A million years ago, from '90 to '92, I lived downtown, in a real loft, converted from a real train freight storage building. The building was deep in an industrial no man's land then. Gorky's Brew, TV Tacos, a half mile north, and south, below the 10, on Adams, a strip mall with a Thrifty's drugs and a free-standing El Pollo Loco in the parking lot. And that was about it.
It had artists and industrial design wannabes, gliiter across the barbed-wire enclosed parking lot from the t-shirts one guy was grinding out with a dozen ladies in a double unit. All the cats that roamed the property shed glitter, and sparkled when your car lights cought them at night.
When the Rodney King riots came, we got it in big screen sensurround. The husband of the dominatrix that lived below me dragged his projection TV to the edge of their sliding doors and our little community of artists and such all sat outside in the parking lot and watched Channel 9's chopper-cam show us our Thrifty's being looted while it burned. There wasn't much wind that afternoon, but as the hours went by, the smoke from those blocks away filled the air. As did the sirens and the continuous sound of helicopters. Like I said. Sensurround.
When I realized my neighbor, a retired LAPD, wasn't around, I went and knocked on his door. His girlfriend said, "Oh, he's on the rooftop, doing high sentry." I climbed the access ladder screwed into the brick wall, shouting ahead of me, "Paul, it's Kelley, I'm coming up. Can you hear me?" I didn't come over the wall at the top until I heard him shout back, "OK."
He was sitting in a lawn chair I guess he kept up there. He had a shotgun across his lap, and was looking southwest, towards our Thrifty's, through a small pair of binoculars. He had a semi-automatic pistol in a holster lying on the roof next to him. We stood there and watched the city slowly become a nightmare. He told me about getting a head's up from a couple of friends on the forc e, then following on his scanner as things fell apart, wondering whether it was safer to drive to the freeway and get his girlfriend out of the way, or stay here and hold the fort.
I told him about the Korean-lettered church van that passed me in the little red Fiero he always kidded me about, heading east into downtown from Santa Monica, where I worked. I'd been doing 80, and as the van passed me, I could see men with straight black hair and long guns staring through the windshield and pointing at the rising columns of smoke that became more frequent, on either side of the 10, as we approached downtown. To this day, when I pass the tall block building that 'Avon' cosmetics shares with 'Pep Boys' automotive, I remember how it looked with smoke pouring off its roof.
"You know how to use a shotgun?" Paul asked eventually. "I gotta go down and take a piss." No, I said, not a pump, just a two-shell that breaks, like my grandfather used for hunting pheasant and dove down in Missouri. And that's when I got a lesson on how to load and unload a pump shotgun. "If you fire it, it'll damned near take your shoulder off if you're not expecting it," Paul told me. "If you can, stay relaxed and go with the recoil, and let your arm and hand use it to pump the next shell into the chamber." He picked up his holster, clipped it to his belt, and disappeared over the side of the roof, leaving me with a shotgun, half a dozen shells, and a police scanner that also got the am/fm radio bands. After another hour of listening to the news, and watching the sun set, it was obvious no one was coming to burn the place down. The winos never came down here. The feral dog pack barely came north from under the freeway where it operated. No one came here who didn't have to. Especially not tonight. I climbed down and rejoined the crowd around the projection TV.
A couple days later, Paul and I were sitting in his van, eating El Pollo Loco carry-out in the parking lot where the Thrifty's had burned to the ground, but the chicken joint still stood. Thinking about living in the land of earthquakes and, apparently, riots, I asked my ex-cop buddy what would be the best firearm to have in the house for protection.
"None. If you've got a gun at home, you stand a much bigger chance of being shot with it, or shooting someone, in your family, or a neighbor, with it." I couldn't tell if that was an official police-line he was reflexively repeating, or if he really felt like that.
"OK, but if I decide I want a gun for home protection, what would be the best? A semi-automatic pistol like you've got, or a rifle with a few clips of ammo, or.."
He cut me off. "Shotgun. Pump shotgun." "Like what you showed me on the roof the other night?" "Yes." "Why a shotgun?"
And here's the lesson I got from that night, about the best firearm, (if you HAVE to have a firearm, something I've never seen the need for) for home protection.
1) You barely need to aim it to hit the intruder somewhere. That 'shoot for the head' or 'hit em in the middle' crap goes out the window when things are actually happening in your home, especially since you aren't trained for it. And target practice doesn't count except to get used to the mechanics of pump, fire, pump, fire, and the noise that goes with it.
2) As mentioned, the NOISE. That fucker's LOUD. Even if somehow you miss, you just woke up everyone in your apartment building or every house on the block. A bad guy doesn't want to stick around with all those witnesses looking out their windows, or calling in a 911 of 'Live fire!'
3) And speaking of neighbors, shotgun fire won't kill a baby sleeping in it's crib five units over, or folks watching TV in the house across the street. What doesn't hit the intruder gets stuck in the walls or the floor unless you point it straight down at the floor. (Remind me to tell you sometime about my grandfather, a guy he put in jail, and the family grand piano.) You read every day about those distant deaths from pistols, whether revolver or semi-auto, fired in the street in anger and revenge, or the monster clip on a rifle, fired into the air on New Year's, that kills some father a mile away when the bullet comes down. Doesn't happen with a shotgun.
So that's what I know about arms for home defense.
White guys (and it's almost always white guys) who have to have more, and bigger and heavier and louder, seem to be stuck at the same point as Rand Paul and his Ayn Randian crowd: "Nobody can tell me what to do. Don't try to make me." And to both groups, I have some advice.
Grow up.
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