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"FacebookPinterest\n\n My parents are sweet, smart, lovely people. My dad grew up in southeast Texas\u2014you can sometimes catch a bit of swampy twang when he talks\u2014and once, when he was a punk-ass longhair kid, he shared a table at a club with Janis Joplin. These days he&amp;#39;s been known to, unprompted, clear the neighbor&amp;#39;s driveway with his snowblower. This is in the suburbs of Omaha, so, you know, that&amp;#39;s just how the guy rolls. My mom&amp;#39;s a killer quilter\u2014if you happened to see the March 2012 issue of American Quilter magazine, yeah, she worked on the cover quilt\u2014and runs a specialty quilting shop. They are adorable, my parents.\n\n They are armed to the teeth at all times.\n\n You wouldn&amp;#39;t know it by looking at them, because they own sneaky little concealment holsters and, in the case of my mother, a purse that has a special hidden gun pocket where she secretes away the pistol she bought precisely because of how easily it fits into her purse&amp;#39;s special hidden gun pocket. There&amp;#39;s a gun stashed away in most of the rooms in their house, including the computer room, where a signed photo of celebrity Marine sniper Carlos Hathcock (ninety-three confirmed kills) hangs on the wall.\n\n Guns have always been in the Segura household\u2014my old man served twenty-four years in the air force doing one of those &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;d tell you but then I&amp;#39;d have to kill you&amp;quot; jobs, and growing up in military communities, you didn&amp;#39;t see a lot of Dukakis bumper stickers\u2014but it wasn&amp;#39;t until a few years ago that guns became such a prominent feature. This development coincided with my folks&amp;#39; procurement of concealed-carry permits. Early on, in the honeymoon period with their permits, I wanted to believe it was a novelty. They could carry, and therefore they carried. It&amp;#39;s a new toy, right? But it&amp;#39;s like any other routine: You build your patterns, and your ways quickly get set. One day you&amp;#39;re walking out the door and checking to make sure you&amp;#39;ve got your keys, wallet, and sunglasses. Day after, you&amp;#39;re making sure you&amp;#39;ve got your keys, wallet, sunglasses, and your .38.\n\n Anyway. Soon after my folks got their permits, my wife and I visited. The old man picked us up at the airport, and on the drive home, someone cut us off on the freeway. As one does, my dad commented on the many ways the guy was an asshole. Then he patted his watch cap, which was lying on the center console. &amp;quot;Would hate to have to use this,&amp;quot; he said. He shot me a wink and picked up the cap, and there it was: the Glock.\n\n He was joking, of course. But that was a turning point, and pretty rapidly the right to carry became the duty to carry. Going to see Granny? Grab the Glock. Grocery run? Grab the Glock. Gassing up the car? Grab the Glock. Going to the yarn store? Maybe just the .380 for that one. You know, in the movies, when the Seals are in the helicopter and are about to land and run out and fuck shit up? There&amp;#39;s that scene, every time, where they&amp;#39;re all checking to make sure they&amp;#39;re locked and loaded. That&amp;#39;s what it&amp;#39;s like to run an errand with my parents. They&amp;#39;re not any more worried about being mugged than they were before they started packing, but now, you see: Now they&amp;#39;re prepared. I called them up recently, the Sunday check-in. Know what they were doing? Shopping for gear to put in a gunshot first-aid kit. Two kits, actually: one for each car. Prepared.\n\n A little while ago, they took a four-day class with a guy who travels the country teaching armed self-defense workshops. Dude looks like he eats a bowl of broken glass for breakfast and washes it down with a shot of rattlesnake venom. My folks told me what they were up to, and I thought: Shit. They&amp;#39;re going to vigilante camp. I went through my mental Rolodex of defense attorneys I used to know from my days as a reporter in Omaha: Who would I call when Mom was facing a second-degree-murder beef? After all, the coursework is a mix of classroom lecture\u2014rules of engagement, threat recognition, legal stuff\u2014and live-fire training where you learn things like how to draw from concealment, how to shoot left- and right-handed and from cover, how to quickly reload (think about that for a second: reload), and then how to deal with the cops when they show up. (Hint: Don&amp;#39;t lie.) You learn when it&amp;#39;s okay to pull the trigger. Turns out there&amp;#39;s a pretty high standard for when you can take someone down. Ask yourself: Is this person going to kill me? For real, though. Not like, there&amp;#39;s a menacing figure in a leather jacket walking toward you. You can&amp;#39;t shoot that guy. Not even if he comes up to you and says, &amp;quot;Gimme all your money.&amp;quot; Keep your finger off the trigger. He takes a swing? Pretty much, you still can&amp;#39;t blast him. My mom\u2014intelligent, responsible lady\u2014did not know when she could and could not shoot someone. She told me she was a menace to society before the class and that it was a miracle she wasn&amp;#39;t in prison. And here&amp;#39;s the thing: Neither she nor my dad want to shoot anyone. They&amp;#39;re about as dangerous as a pair of napping kittens. I think a lot of it was simply a matter of a couple of empty nesters looking for something to do once their asshole kids were out of the house. But those perfunctory safety classes they had to take to get their permits did not prepare them for the reality of what it means to walk around strapped. So, yeah, I&amp;#39;m glad my folks went to gun camp, and I don&amp;#39;t really worry about them these days. What I do worry about is that crank out there who managed to limp over the very low hurdle that stood between him and his permit and is cruising the streets with a pistol full of hollow-points jammed in his waistband, being righteous and uneducated and looking for a reason. That guy&amp;#39;s a problem. Something like 6 million people with concealed-carry permits, how many are that guy?\n\n My folks aren&amp;#39;t whack jobs. They&amp;#39;re not doomsday preppers. They&amp;#39;re not even on the neighborhood watch. (I don&amp;#39;t think their neighborhood even has one, that&amp;#39;s how tame it is where they live.) Most cops will tell you they&amp;#39;ve never once had to take a shot. Cops. Whose job it is to chase bad guys down dark alleys. But none of that matters, because the carry movement is about emotion. Eventually it has an effect on you, the idea that if you are not armed you are not safe. It is, at its core, about fear. Fear and insecurity. And even more than &amp;quot;the need to,&amp;quot; it seems to be about &amp;quot;the right to.&amp;quot; The Second Amendment has become so distorted that today carrying a concealed pistol is a patriotic duty. Now, I&amp;#39;m not quite convinced that the Founding Fathers&amp;#39; intention with that whole &amp;quot;well-regulated militia&amp;quot; thing was to enshrine the right to strap on a .45 when you run out to grab a pizza, but go ahead: Try having that discussion.\n\n There&amp;#39;s a lot about my lifestyle choices that don&amp;#39;t make any sense to my parents, either. Dropping $400 on a pair of shoes? Crazy. Flying to Europe to watch a ninety-minute sporting event? Insanity. Bugging out to the Middle East for a couple of weeks? Pretty goddamned ill-advised. And yet for all our differences on the gun front, there is one place where we do meet in the middle: the shooting range. I&amp;#39;ll confess that the highlight of my trips home these days is shooting with my folks. Yep, I&amp;#39;m your typical effete East Coast dickface, but when I&amp;#39;m back in Omaha, I go native.\n\n It&amp;#39;s fucking amazing, the range. This is how we work it: First thing, we decide, en famille, which pistols to bring. We normally take the .22 for my wife (a Massachusetts liberal who has hung out a few times with the Dalai Lama, she&amp;#39;s caught the bug, too), a revolver, and either the Glock nine-millimeter or Glock .40, though sometimes we go full Travis Bickle and bring both Glocks. We pack our kit early so we can arrive at The Bullet Hole before the rush. (My parents are members.) It&amp;#39;s a pretty slick setup they have there: We walk in with our bags full of lethal toys, sign in, and\u2014bang!\u2014we&amp;#39;re off. Shooting, I&amp;#39;m a fan of the one-handed lean-forward stance, with its essence of &amp;quot;You talkin&amp;#39; to me?&amp;quot; My wife&amp;#39;s more a traditional two-handed, face-forward, feet-apart kind of shooter, the way my dad showed her. Her first time out there, she got a convict-looking teardrop burn when a nine-millimeter casing bounced its way under her shooting glasses. That was a tender moment: baby&amp;#39;s first brass burn.\n\n We go at it for an hour or so, rotating through guns and blasting through targets. We help each other out: I&amp;#39;ll load a couple of magazines so my dad can blaze away with minimal reload time. He&amp;#39;ll do the same for me later. Maybe a couple of lanes over, there&amp;#39;s a guy shooting something full-auto, and there&amp;#39;s casings pinging all over the place, and, you know, it&amp;#39;s indoors, so even with the ear protection it&amp;#39;s loud like a methed-up Chinese New Year, and the air is sharp with the stinging smell of burnt powder, and there&amp;#39;s my mom and my wife trading off shooting their dainty lady guns, and my old man is punching forty-cal holes in a hostage-situation target at ten yards, and by the end my wrist is throbbing and my shooting hand is silver-black with gunpowder residue and my ears are ringing and my dad gives me a thumbs-up: Job well done. It&amp;#39;s fantastic. Fuckin&amp;#39; America, man!\n\n Well, Middle America. I&amp;#39;m from there, mostly, so I get it. I also realize my folks are a bit more passionate about their guns and living the self-defense lifestyle than most. But that sort of quality family time wouldn&amp;#39;t fly in my communist-utopia N.Y.C. Not that we&amp;#39;ve really had the opportunity to give it a shot. I&amp;#39;ve lived in New York for ten years, and my folks have been out here twice: when I finished grad school and when I got married. I&amp;#39;ve never pressed them on why they don&amp;#39;t visit, but I suspect that one of the prime reasons they haven&amp;#39;t is that they wouldn&amp;#39;t be able to legally carry on the mean cobblestone streets of my fancified corner of Brooklyn. Who knows, right? A nanny could have a psycho freak-out. A Euro tourist could go rabid and bash your face in with his giant camera. A sniper could set up shop on one of the luxury rooftop cabanas nearby. The possibilities for danger are limitless, and out here you only have the cops to protect you. Good luck with that.\n\n Look, guns are some scary shit. Handguns especially. You look at a handgun, you hold a handgun, and you understand: The purpose of this tool is to shoot someone. With a rifle you can kill a moose and, if you&amp;#39;re in Alaska, eat on it all winter. A pistol? That&amp;#39;s for shooting people. And yet here I am, trucking my spent Nespresso capsules to SoHo to get recycled, and my parents are over there shopping for khakis with secret gun pockets\u2014and our happy middle ground just happens to be at a shooting range, popping off rounds. For all the destructive power packed into pistols, they&amp;#39;ve also got, in our case, a remarkable ability to create some full-bore Norman Rockwell moments. That&amp;#39;s how I like my guns: at a cozy distance. But this is for sure\u2014if the shit does hit the fan? I&amp;#39;m going to Omaha."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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