Free Gun Guys by Dan Baum Page B

same time. Oliver ended his call and addressed himself to me. “Sorry. It’s just nuts!”
    “Silencers?”
    “Silencers, guns, everything!”
    “How’d you get into this?”
    “My mother grew up in Germany during the war and hates guns,” he said. “She wouldn’t let me have a squirt gun, wouldn’t let me have a rubber-band gun. Wouldn’t let me point my finger and go ‘Bang.’ Well, Mom?” He gestured at the firepower surrounding us on the walls. “Look what you did.”
    “And the silencers?”
    “The majority of my customers are like you.” He swung both arms back, up and over, to point two index fingers at my nose. “They want a silencer because it’s such a taboo. But then they discover that it makes sense to quiet it all down. You try to teach a kid to shoot, and if he’s wearing hearing protectors, you have to yell so he can hear you. Kids get tired of people yelling at them! They tune them out! Silence the gun, you don’t have that problem.
    “I won’t shoot without a silencer anymore,” he continued. “Why should I? Why put up with the noise when you don’t have to? Most guys don’t start out thinking that way. They start out thinking just,
It’s cool. It’s James Bond
. You can fault Hollywood for that. You want to hear what it’s going to sound like?”
    He scurried into the back room and came out with a scoped .22-caliber rifle that had a six-inch cylinder screwed onto the barrel. We walkedacross the parking lot to where a plow had pushed a big pile of dirty snow. Oliver worked the bolt, pointed the rifle into the snowbank, and pulled the trigger. The gun made a faint
phut
—much like in the movies—and a handful of snow leapt from the pile.
    “Is that cool or what?” he asked as we walked back inside. Only .22-caliber silencers, like the one I was buying, are as quiet as Hollywood silencers, he said. A nine-millimeter or .45—to say nothing of a full-size hunting rifle—makes a pretty loud pop, though still a lot less than an unsilenced gun. And then there’s the issue of the bullet’s speed. A silencer only reduces the bang of powder exploding. Most bullets, .22s included, travel faster than sound and make a distinctive
crack
. That can be eliminated only by using subsonic ammunition, as Oliver had used in his demo.
    “Where do you get
that?
”
    “Everywhere. I need to see your driver’s license.” He copied down the information, signed and stamped the form, and handed me a sheaf of papers.
    “Go over to Kinko’s and get two passport pictures taken. Take them and these papers to your sheriff and get fingerprinted. You also need him to sign off; he has to give his
permission
.” He rolled his eyes theatrically. “When you get the papers back from him, you send everything to the ATF with a two-hundred-dollar check. It’s all bullshit, but it makes us rich.”
    “Then what?”
    “Then you wait. Probably the full three months. The paperwork will come back to me. I’ll call you, and you can come pick up your silencer.”
    His phone started ringing, and he reached for it with his left hand. At the same time, he extended his right to me to shake, flicked his eyebrows, and smiled wickedly. “Welcome to the dark side.”
    My concealed-carry permit came right on time, and I picked it up from the county clerk. It was the size, shape, and texture of a credit card. As with most IDs, the photo made me look like someone who shouldn’t be carrying a gun. I went home and loaded my .38 with 125-grain hollow-point cartridges. I slipped it into a holster and tucked it inside the waistband of my trousers, over my right kidney. Then I put on a sport coat and went out for a walk on Boulder’s quaint downtown pedestrian mall, expecting at any moment to hear someone yell,
“He’s got a gun!”
and tackle me. Nobody, of course, paid me a blind bit of notice.
    I found that I wasn’t so much in Condition Yellow as Condition
Day-Glo
Yellow. Everything around me appeared brilliantly