rising in the 1980s, but studies in New York and elsewhere showed that the average police gunfight involved officers firing only two or three times each. In other words, six-shot revolvers still provided sufficient firepower for the typical violent encounter. Moreover, the number of US law enforcement officers killed annually on the job was falling. In 1973, police fatalities hit an all-time high of 268. By a decade later, the figure had dropped to 191; by 1993, it was down to 157. The real lesson of the Miami Shootout was that the FBI was poorly prepared. The agents on stakeout failed to equip themselves with military-style rifles at their disposal, and most of them neglected to wear armored vests. The FBI—and experts like Palank—played down these disheartening facts to promote a less damning story about revolvers having lost the day through no fault of the valiant federal agents. Unsurprisingly, civilians such as Davis readily accepted what they were told. After hearing Palank’s talk, Davis went home “and ordered several Glock pistols to try out.”
A chaplain and religious historian by training, Davis works in a one-story office building he owns on the main commercial street of his north-central Florida town. Every day he puts on a white shirt, striped tie, and business suit—and tucks a handgun in his belt holster. His decision to carry a firearm presents challenges in the Florida humidity. He explained that a finish called Tenifer makes the Glock’s steel slide largely impervious to rust and even to the corrosive effects of sweat and salt water. Perspiration is not a threat to the gun’s plastic frame. Davis’s wife and adult son, who work in the family business, also carry handguns, usually Glocks.
The Davis men are statistically typical American gun owners: white, Protestant, politically right-leaning, and middle class. The elder Davis serves as a GOP committeeman, sings in his church choir, and meets some afternoons with friends at the local gun store. He lifted weights competitively as an undergraduate at Florida State University and, in his early sixties, resembles nothing so much as a 170-pound, five-foot-nine tree trunk. Sporting a bristly gray flattop, he doesn’t speak so much as rumble, in a thick north Florida dialect.
Davis and his wife, Mary, a wispy, high-voiced woman of roughly the same age, met at the Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, where John enrolled after Florida State to prepare for his intended career as a hospital or prison chaplain. Mary completed her undergraduate English degree at a small religious college in Jackson. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life,” she said. Then she corrected herself: “I wanted to get married and raise a Christian family.” A minister she knew recommended that she attend the seminary to look for a husband. She did, and she found one. They married and moved to Florida so John could take a job as chaplain of a center for troubled children. He later switched careers, going into business for himself.
The Davises compete together in a monthly tournament sponsored by the International Defensive Pistol Association. John loaned me his twenty-two-year-old Glock 17 for the competition. He believes that all adults should carry guns as an exercise of civic responsibility. “An armed society is a polite society,” he said, echoing a popular NRA aphorism originally coined by the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein.
In an essay called “America as a Gun Culture,” historian Richard Hofstadter traced our distinctive regard for firearms to the anti-militarism of eighteenth-century British Whig politicians. For those English thinkers, the ultimate civic vice was a standing army of the sort the American Revolutionaries resented and eventually shot at. Virtue was embodied by the rugged yeomen admired by Thomas Jefferson, who included in his first draft of the Virginia constitution that “no freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”
“What began as a necessity of agriculture and the frontier took hold as a sport and as an ingredient in the American imagination,” Hofstadter observed. “For millions of American boys, learning to shoot and above all graduating from toy guns and receiving the first real rifle of their own were milestones of life, veritable rites of passage that certified their arrival at manhood.”
For Christmas when he was sixteen years old John Davis’s grandparents gave him a .45-caliber pistol that had been in the family for decades. “That was something special,” he recalled. “That was my self-defense pistol for a long time.” He practiced at an old sawmill, shooting targets he propped up in front of piles of wood dust that served as a backstop. Davis spoke about the pleasure over the years of “working” with guns, “feeding” various models different brands of ammunition to see which ones they would “digest” the best. In his description, firearms are alive.
On several occasions, Davis said, he was “really, really glad I had a firearm with me.” Before he was married, for example, he was sitting late at night on a deserted beach in Pensacola with a girlfriend; three men approached, menacingly. “They had come up using the dune as a screen,” he recounted. “I happened to have that little firearm. Never even pointed at them. As soon as I produced the gun, they were just like ghosts. They just melted away.”
A self-described orthodox Presbyterian, Davis believes that “this self-defense stuff has to be driven by principles that are not just from the inside of men.… There is a God in Heaven who has not just put everything in place and backed off and left it like a wound-up grandfather clock to tick. He has told men in the Scriptures how they are to live. Those principles that are enscripturated are there for us to bring out and apply for life.” He illustrated his point with the Sixth Commandment: “Thou shall not kill.” Liberals, he argued, interpret the divine rule too broadly, as a ban on all killing. Many conservatives understand the proscription as applying only to murder. Davis sees the issue slightly differently. “If you are not to slay, if you are not to arbitrarily take human life,” he said, “then the opposite side is you must protect human life, which is part of the basis for self-defense.”
Mary Davis says firearms make her feel safer. Like her husband, she has a Florida concealed-carry permit, and she usually is armed with a nine-millimeter Glock when she leaves the house.
Has she ever had to use a weapon to defend herself?
No, she said. But it does give her reassurance. One time when she accompanied John to a business conference in Houston, she and a tour bus full of other wives ended up in a tough inner-city neighborhood. The driver seemed lost, and it was getting dark. “I was glad to have that gun,” she said. “I didn’t know what could happen in a neighborhood like that.”
“You have a right to peace of mind,” her husband said. “Wrong neighborhood of a strange city—you [can] get in trouble quick.”
“I don’t ever want to shoot someone,” Mary added, “but I don’t want to be a victim.”
Mary told a story about the sometimes heavy responsibility of carrying a firearm. Years ago, she attended a family wedding in Texas. She hitched a ride with a relative to the celebration, but planned to return to Florida by plane. She had her Glock with her. You can’t carry a handgun onto a plane, of course, although airlines do allow guns to be transported with checked luggage. But Mary didn’t want to bother checking her bag, so she gave the weapon to a male relative who was driving home. The gun was loaded.
“I was not as responsible as I should have been,” Mary said, her head bowed in confession.
The relative stayed overnight with his son in a motel on the car trip home. When the father and boy got to their room, the man took the Glock from his bag, saw that there was a magazine in the grip, and decided, understandably, to unload the gun.
“But he was beyond his level of competency,” said John, who is a stickler for firearm safety.
The man pushed the magazine-eject button and slid the mag out. But before doing that, he made a cardinal mistake. He pulled the slide back to look in the firing chamber. He didn’t see a round in the chamber and released the slide. When a semiautomatic pistol’s slide is released in that fashion, it scoops up a cartridge from the spring- loaded magazine and places it in the chamber. Basic safety procedure is to remove the magazine first,
For whatever reason, the man pointed the gun, which he thought was empty, in the direction of the motel room bed and pulled the trigger.
“That Glock did what a Glock is supposed to do,” John said.
The bullet ricocheted off the bed frame. A fragment of the round hit the man’s young son in the leg, shattering bone. The injury was severe, requiring extended hospitalization. The police investigated, but no charges were filed. The boy recovered over a period of months. The Glock was returned to Mary in the end. No one blamed her—but she couldn’t forgive herself: “I will never be able to forget it. That boy won’t forget it. His father won’t forget it.”
“You were not irresponsible,” John insisted. After a minute of awkward silence, he sighed and put a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “That marks you,” he said, not specifying who was marked. “It marks you like Cain. There are
