just spent the morning shooting handguns and rifles to always carry their firearms, to remain constantly alert to danger. The instructor is telling them that this danger is not just a probability we face by living in the modern world; it is an absolute inevitability. To make matters worse, the lecture is being delivered a little more than two weeks before the 2016 presidential election, and I immediately recognize the echo of Donald Trump’s stump speeches, in which he warns Americans of an invisible wave of crime, even though homicides continue to be at historic lows—especially for white people, who are far less likely to be victims of gun violence than black people.

Sitting there, you would think that an assailant could break into the classroom at any moment. It’s a miracle that these Americans were even able to live this long, to outsmart the criminals and crime plaguing their communities and make it to this critical life-affirming training alive!

I express these misgivings to Sam, and he agrees that some of the language does sound a bit alarmist and encourages me to bring it up with Mike over our scheduled dinner the following day. I vow to do so and we return to the range. But this time, something feels different. I am no longer viewing this experience as just hundreds of gun nerds engaging in a recreational activity of their choice and doing so safely and responsibly. I see people who have driven out to the desert to take a two- or four-day course and spend hundreds or thousands of dollars learning how to protect themselves from the bogeyman. As I sit back down, I spot several NRA shirts I had missed before. A couple of people are wearing Trump/Pence shirts that I had clocked but dismissed as expected representations of the political climate. Now they’ve suddenly taken on new, more sinister meaning. These are not just gun enthusiasts. These are people whose gun ownership identifies them with a divisive conservative political ideology and identity that prides itself on “trolling” or “owning” libs.

The woman sitting in front of us tells us she carries her weapon absolutely everywhere she goes, to protect her family. She coordinates her gun and holster with her clothes and can’t imagine leaving home without either. She adds that her children would constantly bump into her firearm when they were younger, but now they know how to avoid brushing up against it during hugs.

That afternoon, as we’re getting up to shoot, I’m growing more and more frustrated by a feeling of isolation. It’s as if I’ve fallen into some crazy conservative conspiracy Facebook feed. I’m still overwhelmed by the complexity of technically shooting a gun the right way. Who can remember all of these steps in an actual gunfight?

Chamber check, magazine check, insert magazine, run the slide, chamber check, magazine check, aim, let the slack out, push.

I’m counting down the hours and then the minutes, telling Sam I think I need to just go to my Airbnb and rest afterward. He suggests/insists that I attend the special concealed-carry lecture that ends the day, and I just sigh. “It will really get to the morality of using our firearms,” he reminds me, “and will probably break though some of the paranoia we heard earlier.” I realize he’s right. I have to suck it up. I’ve flown all the way into the desert to experience a real gun course; I should take full advantage of it.

After I leave my rented weapon with the range instructor, we make our way back to the lecture hall for the concealed-carry lecture. The instructor who had thanked Sam that morning for protecting the Second Amendment spots us and comes over to talk. He’s a tall, skinny man with dirty blond hair and a friendly manner. The words LINE INSTRUCTOR are printed on his T-shirt. Sam informs him that I have just shot my first firearm and he looks at me approvingly, mentioning how much he enjoys working here. Sam prods him as to why—more for my benefit than his own, I suspect—and he pauses, looks at both of us, and says, “In case the foreigners invade from China or Hillary turns tyrannical or there’s a mass shooting.” Sam and I fall silent, staring at him. He adds, “I just want to be ready for the worst.”

“Oh, you cannot believe that conspiracy shit,” Sam says with a laugh, glancing over at me nervously. “You just cannot believe that,” he repeats, now jovially slapping the line instructor on the back and chuckling, trying to laugh the whole thing off.

The two of them change the subject and are now discussing some kind of specialty pants that the range has switched to per Sam’s suggestion. They talk some more about gear, and I glance at my watch, suddenly growing impatient. I have an urge to get away from the line instructor and into the classroom. Sam has been good about not outing me, not telling people that I’m on book research, but I worry that the line instructor will ask me where I live, what I do, why I’m here. I’ve thought of some stock replies I could offer if asked, but like the handgun I’m still not sure how to operate, I don’t actually want to deploy them.

We finally break away from the line instructor, and I just shoot Sam a look. We’re walking into the large classroom with the long tables and the four hundred people and I see Bridget back at the podium. She’s using a PowerPoint slide show, and I spot two projections on each side of the room with information about the consequences of actually shooting your firearm. I’m reminded again how massive this whole operation is, and I grow a little depressed. People have traveled from all over the country to be told that they need to be afraid of being killed on a daily basis. On the screen, Bridget is helping us identify what our enemy could look like.

“There are some obvious examples,” she says, and a picture of a Latino gang member comes on screen. “But who else?” she asks. “Hillary Clinton!” someone yells out from the crowd, and the room breaks out in hearty laughter.

“All right, all right,” Bridget says with a chuckle, moving her hands outward and then pushing them down in a gesture designed to calm down the crowd. Sam and I look at each other, and I slump even lower in my chair. “A gunfight is risky business. You risk everything and win absolutely nothing,” Bridget repeats several times. It’s a theme in the speech, and I recognize that the institute is clearly hoping to impart a message of restraint—but it’s not breaking through the context of paranoia surrounding the lecture.

•  “There is no such thing as an unarmed man.”

•  “Do not think you can’t use deadly force if they don’t have a weapon.”

•  “We shouldn’t let people get too close to us so people don’t have an opportunity to harm us.”

•  “Next time you’re sitting with your family or in a grocery store line, think of what you would do if a person had a gun. Try to create different scenarios so you’re preparing your brain to kick in and act almost like muscle memory.”

•  “It doesn’t take much to know what the world is like. All you have to do is watch the news and you’ll be shaking in your boots. It’s a different world now. Stay in condition yellow.”

At one point, she suggests that one way to protect yourself from unfair prosecution if you end up in court after a gunfight is to write a letter to yourself detailing how you have trained to defuse and stop aggressive situations in order to protect your family. “Send the letter to yourself via certified letter. Sign for it, but do not open it,” Bridget instructs. “If you have to use deadly force, that letter could be used to let the jury know why you did what you did. It will make your actions seem more reasonable,” Bridget says, placing an extra emphasis on the word reasonable.

The lecture ends, and Sam and I go our separate ways. I drive back to my Airbnb and reflect on the forces behind this place—a business model that I am realizing is at least in part based on scaring people into coming back time and time again. I thought I was entering a space of gun enthusiasts living out their “martial values,” as Sam had put it to me during our initial conversations. While there certainly is a militia aspect to the training and attitude of my fellow classmates, the training is intertwined with political and social anxieties.

As I go to bed that night, I make a list of questions to ask Mike at our dinner the following day. At the very top is this one: why are you pandering to students who believe their Second Amendment rights are seconds from being infringed, reinforcing their sense of victimhood and fear, then sending them out into the world armed and paranoid?

On day two, we do not need to meet at the range until 7:45 in the morning. I wake up with plenty of time to take a shower and get dressed, but as I look into my travel bag to pull out a fresh T-shirt, I freeze. Among the pairs of socks and underwear, I find just two shirts. One dark blue Georgetown Law School T-shirt and a gray one with the words CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS on the back.

Thought one: I really need to learn to pack the night before rather than the morning of.

Thought two: What the fuck am I going to wear today?

I cannot put on the Georgetown shirt without eliciting suspicion or even ridicule from my classmates. The Center for American Progress shirt is also a no-go. I can’t get away with wearing the logo of a group associated with the woman they joked about murdering less than twenty-four hours ago. A quick Google search reveals that the closest Target or Walmart is more than forty miles away, so I grudgingly put on the same green shirt from day one.

Back on the range that morning, we’re learning how to clear the different jams that could come up in the midst of a gunfight, and I struggle mightily. I find the steps difficult to remember and the process of setting up the jam cumbersome. We have to go through ten or twelve different steps in quick succession, and at one point I fall behind. One of the instructors is standing several yards behind us with a bullhorn, repeating the choreographed procession of instructions.

Chamber check, magazine check, insert magazine, run the slide, chamber check, magazine check, aim, let the slack out, push.

I try to rush through to keep up and accidentally pull the trigger. Thankfully, the gun is unloaded and nothing happens. But I immediately feel I need to stop. We sit back down and I start trying to think of a way to get out of the class without offending or jeopardizing my dinner with Mike. Luckily, it’s time for lunch; Sam and I go back to the classroom to eat. It’s another lecture about how to avoid being detained in the aftermath of a gunfight. Bridget is back up there offering sample answers we need to give to the police to avoid being arrested or serving jail time—answers that would sound good to a jury, should it come to that.

After lunch we get back to our range and a truck with bleacher seats in its bed is waiting to take us to a house simulation. The instructors announce that the exercise will test our ability to defend our homes from intruders, and we load up. I’m nervous about having to shoot a gun outside of the range, in a more realistic environment, but I climb onto the truck and hope for the best. Beside me is an older, heavier gentleman, who I learn has made the trek to the desert from Connecticut. He bemoans the state’s tight gun restrictions and says, “If this election goes the wrong way, we’ll all be living in FEMA camps without any ability to defend ourselves.” I start to say something, but then stop, not sure how to reply to something like that. Do I agree? Do I try to challenge his logic? I decide to leave it alone and look away toward the mountains, pretend I am mesmerized by the scenery. We arrive at the simulation point and I see two hastily constructed houses. We each take turns going in with an instructor, who walks us through the process of shooting pictures of intruders who pop up from behind the windows. The experience is far less stressful than I expected. I shoot at pictures of humans who look threatening and pop out at me from different areas of the house. There is a certain concentrated rhythm to this exercise, and I begin to enjoy it.

On our walk back to the range Sam is pumped, and he asks me what I think of this “Disneyland of guns.” I chuckle and realize that this is exactly how the institute is presenting itself. It is also quickly expanding, building new, more complex ranges, and developing a resort component that will allow vacationers to buy time-shares and stay out in the desert shooting guns for weeks at a time.

We get back to our range and spend the afternoon just firing off rounds. I finally realize that the trick to aiming is to focus on the front sight of your weapon while allowing the target to become blurry. My instructors and my partner, Tim, have reminded me of this almost every time I pulled the trigger, but it took a while for my brain to actually process the information.

At the end of the day, I return my rented equipment—feeling lighter almost instantly!—and speed off to meet Mike at the country club down the road.

Mike gives me a warm handshake and sits down next to me. He comments briefly on the beauty of our surroundings and launches right into his pitch. He sees the training facility as the political middle ground between crazy right-wing gun enthusiasts and gun control advocates. He hopes its emphasis on increasing training standards could be supported by people on all sides of the debate.

Mike is also laying it on thick. He has Googled me enough to learn that I was the LGBT content editor at ThinkProgress. He informs me that the institute employs a transgender person and that gay people often come to the range. (It’s sweet—the kind of thing a straight person thinks a gay person wants to hear.) The training institute, he stresses, strives for diversity and has a high number of women who take its courses and a good number of African Americans. I listen to him and decide that the best way to address my concerns about the institute is to ask him about them directly.

“I really enjoyed my time on the range,” I begin. “The staff was incredibly professional and knowledgeable, and the instruction was top-notch. But I was very disappointed in your lectures.”

That’s when I blurt out my tactless question.

After an uncomfortable moment, I say, “It’s one thing to tell students, ‘I have a Second Amendment right to own and use a firearm, and if I’m going to do that, then I’m going to come here and get the best training I can to exercise that right.’ This is what you’re describing to me as the mission of the school. But it’s another thing to tell students that there’s a criminal on every street corner and that gun violence is almost inevitable.”

“Those statements are irresponsible and not our doctrine,” Mike quickly assures me. He concedes that some instructors do go off script during lectures but tells me he is in the process of videotaping those presentations in order to avoid the kind of fear mentality that I experienced.

“I guess what I can’t understand is why you’re telling your students that violence is on the rise and their lives are in danger, if that is not empirically true.” While there are large geographic variations in crime rates, overall the violent crime rate fell by 48 percent from 1993 to 2016.¹

Mike looks away and then down to the table, as if I have disappointed him. “The increase in peripheral awareness—head on a swivel, keep aware of your surroundings—is probably the number-one thing you can do to live a long and healthy life, irrespective of the communities in which you live or travel.

“The skill set of color-coded awareness is just a habit, like brushing and flossing your teeth. I don’t consider it paranoia,” he says. “I will sit in a place where I’ll have multiple choices for exiting, where I can see someone who is a problem coming in. You can go through your life and never have a problem, but tomorrow’s paper will show someone who didn’t think they were going to have a problem tonight either. It’s a matter of preparedness. I don’t live my life frisking people, but I don’t know that you can depend on law enforcement as a solver of problems in all cases. In many cases where seconds count, the police are minutes away.”

I look at him incredulously and say, “But your lectures aren’t just telling people to be vigilant. They’re instructing them that crime is inevitable. When you drop those kinds of statements into the conspiracy theories and paranoia that are prevalent throughout our culture and you add guns to the mix, you’re asking for violence.”

“My answer is, our lectures … when we were smaller and had one guy doing the lectures, they were memorized and it was scripted word for word. We now have maybe a dozen staff that provide lectures, and quite candidly it’s not as tight as our on-range content, and what I started, and we’re doing it right now, is a video project where we’ll have someone do all of the lectures, we’ll script it in advance and update it so it’s not going to have unreasonable fear-and-threat crap in it.”

“So, the new lectures are not going to be instigating fear?” I ask, to clarify.

“When I get through the new script that we’ll draft and sign off on, it’ll be ‘The world can be a very dangerous place and problems can go from a walk in the park to danger, but it all depends on where you are and where you live.’ I do not like fearmongering,” he says, then adds, “We also may be overstating for dramatic effect and to make sure that you’re paying attention, but I totally object to the Chinese hordes or that Hillary Clinton will take away their guns.”

I take Mike at his word. He seems far from the type who spends his nights on alt-right websites. But I also suspect that he uses the fearmongering as a business opportunity: meeting his clients where they are, serving and catering to their beliefs and prejudices just as the NRA manipulates fears of a gun grab to drive up gun sales. He’s certainly not going to any great lengths to dispute such myths.

I turn to the question of policy. “Ideally, in my perfect world, all Americans would have to obtain a license before they can buy and operate a gun, proving that they know how to use the firearm, and then renew it every so often, undergoing a background check each time.”

To my surprise, Mike agrees. “If you were to wave a magic wand and make that happen, I would personally agree with you, because that’s the business that we are in, but I would add to that that it should be a federal standard and it should be ‘shall issue’ instead of ‘may issue.’” He adds that he wants the government to deal with this once and for all, in a big compromise that doesn’t create a slippery slope that could lead to even more restrictions.

“My concern is that the end game of the most severe liberal is the elimination of the individual’s right to possess a weapon for self-defense. The equally idiotic right-wing position is that regardless of your psychological soundness and skill level, you should be able to have not only small arms but also rockets and put them in a backpack and carry them to school. Those are not going to happen—either one of them—so rational folks like yourself should be able to come to a compromise. Just arm-wrestle it one damn time and be done with it,” he recommends.

Mike goes on to argue that carrying a weapon in public should be even more restricted: you should need a “graduate-level skill set” from a four-day handgun class to be allowed to conceal and carry in public. He admits that that description would apply to only a tiny percentage of those who come through his institute, and an even smaller portion of those who currently own guns overall.

“I used to live in Southern California and had a concealed-carry permit that I had to renew every two years,” he says. “I would go to a range in order to take the skills test. Almost everyone else there was a retired cop or a private eye. The test basically was, do not shoot yourself in the foot, and the target was the size of Schwarzenegger from three yards. It was embarrassingly nonexistent in skill and they could barely pass it. None of them should have a concealed-carry permit. It’s just that simple.”

As our dinner comes to a close, I thank Mike for his time and generosity.

For all the discomfort I felt at his range, his openness to having a rational conversation about increasing standards and support for federal gun licensing left me hopeful. It made me feel that if we organize our communities and he organizes his, maybe we’ll be able to fix this thing after all.