5.

NUMBER ONE WITH A BULLET

In the night, screaming.

That’s a bad thing to wake up to. I sit straight up in bed. Screaming again, hoarse, ragged, terrified. My wife’s eyes are open.

“What was that?” she hissed. As if in response, another scream, louder. Closer, a different voice. Shouting.

“Shit,” I whisper, and slide out of bed.

It’s been two weeks since the quake, and things seemed to be normalizing. Some main roads have reopened and power is back on in some parts of the city, though not here yet. The elderly and sick have been evacuated to some of the convention center buildings downtown.

Rumors have started. There was a report on CNN radio for about twenty minutes that China had some uncontrolled flu outbreak, but that report was pulled and never mentioned again. It has all been rumors, wild rumors. The CDC came in and closed the port in Long Beach, followed by a full military invasion of choppers, constant flights. It’s creepy, living under the constant whup whup of rotor blades. We hear different things every day. People wear paper masks, hide inside, and hope.

I slip through the house, quiet in bare feet, and listen as hard as I can. Up on the roof, I survey the night. The city is dark, although downtown there is the glow of lights. Another shriek, not far away at all. That sounded like a woman. I have a really bad feeling about this.

Inside, I crank up my emergency radio. The local channel has a riot in Koreatown and another downtown. A reporter is talking about a complete news blackout from Washington, DC, then suddenly he’s cursing, and then the signal turns to static. I stare at the radio. That can’t be good.

Out the window now I can hear gunshots, sporadic, wild. Somebody just blocks away empties the magazine of a handgun: pop, pop, pop-pop-pop.

This isn’t a riot, even a citywide riot. This is something else.

I drop downstairs and grab the revolver out of the closet. A Smith & Wesson .357 with a comforting weight and heft, oiled precision. My wife bought it years ago, when she lived alone. I’m careful not to come near the trigger. I deeply regret that we’ve never fired it. We never even went to the range to test it out. But really, how hard can it be?

I keep watch from the balcony, trying to stare holes into the darkness. The night is strangely hushed, even though sirens and gunshots punctuate and rattle the air. Finally, in the east, a lightening: dawn is on the way. My wife joins me, and we crouch in silence.

“Look,” she whispers, pointing below us. There, in the gloom, two figures are shambling up the street. Instinctively, we both crouch down, peering out over the railing. There’s a harsh, metallic smell in the air, blood and adrenaline.

I hear a brave voice, my neighbor Tim, down in the street. He challenges, “Hey, what’s happening?” and then, “What’s wrong with you guys?” I catch a glimpse of Tim’s back, and then he raises his flashlight and shines it on the figures.

Their eyes are dull gleams, reflecting back the light like black marbles. Their clothes are torn, and gaping wounds mar their faces. Black blood covers their clothes. Is this some kind of joke? Halloween?

Their mouths sag open, gaping, and a low moan drifts out, an eerie, otherworldly sound. It’s not a joke.

Zombies, straight out of a horror movie. As the light plays across them, they surge forward, and I hear Tim’s bubbling scream. It’s hands down the worst thing I’ve ever heard. The scream cuts off abruptly. They sound like a pack of wild dogs, snarling and ripping, tearing.

I pound down the stairs and fling open the front door. I burst out of my gate, then stop dead. They’re crouched over, and in eerie unison their heads mechanically pivot toward me. They start toward me. I raise the pistol, dully amazed, in the back of my mind, at how hard my hands are trembling. I fire, and I see the shot spark off the pavement. I know I missed by a mile, but I can’t seem to control the shake.

—

Guns. I knew almost nothing about guns.

What little boy, growing up, isn’t obsessed with guns? Squirt guns, laser guns. The nonstop violence of cartoons and comic books gives way to John Woo movies. A few real hippie mothers in my neighborhood hadn’t allowed toy guns in the house, but that just meant those poor kids had to find sticks and break them to look like pistols. Poor bastards.

Sure, I’d shot a little with my dad as a kid, with a .22 pistol in the backyard. Even though we used wadded cotton for earplugs, the ringing in my ears would last for three days. I’d gone out with friends in college and blasted off various handguns, but I didn’t know anything about guns, really. I knew that what I saw in movies was probably wrong.

Guns scare me a little. There is something about the metal weight and deadliness, the horrific finality of a misdirected bullet, the bang and the kick that frightened me. I’ve never liked loud noises; that’s one reason I prefer sailboats to Jet Skis.

I am not alone in this. That bang and kick are a huge factor on the battlefield. The lightning and thunder are a principal part of the success of firearms. Napoleon used them at a time when the longbow had a better rate of fire, range, and accuracy. However, the longbow’s swish didn’t carry the moral authority of a musket’s bark.

Almost any apocalyptic scenario you can imagine will probably have guns in it, at some point. If you’re not fighting marauding bandits, aliens, or robots, you’ll be hunting for food. And once you have that, others might want to take it from you. What would I do if something or someone threatened my son, my wife? I’d do what I had to do. And would anybody else act any differently if their kids were starving?

Here in the cozy confines of the first world, we’ve all grown fat, at least metaphorically; and the lean and hungry may invite themselves to dinner. Better get hold of some guns and learn how to use them.

Interestingly, it is civilians who have led the way in modern combat shooting. The pistol originated as a cavalry weapon, to be used one-handed. While the technology evolved, and individuals learned how to fight with handguns (during the Civil War and in the Wild West), for the military the pistol was something of an accessory, a last-ditch affair. Modern gunfighting can trace its roots to Shanghai in the 1920s and ’30s, where British policemen William Fairbairn and Eric Sykes followed the local police into riots and studied what they did there. When they were called back to Britain at the onset of World War II and thrust into military life, they began training commandos with their new methods, such as point shooting—firing without looking down the sights, just pointing the gun at the target, which saved precious fractions of seconds. They also devised the first modern shooting course, which simulated real combat instead of using paper targets. The handgun became an effective close-quarters weapon.

Point shooting has fallen into disfavor now, replaced by modern shooting techniques like the Weaver stance. The Weaver stance is named for Jack Weaver, a famous competition shooter and a member of the LA County Sheriff’s shooting team. His stance (trigger arm straight, supporting arm bent, body at a three-quarters angle to the target) first appeared in 1959 in a competition sponsored by Jeff Cooper (the guy who later developed the threat color code). The debate continues as to whether the Weaver or “modified isosceles” stance (arms extended equally, squared up at target) is better or more structurally sound for movement and absorbing recoil. Most professional gunmen (SWAT and Special Forces) will use the Weaver—but they also are paid to train, and they shoot all the time. In stressful situations, individuals are prone to face the perceived threat head on, so the modified isosceles might be more natural.

Jeff Cooper wrote in one of his many essays that this refinement of technique comes not from the military or police departments, which tend not to foster innovation and often discourage it, but by private civilians: “Their pioneering work in shooting was done on their own time, at their own expense, and in some cases contrary to the policies of their superiors.”

There are a multitude of schools today offering three- or five-day courses in subjects ranging from Basic Handgun to Advanced Shotgun, but I wanted more than that. Mastery of the gun takes a lifetime of study, and while I knew I couldn’t attain mastery quickly, I wanted to leap into the deep end, to find a way to make up for lost time.

Tiger McKee runs his own school in Alabama, a place called Shootrite. Tiger published a training manual called The Book of Two Guns, which focuses on using the pistol and the rifle in conjunction—alternating as necessary from one to the other. The title was inspired by the classic Book of Five Rings, by Miyamoto Musashi, one of the greatest treatises on individual combat ever written. Musashi was a duelist and sword master of feudal Japan who refined the art of two swords and suggested that mastery of the weapons leads to mastery of oneself. The way of the sword leads to “the Way,” in a larger, more profound sense. Tiger is a martial artist, and thinks like one, which I found tremendously appealing. It was a mind-set I was familiar with and would, I hoped, ease my transition into the world of the gun.

—

Guntersville, Al

—Alabama sweltered under a misty blanket of humidity. Alabama in August, for the hottest summer on record? “You’re an idiot,” I told myself, driving through rolling green hills and thick southern jungle, around the sweep of Guntersville Lake.

I wound my way into the Alabama backwoods and met Tiger at his local diner, the South Sauty Creek Store.

Tiger McKee is a stocky man with small, strong hands. His hair is cut high and tight like a drill sergeant’s, and his blue eyes are unnervingly pale. I had spoken to him over the phone, and his deep, gravelly voice had me picturing a big John Wayne type, pearl-handled six-shooter draped insouciantly over his hip. Tiger was the opposite of that. He was compact, neat, powerful.

He smiled and shook my hand and we made small talk. I wallowed in that mellow Alabama twang, that redneck elocution, part natural and part an intentional disguise. There’s a humorous slyness about Tiger’s casual conversation, just a hint of playing a hick. He invites you to underestimate him at first, because in the end you won’t.

Tiger was happy that I hadn’t done much firearms training. “Starting with a clean slate is a really good thing,” he said.

We joked about telling people what we do. We both have the same problem. Whenever I tell somebody about the books I write, they want to talk my ear off about the training they’ve done, or their brother who boxes, or the time they sat ringside for Holyfield–Foreman.

“When we go to parties and somebody finds out what I do,” Tiger drawled, “then I have to talk about their grandfather’s .38 or whatever . . . so I tell people I run seminars for conflict resolution.” He smiled.

“But that’s what this is about, really. Someone is trying to do you or your family serious injury, and you have to stop them as quickly and as efficiently as possible. I hate to use the word ‘fast’ because that takes people in the wrong direction . . .” He shook his head. “We’ll get into that, but fast and inefficient is slow. Wyatt Earp even said it: ‘Fast is fine, but accuracy is final.’

“There are two ways to stop a threat,” Tiger continued. The Alabama twang was still in evidence, but the laziness was gone from his voice, the relaxed nature. This was the firearms instructor, deadly serious. “The first way is to force them to make the mental decision that they don’t want to be involved in a fight. This is by far the preferred way. Most people attack because they think they’ll get away with it. If, through readiness, or nonverbal cues like our posture, or verbal commands or presenting our firearm, we can get them to change their mind, that works great.

“Now, if none of that works, then we inflict enough damage to their body to stop the threat. So the thing to think about is that we’re not gonna fight unless it’s worth our life,” Tiger said. He warned me about even getting in a verbal confrontation—that can escalate into lethal force without you wanting it to. Better to just avoid the verbal scrap in the first place.

Tiger smiled at me beatifically.

“Think about it this way. If a criminal with a long rap sheet, a murderer, breaks into your home with a gun at night and you shoot him and kill him, you might spend two or three years in and out of court, and several hundred thousand dollars in lawyer fees. That’s often the best-case scenario, that’s with you being righteous and with self-defense and all that. So if a guy breaks into my house and is stealing my TV? I ain’t shooting. I’ll make him leave, and if I have a real reason to believe that my life, or my wife’s life, is in danger, then I’m shooting . . . but not for my TV.”

You can’t kill someone to protect your property. But, conversely, you can’t read the mind of an intruder, either; and if your life is in danger, you must defend yourself.

Tiger went on, “The efficient use of firearms is a martial art where the eighty-pound woman really can, with proper technique, stop the three-hundred-pound man.”

“You said efficient,” I said. “Why efficient?”

“The threat is trying to injure us, or our family, and the longer the fight lasts, the chance of being injured or killed increases exponentially. Most fights with firearms are two or three seconds.”

As I scribbled furiously, Tiger shook his head, changing his mind.

“Those numbers always get thrown around, but they’re kinda misleading. Maybe the shooting is only a few seconds, but in my mind, the fight ain’t over until everything is locked down and secured. So if I’m at my house and I call the law and then it’s twenty minutes before they show up, then the fight’s not over. Or, for your Hurricane Katrina–type situation, your end-of-the-world-type deal, that could go on for days.

“But even more than that, when did the fight start? Did it start when the threat decided to come to my house and kill me, two days ago?”

He looked at me for an answer, and as I tried to think of something, he continued, “You got to think outside the box a little. When I get up in the morning, I put my pants on and I belt my holster and pistol on, in my mind. I’m saying, Today might be the day I have to use this weapon. I pray that I never have to use it, but I recognize the reality of the world we live in. So mentally I am preparing myself, so that if something does happen, I’m ahead of the game because I expected it before I even left the house.”

I could see that Tiger was talking about limiting or eliminating the denial stage of a crisis.

As we walked out, Tiger paused.

“Fights are like car wrecks,” he said. “It could be anything, anytime, and it will be unexpected. Car wrecks are what they are—you don’t leave in the morning and think, Okay, I’m gonna get hit by a station wagon at the stop sign on that little street. It’ll be a fucking car wreck and you just don’t know how or when it’s gonna happen.”

This is a huge concern of mine, because all the confrontations I’ve been in have been planned, fights in cages or rings, with months of preparation. The car wreck fight scares me, because you have to react quickly and surely; hesitation can be doom. I’m sure I can be plenty effective if given enough time to prepare, but wake me up from a nap and how would I act?

“When you get in your car, you put your seat belt on, not because you expect the wreck, but because the possibility exists,” Tiger said as I followed him out into the blazing heat of the parking lot. Time to buckle up.

—

Shootrite Firearms Academy is an air-conditioned classroom and a shooting range up a dirt road, hidden away in the woods.

Even after our initial meeting, Tiger and I were both a little guarded. We’d embarked on a three-week training program, just him and me—a crash course in the way of two guns. Two thousand dollars’ worth of ammunition was purchased. I had signed myself on to a very serious apprenticeship and wanted to start things off on the right foot.

In the chilled classroom, air conditioner throbbing, Tiger began his instruction, and his first point was a familiar one. My father had always impressed upon me the idea of gun safety with a kind of religious zealousness, an almost magical thinking. He said you should always think of the gun as being loaded. Tiger reiterated that point.

“If sometimes we treat the gun as loaded, and the other times, unloaded, sooner or later we’ll get it crossed up.” He even treats squirt guns and dummy weapons the same way. It doesn’t matter if you just unloaded it, the slide is back, and there’s a red safety cord running through the gun: it’s still loaded.

“When we started Shootrite, in 1995, my wife, Gretchen, came up with the name, and I liked it because it goes along with the martial arts.” He meant that shooting and training and practicing is a rite. First, it’s a rite of passage, an important step to undertake. But also there are rites or rituals you repeat every time you work with a weapon, when you apply the fundamentals of marksmanship.

“Think about it like this,” he said. “Every time you perform a repetition of the action, every time you practice it, you put that repetition in your mental storage box. Now, in a crisis, you have to perform that same skill, and you blindly reach into your mental box and pull out a repetition at random. Hopefully, it’s a good repetition, done with the proper form, or you will be in trouble.”

Tiger was talking about what Jeff Wise, in Extreme Fear, called “overtraining” the poor, weak prefrontal cortex to ensure that the midbrain does it right when the stakes are high. You have to work to ensure that your practice is good.

An eminently practical rule is to never let the muzzle of the gun cover (point at) anything you don’t wish to destroy, like your legs, hands, or innocent bystanders.

“You hear ‘accidental discharge’ a lot; a cop is cleaning his gun and there’s an ‘accidental discharge.’ Well, that’s bullshit,” growled Tiger. “It’s not an accident, it’s negligence. It’s negligent discharge.”

What he meant was, you are responsible. And that is one of the deeper lessons behind firearms training. Whenever you touch a gun, own a gun, wear a gun, you have taken on an immense responsibility. Just the act of purchasing a gun has made you absolutely responsible for it. At home, my wife and I had a gun but no safe (before we had a child, not after)—and that’s bullshit. If you own a gun, you have to own a safe. Not just for the gun but also for every bullet—you are responsible for every bullet that comes out of your gun.

“Every instructor I know—and I’ll be the first to raise my hand—has had a negligent discharge. I’ve had two. If you drive for long enough, you’ll have a wreck.”

I thought of the old sailing joke: If you’ve never run aground, you don’t go sailing.

A critical rule was about the trigger finger, which is your real safety. The finger stays off the trigger and out of the trigger guard unless the sights are on the target. If you clench your fist, you’ll squeeze all your fingers, particularly under stress, so you have to keep your trigger finger out of the guard until the gun is on target. Conversely, if the sights are on the target and your eyes are on the sights, then your finger should be on the trigger.

“That will keep you from rushing to get your finger on the trigger and slapping or jerking the trigger,” Tiger said. “There’s no middle ground here, there’s no ‘almost pregnant.’ That finger is your real safety.”

—

We went up to the range to start shooting. Tiger had found this place, half an old gravel pit the county had used for road building, and had turned it into his own private shooting range. Tiger is something of an inventor. He invented his own target system, designed his own rifle and handgrips, and even came up with a lanyard ring for the tactical flashlight. Tiger is always looking to improve everything.

Tiger was neat, all matching drab clothing, everything in place. I was a mess, Carhartt pants and the wrong belt, running shoes, a crushed old sailing hat from La Paz, some free MMA T-shirt. I felt like a clown as I tried to get the earmuffs on over the hat.

Tiger started me with the Glock 19. Tiger carries a 1911 .45, a bigger handgun, a classic of the genre, but at times he also carries the Glock because it is a great weapon: dependable, simple, refined, light, and easy to use.

As soon as you enter the gun world, you enter a world ruled by men and their delight in technicalities, worse than baseball fanatics reeling off statistics. Patrick O’Brian wrote that “sailors are sadly given to jargon,” but let me amend that: men, in general, are sadly, hopelessly, given to jargon. Sailing is a whole new language I had learned, and now it was guns: numbers and frames, models and millimeters, grains and feet per second. Is that the two-two-three, or the seven-six-two? Over and under? Breech-loaded muzzle dock? Do I speak gun?

The Glock 19 is a 9 millimeter, meaning it fires a 9-millimeter bullet, a very common round. Gun preferences are faddish, depending on technology and the prevailing wisdom amongst gun enthusiasts, law enforcement, and the military. For a long time, police carried the .38, a revolver, until they switched mostly to “nines.” The current trend is toward a larger gun, like the .45 that Tiger carries.

There was a famous FBI shootout in Florida in the eighties, in which two criminals engaged in a gunfight with a dozen or so FBI agents. One of the criminals was fatally wounded in the opening shots, but he didn’t die right away, and went on to kill two agents and wound eight more before he eventually succumbed to his injuries. This case is well known and is often referenced for discussions on “stopping power.” When the bullet hits something, does it stop the target? The argument goes that the 9 is just too small to get the job done, so the .45 (a much bigger, heavier, but slightly slower bullet) is the bullet of choice. You should carry the biggest gun you can handle. And now we’re getting into male ego territory: what can you handle, buddy?

We prepared under an awning, where a thermometer read ninety-nine degrees in the shade. I slipped a holster and two magazine holders onto my belt. “If you own a gun it needs a holster,” said Tiger.

First we worked on “presentation”—the correct way to draw the pistol from the holster. Everything has to be done correctly, meaning the safest and most efficient way possible. As the right hand drops onto the gun, the left hand slaps the chest. This is important for two reasons: it prepares you to strike or push if someone is too close for you to get the pistol out, but more important, it gets the left hand out of the way of the muzzle of the pistol as you draw it. Blasting your own hand off is not the best way to start a gunfight.

The gun comes up the side of the chest, angled forward and out so that the ejection port is clear, and then both hands push the gun out into a ready position. The finger stays welded to the gun, out of the trigger guard.

We practiced this dozens of times, for a half hour or more. I was a baby, still crawling, who has signed up to work with an Olympic track coach. The amount of shit I didn’t know and couldn’t do was absolutely staggering. We’d have to build my knowledge up block by block.

As we rehearsed stance and balance, grip and posture, one thing became clear to me. This was not shooting. This was gunfighting. This was about everything else in the fight as well as the shooting.

“As far as the total picture, you may not shoot at all, and in a real fight shooting is only going to be a small part.” Tiger talked about movement, communicating both with your friends and with the threat, and evaluating the environment.

We started in on what Tiger called the fundamentals of marksmanship. Accuracy, for Tiger, is defined by the situation: what do I need to do? At three feet, I don’t have to be real accurate to get good hits. As distance increases or the size of the target decreases, the definition changes.

“There are four parts to the act of shooting,” he said, almost chanting: “Aim, hold, press, and follow through.”

It’s all very simple. You have a tube and the projectile comes straight out of it, so you have to align the tube with where you want the bullet to go, and hold it there without moving until the projectile has left. Nothing to it. Except that by initiating the action, by pulling the trigger, you jostle the tube.

Like a golf swing or a tennis stroke, the physical act is subject to endless refinement, and with a mastery of the details you come closer to correct mechanics. For instance, in aiming, bring the gun up, not your head down, for better breathing and for more consistency. As with stroking a pool cue, you want to be consistent in your mechanics so that you can figure out how to adjust your aim.

The “sight picture” means using the sights on the gun barrel to maintain that correct alignment. The three things we are looking at when we shoot are the rear sight, the front sight, and the target. To “hold” the sight picture, you focus on the front sight. The front sight is in the middle, so we focus hard on that and let the rest blur out a little. It’s interesting, and counterintuitive, to focus on only a small piece of what you have in your hand while a live attacker is bearing down on you, but that’s how you can get good hits.

“The most important part of the process is to smoothly press the trigger, because there’s a tendency to anticipate when the shot is going to break, so we tense up in anticipation of the recoil,” Tiger said. If your sight picture is perfect but your body jostles when you pull the trigger, you won’t get good hits.

We trudged out over the scree meadow to the targets. Tiger set me up in front of a cardboard figure (with a stenciled-on gun) at the distance of about ten feet. It seemed insultingly close, but I knew that most gunfights happen at close ranges, inside rooms, so I said nothing. I carefully followed commands and made ready, drawing the gun from the holster slowly and smoothly and coming up to the ready position.

When Tiger said, “Up,” or “Gun” (as in, “He’s got a gun!”), I would bring the pistol up, try to focus on that front sight, then slowly, slowly, press the trigger. Then came the shock of the bang, a muffled thud, the gun jumping like a live thing, twisting in my hands. I slowly let the trigger out until it clicked—the reset—and again tried to focus on the front sight with sweat pouring down my face, streaking into my glasses.

Within twenty or thirty rounds the sequence had already become familiar, but the results were getting worse—more and more shots to the left, a shotgun spread out from the center to the left edge. My arms ached, and as I was trying to control the trigger reset, I shot another round, downrange, quick as thought. I hadn’t meant it: negligent discharge. I didn’t have control of the trigger.

I muttered to myself, and Tiger sharply interjected, “Kill that shit. You’re in a fight, you don’t stop to criticize yourself.”

Fighting with a gun demands precision, cool control, and understanding what the gun is doing. Minimize the time not shooting at the target, because fractions of a second count. There’s not a lot of time to be looking down at your ammo pouch, or fumbling around trying to get the spent magazine to eject, when somebody is blazing away at you.

At the end of the day, my arms and shoulders were trembling from effort and I’d sweat clean through my pants. We went back to the fundamentals of marksmanship. I was really struggling to get the good hits I had been getting when the day started. I was off by about five inches to the left every time. What was wrong?

“Hold on a second, let me see that,” Tiger said, and he took the gun from me. I was relieved. There was something wrong with the Glock’s sights! He fiddled with it, then handed it back to me. “Now try it.”

I made ready, brought the gun up, saw the front sight, and squeezed. The gun clicked, but there was no bang—Tiger had removed the round from the chamber. I jerked the gun visibly, anticipating the recoil, a herky flinch.

After I unloaded and holstered, Tiger and I pulled the earmuffs off.

“Wow,” I said, shaking my head. I couldn’t believe I was compensating that much for the bang.

Tiger frowned. “You’ll be fighting that tendency the rest of your life. Smoothly pressing that trigger is an essential skill, and it takes a long time to master.”

I got back to my hotel and simply crashed—from the heat, from the focus, from the effort of holding the gun up. This was gunfighting, not just shooting; the stance, footwork, and intense concentration meant I was utterly wasted, and I barely stirred off the bed as night fell.

—

The days rolled by, and everything became increasingly complicated as the heat continued to punish me.

Communication, in particular, was a bitch. Tiger had me “communicating” with the threat from the minute he said “Up.” So as I attempted to smoothly step to cover and maintain that sight picture and shoot, I was also yelling, “Drop the weapon!” or “Get out of my house!” or “Don’t move!”

It was amazing how much my pulse rate went up simply from yelling. I could often hear it thundering in my ears against my earmuffs, and could plainly hear it thump faster as I rushed reloads or manipulations to clear malfunctions. For complex motor skills, like shooting, the optimal heart rate has been found to be between 115 and 145 beats per minute. I wasn’t getting into bad territory, Condition Black or anything like that—but I could feel my heart rate climbing just from the stress of yelling at a cardboard target and having Tiger’s unremitting gaze on my every move. How much greater would the stress be with an actual armed opponent who might be shooting back? It was nearly unimaginable.

It became very, very clear to me, very quickly, that unless you train for this stuff all the time, there is absolutely no way you are going to be able to do it during the car accident of a real fight. Even here, just in training, I got flustered, made mistakes, and started rushing, which only made things worse. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Tiger taught me to fight with one arm, as if I had been injured. I learned to do the reloads and fix the jams, and it wasn’t too hard, as long as I rehearsed it and stayed slow and smooth. But if I hadn’t ever practiced it? If I were trying to do it in a real gunfight? Forget it. “A fight is not a place to develop new skills,” Clint Smith, a famous gun instructor, has said.

Afterward, gazing at the target, I was dismayed to see how my shots spread out. Tiger said, “You can expect, in a live situation, to have your shots spread out to three hundred percent or more.” So although I’m getting hits, from a distance of five to maybe thirty feet, I’m not getting good hits all the time.

Particularly troublesome was the head shot. It’s such a small target that I can see why it’s often abandoned. The head itself is not the target, as the thick skull protects it, but a triangle between the eyes and mouth, the “ocular cavity.” That shot proved impossible for me to make while moving.

Tiger and I spent a lot of time together, and we’d often get to chatting underneath the awning as I reloaded the magazines. He made me reload without looking at the bullets or magazines, with my head up and scanning around, making sure I didn’t get “head-down” complacency.

Tiger’s father had been a colonel in the Special Forces, in command of the Twentieth Group, based in Huntsville, and Tiger had grown up shooting. “I can’t remember not shooting,” he said. “Also, my dad would take me with him when the unit was training, running ambushes, riding in C-130s and some of that fun stuff.”

“So why didn’t you do the military route?” I asked him.

Tiger smiled wryly. “When you grow up with a dad that’s a colonel, that’s a little like being in the military. By the time you’re leaving home you get pretty tired of being told what to do.”

Tiger had been a little wild in high school. “I was basically a professional street racer, with a manager who booked opponents for me. But I was always shooting. It wasn’t until I started taking classes that I realized how little I knew about it. So I started approaching it as a martial art: here’s something I can do with the rest of my life, study and improve.”

He started Shootrite because he was ready to teach things his way. “I wanted to bring in things from other martial arts—boxing, karate, muay thai, jujitsu, a little bit of aikido, tai chi chuan.”

Tiger had found the most crossover with tai chi. He found the movements, the footwork, and the ability to “root” to the ground for stability all very applicable to shooting.. Tai chi is considered a soft, or internal martial art, and Tiger thought of firearms in the same way. “Hard” arts are about meeting force with force, like a punch; and the “soft” arts focus on redirection and using an opponent’s force against him.

Tiger frowned, knowing how the soft arts are seen by MMA fighters, “I fully believe that if you apply your internal energy you could apply it through a firearm or a sword or an open hand. I know people will laugh, but I think you can channel energy into that weapon and into that bullet.” The Zen master archers would describe the true archer as being both the archer and the target at the same time.

The mistake that people make is they confuse Zen sayings with mastery. They think of The Karate Kid and assume that if you learn “Wax on, wax off” and your heart is pure, you can beat up a black belt. The myth is seductive, but mastery has to come first. Once you’ve shot every day and taught firearms for twenty years, then maybe you too can start to channel energy into your weapon and place the bullets where you want them. But mastery doesn’t fall into your lap when you read the Zen wisdom or begin studying tai chi. After ten thousand hours of diligent, intelligent practice, you can start thinking about the internal energies and finding ways to be the shooter, the bullet and the target.

—

“If you knew you were going into a fight, you’d want a rifle,” Tiger said. The sun ticked off the metal awning, and a tiny breeze eddied the lush Alabama jungle around the range. Cumulus clouds towered to the east, and heat lightning flickered.

“The pistol is a defensive weapon, but it’s a tool, like a hammer. A rifle is something you’d take into bed with you at night.” He’s named all his rifles; his sniper rifle is named after a coldhearted ex-girlfriend.

“The pistol is easier to learn on than a rifle, and the same principles apply. But something like eighty percent of people survive being shot with a pistol, and maybe ten percent survive being shot with a rifle.”

“Why is that?” I asked. The bullet weights or the grain are similar.

“Velocity,” Tiger said. “The AR, which is the civilian version of the M16, fires the .223 round, which isn’t all that big, but with the much longer cartridge case and more powder it has much more power and velocity.”

Tiger lent me Terminal Ballistics: A Text and Atlas of Gunshot Wounds, a forensics guide. It is a truly horrible book, but in its photographs you can see plainly the difference: the handgun wounds are small dark holes, but the rifle wounds are massive eruptions, with heads split open like burst melons.

Tiger has designed his own version of the AR, and he calls it the Katana, after the long sword of the samurai. The AR is an immensely popular rifle and has become a platform for accessories—special sights, grips, and tactical flashlights, everything but the kitchen sink. Tiger stripped it back down to its essentials.

“In my opinion, the samurai took personal combat to a much higher level than any other culture has. In feudal Japan, even a big battle was a massive series of individual combats. So I named this rifle after their sword.”

It may sound odd to think of a rifle as a sword, but when you start to look at the history of firearms, basic designs have not substantially changed in a hundred years. John Moses Browning, an American inventor who died in the 1920s, made the last real changes to modern firearms, introducing the slide action and autoloading. Since then, plenty of bells and whistles have been added, but the structures are essentially the same. Modern gunfighters—SWAT and Special Forces guys, for instance—should think about what they do in terms of martial arts, in light of a hundred years of study. A rifle can be pure like a katana.

Tiger pulled his two prototype rifles out. They are not beautiful things, these Katana ARs. They are strict black utility, alien, all hard angles and notches. Maybe an elegant simplicity could be ascribed to them, but that would stretching the aesthetic issue. My first impression of vicious, lethal metal was compounded when I brought one of the rifles to my shoulder. The gun had a hard edge and was uncomfortable. But it was light.

Tiger was even more cautious about the rifle than the pistol. “Don’t even touch it without respect,” he said, when I picked it up off the rack by the barrel. “Don’t pick it up like it’s a rake. Imagine that’s a giant laser beam that is always on, and it will cut in half anything the muzzle sweeps.” Every time you touch it, you should bring it up properly and check that it’s “clear” (that is, unloaded). Just in case the gremlins had reloaded it.

The semireligious clinging to the ritual is the mainstay in the battle against complacency. The weather was hot and I was shooting when I was tired, for days on end. If little mistakes started to creep in, they would cascade into a big one at some point. And any real mistake with a rifle was going to be supremely dangerous.

Out on the range, just holding the rifle was hard work, and I learned to seat the butt not in my shoulder, but high on my chest, in the pocket of the collarbone, just the very bottom inch or so of the stock. There, my eyes aligned perfectly with the iron sights, and my “cheek weld,” where the gun hits the cheek, was correct and tight. It just felt right.

Shooting the rifle was far easier than shooting the pistol, partly because I had no interest in rushing this scary black laser beam at all. It was a whole new world, a new level of power and emphasis. The AR was emphatic compared to the Glock 19. I shot with the plain metal sights on the rifle first, and accuracy was much easier. I made headshots at ten or fifteen yards. I couldn’t see the bullet holes, but I could hear Tiger telling me where the shots were going. If he was silent my heart fell, and I knew that I’d missed—so I would take a breath, slow it down, find the front sight, and prreessssss. At the end of two thirty-round magazines, my forearms were blazing with the effort of wielding the rifle.

With the AR your ability to fight is extended to three or four hundred yards, but we did much of our work within twenty that first day. “Most rifle shootings happen at pistol range, ten yards and less,” Tiger said. “Even police snipers are usually shooting across the street, which is well under a hundred yards.” Tiger teaches sniping to SWAT and FBI officers.

I practiced properly reloading, correcting malfunctions, even slinging the rifle over my shoulder and unslinging it. Every move should be made with maximum safety and efficiency, minimum effort. Learning to handle a gun reminded me a little of learning chess. When I started I thought that the chessboard was wide open and there were a billion ways to win. But in chess, as in a gunfight, there are correct moves to make and there is a best move.

As we walked off the range that day, soaked through with sweat, I asked Tiger, “Why do you think shooting is so much fun?”

He looked a little startled, as if maybe no one had ever asked him that.

“It’s just cool, man,” he said at last, in his laid-back regular voice. “As a kid, you think explosions are cool, and learning to hit and break stuff, and then hunting . . . it’s fun.”

—

Shooting is fun, and not because we have power over life and death: that’s too cerebral. It’s a far simpler pleasure, more like skiing. The power and thrill are primitive, rooted in our fear and love of thunder. The first time you fired a gun it scared you, even if you can’t remember. When you learn to master the elements, now the thunder and lightning come under our control. It’s exhilarating, the ability to put a bullet right there.

—

The next day we started with the red dot, a kind of scope that is attached on the top of the rifle. With the red dot, you keep both eyes open, and wherever you put the dot you put the bullet. It’s the magic of technology, basically a small lens that reflects a laser dot back toward your eye.

The red dot is kind of a miracle. It basically idiot-proofs shooting the gun. With the red dot, I’m Deadeye Dick. I’m Annie Oakley. I’ll shoot the wings off a fly. It inspires a confidence that can get out of hand.

Tiger has built what he calls the Wall, a strange conglomeration of structures about sixty yards from the targets. It’s a straight wall composed of varying types of cover: a roofline, a chain-link fence, and cement blocks, with various styles of windows and low holes.

We did a dry run first, moving down the line, heads swiveling, and from each of the ten or so positions I was supposed to get two good hits. Some were kneeling, some prone; one was angled up on a piece of roof.

One position in particular was tough. Called roll-over prone, this position was for firing the rifle through a hole maybe six inches off the ground, simulating firing under a car, as had been done in the shootout following the famous 1997 North Hollywood, California, bank robbery. In that incident, two felons wearing body armor and carrying automatic weapons had waged World War III on the local police, until finally nearby off-duty police officers went into a gun shop, commandeered weapons, and shot one of the guys from underneath a car. Interestingly, the felons had taken the muscle relaxant phenobarbital, and when you watch the security camera footage, they are slow and calm, which made them vastly more dangerous.

Finally, I stood at one side of the wall, smoothly pulled the rifle out of the slung position, put in a magazine, then ran the correct readying procedures. My eyes and the weapon pointed downrange at the target. My intention was to get the record-setting slowest time on this course.

“On you,” Tiger said behind me.

I stepped quickly behind cover and climbed up the “roof,” and as I came over the top, I awkwardly braced myself, found the sight picture, and touched the safety off. I had absolutely no idea how hard anything would be to hit at this range. I fired, and the steel target gave a ping. I controlled my breathing, let the sight settle, and pressed again. Ping.

Turns out, with that red dot, everything was pretty easy. I took my time and moved under control, scanning, weapon ready, trying for smooth as I went down the line. I climbed up and down, I crawled in prone and backed out. I didn’t rush it, and I only missed once, from roll-over prone. The roll-over prone was particularly hard because the rocks were boiling hot from the sun. But I let everything drop out of my mind—the discomfort, the searing hot rocks, the odd body position—concentrated on that front sight, and press, got my dings.

I had finally internalized the principles of shooting. You can move at varying speeds, but when you actually have to shoot, everything has to slow down. You can hurry—but not during the shooting part. So what if I was a little slow? I was getting good hits. I felt deadly.

When I finished the Wall, I could really understand how the rifle was much more effective than the pistol. There’s an old military maxim that “the rifleman controls everything he can see,” and now I knew how true that could be. Where the red dot goes, so goes a big, scary bullet at supersonic speeds, straight as a laser, pounding down. I could control the landscape, I shaped it, I owned it.

—

That night in my hotel room, I glanced over Terminal Ballistics again, and it made me deeply sad: all those dreams gone up in smoke, all that life cut short into dead meat. I was also reading a book about the siege of Stalingrad, one of the more horrific chapters of human history, and that was weighing on my mind too—the utter breakdown of society into warfare, then into total warfare, and finally into mindless killing, deprivation, cannibalism.

My one thought as I turned out the light, the thought that kept me twisting and turning, was: It must never come to this. We can never have this, any of this, for my son. The whimsical, comical aspect of training for the apocalypse felt very far away.

—

Toward the end of my stay we began to work on transitions from the rifle to the pistol and back again. Tiger had a special timer that reset at each loud bang, and he timed me in all my motions—shooting the pistol from ready, from the holster, reloading, and then shooting again with the rifle. It turned out that reloading the rifle took me almost five seconds, while switching from rifle to pistol took only two and a half seconds. So instead of reloading the rifle, you might switch to the pistol until you can move to cover or the threat is down.

Think about it like this: if you were standing in front of a guy who was shooting at you, five seconds would feel really, really long.

And it was here, in practicing these transitions, that I really began to feel the martial arts element of shooting strongly—because it was so physical, smoothly flowing between one action and another, safely, efficiently, with no wasted motion. Tiger would bark at me anytime I didn’t have an active weapon up on target—and if the threat was down, better get back to that rifle and get it cleared and reloaded, because another old maxim is “The pistol is what you fight your way back to the rifle with.” The actions acquired a smoothness that felt like boxing, like ballet, a beautiful, smooth, economical action that is also fast and deadly, as it should be. I danced the way of two guns.

Up on my roof, I smoothly bring the AR to my shoulder, light as thought. The red dot flares on.

The zombie is standing at the gate to our yard, sniffing, hunting for the living inside. He bangs against the gate, then starts to climb it. Another zombie slouches up behind him. The first climbs slowly, moving as if he’s underwater, and the red dot settles on his forehead. I breathe; watch the dot rise, fall, and settle; hold my breath; and gently press. The rifle cracks, and the zombie crumples and falls.

I breathe and adjust. The red dot finds the other zombie, clambering over the first. Breathe, hold, and the dot settles . . . crack, the zombie splays out. I am mechanical, detached, a smooth-functioning machine. I lower the rifle and scan.

For now, the street is empty. I know there will be more, a lot more. But I have a lot more bullets, too.