One Gun, Two Seconds, Three Men Dead
From a typewritten manuscript found in the men's room of a seedy, biker bar in Moscow, Iowa in 1994
This piece was sent to me by a long time reader who retrieved it from the online archive, Wayback Machine. It was originally published on Chicago Tribune's ChicagoNow.com on June 15, 2017 and she had some questions about it.
As is usually the case, women have more questions than men have answers.
The first time I ever fired a handgun, three men died. That's how these things go, every bullet writes its own tale of tragedy, grief and regret.
I spent the mid- and late 1970's selling T-shirts at rock concerts. Having no contractual relationship with the bands, promoters or venues, we were known as bootleggers.
We worked parking lots, sidewalks and wherever we could get in the stream of concert-goers. All sales were in cash and on a good night, I went home with no T-shirts and a bag full of money.
Outdoor concerts were like Christmas. A 3-day holiday weekend in the summer of 1977 could have my crews crisscrossing the country, selling hundreds of dozens of T-shirts from Rich Stadium in Buffalo, New York to California's Orange County Coliseum.
We followed everyone from the Rolling Stones to Elton John, Queen, Heart, REO Speedwagon and Pink Floyd.
A few days before a Ted Nugent show in Tiger Stadium, we heard that the Detroit PD was going to be on strike, which was a bit of a good news/bad news situation.
Four of my guys volunteered to run the crew, but it was risky. I was worried that they were putting their greed ahead of their safety (and my money) and I wound up taking them to Detroit myself.
When I went to pick up my van the day before the show, I found it sitting on a lift in an empty garage, sans tires. My trusted mechanic, also known to sell some pot was most apologetic upon his return 90 minutes later, explaining that he was out on delivery.
While he mounted my tires, I told him about the police strike in Detroit.
Probably out of guilt, he went into a back store room and came out with two guns, a Colt .357 Magnum revolver and a Walther .380 semi-automatic pistol and told me to take them both.
While I had earned an Expert rating in marksmanship with an M16 rifle at Fort Polk, LA in 1969, I had never previously touched a handgun. I thought that if I used the guns at all, it would be for purposes of intimidation.
We got to Detroit about 10:00 AM the next day, scoring a prime parking spot on Trumbull Avenue, just down from the stadium.
As most of the other bootleg crews avoided that show, our sales were good, each guy coming back within the first hour to reload.
About 2:00 PM one of the guys showed up in the doorway of the van bleeding profusely from a couple of gashes across his forehead and right cheek. He was beaten and robbed, the culprits taking his cash and T-shirts.
While patching him up, I got a pretty good description of his muggers and the location of the attack. We should have immediately headed home, but I wasn't that smart back then. Maybe not now, either.
About 6 blocks away, I spotted the suspect trio across a parking lot, standing next to a white van. Reaching into the pocket of my army jacket, I squeezed the grip of the .380, took a deep breath and headed towards them.
As I neared their van, one of them turned toward me, a huge, shiny revolver in his hand. He told me to take my hand out of my pocket and sent one of his crew to check my pocket.
Grabbing the .380, he dropped it as his buddies looked on in amusement.
As the guy in front of me bent down to retrieve the gun, I reached under my shirt and pulled out the revolver, extending my arm toward the guy with the shiny gun, who was still looking down at my gun in the gravel.
At a distance of about seven feet, shooting him in the chest required no aiming. The gunshot rang out and he fell backward without ever looking up. I immediately shot the guy next to him, who fell backwards, landing halfway into the van, his legs dangling out the door.
By this time, which seemed like about an hour later, the guy at my feet had the .380 in his hand. As he stood up, I shot him in the face.
I retrieved the .380 from the gravel but later - much later - I realized that I hadn't racked the slide to put a bullet into the firing chamber and I hadn't disengaged the thumb safety. The gun would’ve been useless.
Seeing the keys in the ignition, I dumped the guy hanging out of the van onto the gravel and took off in their van. I pulled up alongside my van and told my guys to follow me.
About 15 minutes later, we parked their van in a small industrial park outside of Dearborn. We grabbed the duffel bag, which was stuffed with T-shirts, $700 in cash and about 100 Quaaludes.
That guy's shiny gun turned out to be a nickel-plated Colt Python, unmatched by any Python manufactured after 1977.
I have no moral judgements about that day and make no apologies. It was a glimpse into what might comprise a life of crime. It was an event that seemed to unfold of its own volition and I have lived with that.
Random events often conspire to cause serious, unintended consequences. It should be clear to anyone that the more we have readily available guns, the greater the probability of gun-related deaths.
There are more guns in America than people, one of the few things in which we actually hold the number one spot. That and the number of people (mostly poor) we have locked in our jails.
It's just simple math, and that's something with which we all have to live.
At least it was a Ted Nugent concert
He would have approved