Magazine
LETTER FROM
TEXAS
They’re Afraid. They’re Buying Guns. But They’re
Not Voting for Trump.
The drumbeat of national crisis is driving first-time
gun sales across the country. The buyers aren’t who you might expect.
AUSTIN, TX
- OCTOBER 15, 2020 - Michael Cargill teaches a student how to aim and fire a
handgun during the range qualification test portion of a Texas License to Carry
a Handgun course at the Central Texas Gun Works range near Austin, Tex.
Photos by
Tamir Kalifa for Politico Magazine
By CIARA
O’ROURKE
10/25/2020
07:00 AM EDT
Ciara
O'Rourke is a freelance writer and editor.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/25/first-time-gun-sales-not-voting-for-trump-430310
AUSTIN,
Texas—Noah Horner always wanted a gun, but the 24-year-old tech company
engineer had never been motivated enough to follow through. At least until this
year, when coronavirus shut down the country, the economy tanked, unemployment
spiked, more than 220,000 died, and a series of killings by police inspired
thousands of protests, some of which turned violent.
Six weeks
ago, because of what he understatedly calls “the current environment,” Horner
bought his first firearm, a Glock 43X handgun that he keeps in his nightstand
while he sleeps. But he didn’t want just to protect himself at home. He was
worried he might need it as he was going about his daily life. In Austin, an
Army sergeant had shot and killed a protester he said pointed a rifle at him
after he turned his car onto a street where a demonstration was taking place.
Horner wondered: What if I had to confront protesters alone at night? But if
Horner wanted to be able to carry his new weapon in public, he’d need a
license. Which is why on a recent Saturday morning, he drove to a strip mall in
South Austin to sit in a windowless classroom at Central Texas Gun Works.
The class
of about 20 people was being taught by the store’s owner, Michael Cargill, who
offers up to four classes a week; the Saturday sessions are booked weeks in
advance. He said he has noticed a shift in his clientele this year. Typically,
Cargill’s customers are mostly conservative, he said, and the people enrolled
in his license to carry classes are a mix of Republicans, Democrats and Libertarians.
But lately, he said, the majority of the students are coming from the left side
of the political spectrum.
For months
Donald Trump has tweeted “LAW & ORDER” in all caps and cast himself as a
“tough on crime” leader who will quell the unrest that defined the summer. He
warned the “suburban housewives of America” that Joe Biden would destroy their
neighborhoods. It’s a message that seems designed to appeal to anxious people
like Horner. But it isn’t.
Horner told
me he doesn’t consider himself political, but he said he’s planning to vote for
Biden. He thinks Trump has embarrassed the country and mishandled the pandemic.
Two others in the class, a young couple, described themselves as left-leaning,
and they both have cast early ballots for Biden. Zachary Harris, 23, and his
fiancée, 24-year-old Amy Taylor, purchased their first firearms about six
months before the course—a shotgun, a .22 rifle and a handgun. Even though
Taylor grew up around guns, they were both wary of the dangers the weapons
posed if they didn’t handle them carefully. But soon they expected to have
something to protect—a child. And as a woman, Taylor felt vulnerable. Harris,
who said he once would have described himself as anti-gun, said they’re not
alone among their left-leaning friends who are also considering what kinds of
weapons they should own.
Across the
country, gun sales are high. Ammunition is sold out. And Cargill, among other
retailers, is selling more firearms to first-time buyers. Gun retailers in the
United States estimate that 40 percent of their sales during the first four
months of 2020 were to first-time buyers compared with an annual average of 24
percent in years past, according to a survey conducted by the National Shooting
Sports Foundation, the firearm industry’s trade association.
Between
Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, about 15.4 million background checks were conducted
nationally, said Mark Oliva, public affairs director for the foundation. That’s
more than all of 2019, and quickly approaching the all-time record of 15.7
million checks in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was running for president.
Gun sales
typically rise during an election year, but 2020, Oliva said, has been “unlike
any other.” And the demographics of gun buyers appear to be shifting, too.
Retailers are selling to more women, and more Black men and women, than in
previous years. Oliva, who is a 47-year-old, white Marine veteran, said gun
owners are starting to look less like him and more like Cargill, who is Black.
Sales data don’t provide clues about buyers’ politics. But Cargill’s
interactions with his customers across the counter tell him that talk about
civil unrest around the upcoming election is just one more reason people are
feeling anxious enough to buy a weapon now.
“If I dial
911, I’m not going to get the police officer,” Cargill said, explaining how
some people have weighed the decision to arm themselves, “I’m going to have to
be my own first responder. I’m going to have to get a gun.”
Like some
of his new clients, Michael Cargill may not meet everyone’s expectations about
the kinds of people who pack heat. Cargill is gay, Black and Republican. In
recent years, he’s both pushed back on the county GOP for rejecting LGBT
candidates for precinct chair positions and sued the federal government over
its ban on so-called bump stocks that permit more rapid firing. His pickup
truck has a license plate that says “Come and Take It” and he hosts a talk
radio show called “Come and Talk It.” But that spirit of defiance doesn’t
extend to the state’s pandemic-era mask mandate. Before Cargill allows people
to enter Central Texas Gun Works for their license to carry class, he makes
sure they’re wearing a face covering and then he takes their temperature. In
the classroom, he wields a spray bottle of hand sanitizer, circling the room
and spritzing open palms as he goes.
On this
Saturday, wearing a clear face shield and a gun holster clipped to his belt,
Cargill stood at the head of the room, explaining the steps everyone would have
to take to secure their license to carry a firearm in the state of Texas. They
would need to prove they could shoot proficiently and pass a written
examination, which Cargill reassured them virtually no one in his classes had
ever failed. Over the course of the five-hour class, not counting the time the
group spent at the shooting range, Cargill talked about how to hold a handgun
and how to identify their dominant eye to help them aim. He covered how to
properly conceal a weapon in a vehicle, what crimes could result in a license
suspension, and what states recognize Texas license-to-carry permits. One
poster hanging on the wall reads, “Where can I legally carry in Texas?” The
list includes the state capitol.
“You can
get kicked out of the capitol for yelling but not for carrying a gun,” Cargill
said, clapping his hands joyfully. “I’m never leaving Texas!”
Later, he
also explained under what circumstances they could draw their guns or use
lethal force. Many of the people in the class had specific scenarios that have
preoccupied them. Amy Taylor, the engaged 20-something, asked under what
circumstances she could pull her gun if she were out with a friend and a man
started to forcibly drag her away. Preventing an aggravated kidnapping is
definitely justified, he told her.
Then
Cargill announced that they were going to discuss current events and the
conversation turned to cases that had dominated the news over the past several
months. He asked what specific shootings the class wanted to talk about. Noah
Horner spoke up. He wanted to know about Kyle Rittenhouse, the armed teenager
who shot and killed two protesters and wounded a third in a confrontation in
Kenosha, Wisconsin.
“Me too!”
said a woman across the room.
Cargill’s
telling of the incident was sympathetic to Rittenhouse, 17, who has been
charged with two counts of first-degree intentional homicide. Rittenhouse, he
said, was in Kenosha cleaning graffiti from a high school when a local business
owner asked Rittenhouse and his friends to protect the man’s property during
protests over the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Rittenhouse, who was armed
with an AR-15-style rifle, was later chased by protesters, some of whom tried
to take his rifle away. He fired his weapon in self-defense, Cargill continued,
echoing what Rittenhouse’s lawyers have said. Details about the incident are
still emerging. The business owner, for example, has said he didn’t ask anyone
for help and it’s still unclear what provoked the confrontation between
Rittenhouse and the first protester he shot. Cargill had enough information to
render his opinion: The shooting was justified.
Students
fire handguns during the range qualification test portion of a Texas License to
Carry a Handgun course at the Central Texas Gun Works range near Austin, Tex. |
Tamir Kalifa for Politico Magazine
Students
fire handguns during the range qualification test portion of a Texas License to
Carry a Handgun course at the Central Texas Gun Works range near Austin, Tex.,
on Oct. 15, 2020.
He compared
Rittenhouse to Ahmaud Arbery, the unarmed Black man who was shot and killed in
February after he was pursued by two armed white residents while running near
his home in Georgia. The difference between Arbery and Rittenhouse, Cargill
said, is Rittenhouse had a rifle. Gregory McMichael and his son Travis
McMichael, who were charged in Arbery’s death, were legally carrying their
firearms under Georgia law, but Cargill said they weren’t justified in the
shooting.
But Breonna
Taylor’s boyfriend was justified when he shot at the police who forced their
way into her Louisville apartment to serve a warrant, Cargill said. And so, he
said, were the officers who returned fire, killing Taylor in her bedroom.
One man,
who identified himself as a military veteran from Portland, Ore., wondered
whether he would be justified in shooting if he found himself in a situation
similar to what protesters reported there—men in generic uniforms dragging
demonstrators into unmarked minivans. In this case, the men turned out to be
federal agents but that didn’t change Cargill’s opinion.
Under Texas
law, Cargill said, “you can use deadly force to stop them.” If you don't know
they’re law enforcement and they don’t identify themselves, it's justified.
“Unmarked vehicle and plainclothes is suicide,” he told me later.
Finally,
Cargill returned to a case that had riveted Austin itself. Daniel Perry, an
Army sergeant shot and killed Garrett Foster, an armed Black Lives Matter
demonstrator in July. Some people at the scene have said Foster didn’t raise
the AK-47 rifle he was carrying, and that Perry, who had made statements on
social media critical of protesters, seemed to use his car as a weapon. But
Cargill sided with the sergeant. Perry, he said, was justified. Horner, who had
recently been watching YouTube videos that dissect shootings, agreed.
“He made a
turn and all these guys were in the street,” Horner told me later. “I think
that he was justified because they started banging on his car and that guy’s
walking up with an AR. That’s pretty scary.”
Horner
understands protesting during the day, he said, but after the sun sets, people
who want to cause trouble show up. He tries to avoid downtown at night. He’s
from Oklahoma, where he attended college in a small town that didn’t see much
crime. Arriving in Austin, he said, “immediately you could just tell there’s
evil people here.”
But if
those fears seem to echo recent Republican talking points about the capital
city and a host of other big cities around the country, Horner also said he
thinks “this is a pretty important year to vote blue.”
Like
Horner, Harris said that there are things about both the major political
parties that he and Taylor disagree with. But they’ve been turned off by what
feels to them like a president steering the country toward civil unrest. “We’d
like a president that would at least not push people to political violence,” he
said.
Harris was
disconcerted by how some of the people in the license to carry class “almost
sounded eager” to shoot someone. But Cargill also dedicated much of the class
to discouraging people from drawing their weapons in tense situations. A
license to carry is supposed to help you protect yourself and your family,
Cargill said—not turn you into a one-person armed security force. Don’t chase
down the suspect in a convenience store robbery you happen to witness, he said.
Use your phone to take pictures and call the police instead. The last option
should be a gun, he explained, because “once you use that gun your life is
going to change forever.”
“Do we
shoot to kill in Texas?” he shouted. When no one responded, he said it again.
“Do we shoot to kill in Texas?”
A few
people said yes.
“No!” he
said. “We shoot to end the threat.”
Michael
Cargill looks on as students prepare to fire handguns during the range
qualification test portion of a Texas License to Carry a Handgun course at the
Central Texas Gun Works range near Austin, Tex., on Oct. 15, 2020. | Tamir
Kalifa for Politico Magazine
Michael
Cargill looks on as students prepare to fire handguns during the range
qualification test portion of the course.
If they do
end up having to pull the trigger, he told the class, the first call should be
to police. But it should be brief, and after they hang up, they should
immediately call their lawyer. A lawyer, he said, would protect them against
making incriminating statements. Toward the end of the class, a representative
for Texas LawShield, a prepaid legal service for gun owners, passed out forms
to sign up. Horner started to fill out the paperwork as she made her pitch. He
figured that it would cost him a fraction of the amount he’d owe if he had to
go court for using his gun. Plus, if they joined that day, the woman said, they
could lock in a monthly rate for life.
“You never
know when you’re going to need it,” she said. “Especially right now. Everything’s
crazy.”
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