[The classes I attended trained students to believe that their
lives are in constant danger. They prepared us to shoot without
hesitation and avoid legal consequences. They instilled the kind of
fear that has a corrosive effect on all interactions — and beyond
that, on the fabric of our democracy. ]
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FIREARMS CLASSES TAUGHT ME, AND AMERICA, A VERY DANGEROUS LESSON  
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Harel Shapira
May 16, 2023
New York Times
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_ The classes I attended trained students to believe that their lives
are in constant danger. They prepared us to shoot without hesitation
and avoid legal consequences. They instilled the kind of fear that has
a corrosive effect on all interactions — and beyond that, on the
fabric of our democracy. _

, Jérôme Berthier

 

I did not grow up around guns, but 10 years ago, I started attending
firearms training classes. I wasn’t there to learn how to protect
myself or my family. I was there to learn what was taught in the
classes themselves, which a broad coalition of groups — including
many police officers, Republican and Democratic legislators and gun
violence prevention organizations — have hailed as a path out of the
nation’s epidemic of violence.

I found something very different. The classes I attended trained
students to believe that their lives are in constant danger. They
prepared us to shoot without hesitation and avoid legal consequences.
They instilled the kind of fear that has a corrosive effect on all
interactions — and beyond that, on the fabric of our democracy.

I took 42 classes and conducted interviews with 52 instructors and 118
students, in traditionally red states like Texas as well as blue
states like Massachusetts, in urban areas like Newark as well as rural
Southern Illinois. (The instructors knew I was there to conduct
research; in keeping with my university’s academic protocols, I had
permission to take notes in class and to record interviews but not to
publish anyone’s names.) Most of all, I immersed myself in firearms
schools in Texas, where I live, that cater to people who wish to learn
how to use guns for self-defense. Some instructors in these schools
told me they have been involved in drafting public safety protocols or
running active shooter drills for public school teachers. Some of
these instructors’ students have gone on to open training programs
of their own.

While American gun culture has diversified in recent years, the
overwhelming majority of firearms instructors — in Texas it’s 75
percent — are white men. Many have a background in the military or
law enforcement. Nationwide, more than 125,000 of them have taken a
certification course offered by the National Rifle Association. Many
states require instructors to complete additional training.

 

First, the good news: Every firearms instructor I encountered was
extremely serious about preventing accidents. When a student
inadvertently pointed his gun at me for a moment, our instructor
immediately chastised him. And when the student objected, saying he
didn’t have his finger on the trigger, the instructor became livid
and threatened to kick him out of class.

But teaching people how to avoid shooting someone by accident is a
small part of what these classes are about. The primary lessons are
about if and when to shoot someone on purpose. And this is where the
trouble begins.

Instructors repeatedly told me that a big part of their job was to
make people feel vulnerable, to make them aware of dangers they were
not conscious of before to understand that bad things can happen at
any time. One instructor told me he encourages students to carry their
gun at all times. If students say they plan to leave it in the car, he
responds, “So what you’re telling me is the only time you are ever
going to get attacked is if you are in your car?”

The instructors describe a world teeming with violent and deranged
individuals. And not just any individuals. The scenarios cluster
around the public spaces of racially diverse cities. “More often
than not,” an instructor who had been a high-ranking police officer
said, the place you’re likely to be attacked is “in an urban part
of society.” Another instructor, also a former police officer, tells
students to keep their gas tanks filled at least halfway to avoid
situations in which “it’s the middle of the night and you need to
get gas in downtown Houston.”

Outside a restaurant in Austin, an instructor saw a disheveled man
sitting on the curb and nudged me in the other direction, directing me
to pick up the pace. He said he had detected “potential predatory
behavior” and wasn’t sure if this man was a panhandler or someone
about to stick a gun in our faces.

Instructors repeatedly told me that statistics about crime are
meaningless when it comes to the need to carry a gun. It’s not the
odds, I heard on numerous occasions; it’s the consequences. I have
been taught strategies for avoiding interactions with strangers. I
have participated in scenario training sessions in which students
carrying guns loaded with plastic ammunition enact mock burglaries,
home invasions, mass shootings and attacks by Islamic terrorists.
Repeatedly the lesson was that I ought to shoot even when my instincts
might tell me otherwise.

For example, in one scenario, an instructor pretended to punch someone
I know and care about in the head. The instructor’s back was toward
me, so I held my fire. Later, I told him that I hadn’t had enough
information to act. Wrong answer. Being punched in the head can be
fatal, the instructor told me, so there was no time to wait. I had
never heard someone advocate shooting an unarmed person in the back.
The instructor did it with a sense of moral, legal and tactical
clarity and conviction.

Officially, the message is caution. A line I heard from multiple
instructors was: If you are not about to die in the next three
seconds, don’t pull the trigger. If you are not 100 percent sure,
then don’t shoot. But relentlessly harping on the dangers that
surround us changes the way students assess those risks.

I experienced it myself.

On a recent night I saw a driver who didn’t appear to realize that
he was going the wrong way on a one-way street. As the other car
approached, I began to slow down, roll down my window and stick my
hand out in a friendly gesture. Suddenly I worried the other driver
might have a gun. How might he respond to someone slowing down a car
and waving at him in the middle of the night? Would he shoot? Probably
not. But it’s not the odds, I remember telling myself; it’s the
consequences.

That’s the great irony of firearms training: In learning how to use
a gun for self-defense, something that seems like it might give you
confidence and a sense of safety, people end up feeling more afraid
than before. “I knew the world was dangerous,” a student told me
after class one day, “but this was a real wake-up call.” “He
scared the daylights out of me,” I heard from another student, who
went straight from class to a gun store. Others who already owned a
gun told me the classes made them feel the gun should be bigger, with
a larger caliber and more capacity.

Firearms instructors are not the only ones who make an appearance at
self-defense classes. Lawyers do, too. Lawyers who specialize in
defending gun owners. They go to classes and tell students how to talk
(or not) to 911 operators and police officers in the event they shoot
someone. In one seminar, a lawyer emphasized the importance of
explaining, “I had no choice.”

With more than 200 mass shootings
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advocates of gun regulation often cite the tragic number of lives lost
or the fact that gun-related injuries have surpassed car accidents as
the nation’s leading cause of injury-related death
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people under 24. But another, less recognized casualty is the kind of
public interactions that make democracy viable. The N.R.A. says
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society is a polite society.” But learning to carry a gun isn’t
teaching Americans to have good manners. It’s training them to be
suspicious and atomized, learning to protect themselves, no matter how
great the risk to others. It’s training them to not be citizens.

_Harel Shapira is an associate professor of sociology at the
University of Texas, Austin._

 

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