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Archived at Keep and Bear Arms

Chip Elliott, author of a novel entitled Tomorrow Come Sunrise, published in 1970, wrote the below letter in response to an April 1981 article in Esquire Magazine entitled "Fifty Million Handguns." It so impressed the editors that it was published in the September 1981 issue as the cover story. Mr. Elliot's comments are just as relevant to the gun issue as they were the day they were written — and his effervescent authenticity is indeed deeply appreciated. Esquire Magazine did a great service by running this letter — do your part by making sure someone else reads it.

Letter from an ANGRY Reader

A Letter to the Editor of Esquire Magazine
from Chip Elliott

The streets of America...are as dangerous as the roads and alleys of an earlier century. But before we resign ourselves to helplessness, this reader urges us to listen to the story of how he took up arms in defense of his life and property.

In regard to Adam Smith's April column, "Fifty Million Handguns," come off it. Smith laments the fact that large numbers of people are prepared to defend themselves with handguns. He can't really accept the fact that we are living in a world where personal self-defense is a necessity. Didn't he read the article in the February Esquire called "Shooting to Kill"—about middle class citizens who are determined to shoot to defend their lives? Did he or you think that was a joke? That it was made up?

I went from being where both of you seem to be at this point to carrying a 9mm Smith & Wesson automatic in ten weeks. My wife is a psychiatrist. Very attractive, very easy to intimidate, very abstracted, a likely target for muggers both outside, because she's lost in her thoughts, and at home, because punks think doctors keep drugs in their houses (they don't). She has a gun, too, a .38, and she knows how to use it. We are not hillbillies: we are people who went to Radcliffe and Stanford, respectively. Appalling, huh? It used to appall us too, until we were forced to realize that our lives, both as a married couple with a deep commitment and as individuals doing important and meaningful work, were worth protecting.

In the spring of 1976 we were living in the San Francisco Bay area. My wife was doing her psychiatric residency. I had just walked out on the advertising business and was working on a novel. That spring, Peter Brook directed a play called The Ik, a hair-raising piece created by the troupe of the International Center for Turnbull's anthropological study called The Mountain People. Sponsored by the French government, Brook and his gang made a six-week American tour and played Berkeley.

The play cast in theatrical bronze the lives of a tribe of hunters in Uganda who had been displaced from their centuries old hunting grounds by the creation of a national park and a game reserve. What followed was an utter disintegration of their social structure, and it turned everybody—including members of the same family—into mortal enemies seeking, each alone, food.

The play's premise is that what we call human values are actually luxuries qualities that only emerge and exist under the best and calmest of conditions. It was a spooky production and great theater, but I did not see how it could possibly relate to America in the late Seventies.

Two years later, we moved to Los Angeles. We did not move to the glamorous, movie-struck Los Angeles of The Ginger Man and the Beverly Hills Hotel—though I would be lying if I said the thought had never crossed our minds. We moved to the Los Angeles of the Nuart theater, the Fox Venice, the Jung Institute, a city with the sense of being in another country with American hamburger overtones. And, of course, the sea. Not the beach, the sea.

Our friends Boris and Ute—a Yugoslav sculptor and a German painter—had just bought a house in Venice, and we quickly rented a house nearby on Electric Avenue. Electric Avenue yet! Whooee! It was dirty pink with a gray-green roof, and its outstanding feature was an eight-by-thirty glassed-in porch. A grown man in good condition could have torn this house down with his hands, but I loved it because it swayed when you walked through it. It was like being on a weather-beaten but seaworthy closed cabin schooner.

Venice at that time seemed like Sleeping Beauty after a century of trance: musty, dusty, and long stagnant, but with the promise of awakening magic. On that porch I intended to write a new Threepenny Opera, to invent at least two or three new Sally Bowleses. I would knock the world on its ear.

More friends quickly turned up—Rene and Renata, European graphic wizards; Carolyn and Chris, a mime and an actor who wanted to get away from off-Broadway and into movies and television; a middle-aged Australian writer and adventurer and his half-Irish-half-Mexican wife with her wall-to-wall cheekbones and her head full of D. H. Lawrence and Denise Levertov...and many others.

My beloved French Lop rabbit, Nicole, had a yard to romp in. We quickly discovered a sensational wine from a local vineyard, a county fair prizewinner that sold for $3.38 a gallon at the local Safeway.

Our days quickly became ordered: group breakfasts, work all day, talk all evening, lights out by ten p.m. My wife took a job as staff psychiatrist for a county mental health clinic in downtown Los Angeles. We settled in in a hurry. There was no time to lose. We were going to recreate the world not of the Sixties but of F. Scott Fitzgerald's friends Gerald and Sara Murphy in the years 1922 and 1923. We would throw a two-year-long working party.

But it quickly became apparent that all was not as it seemed in Venice. For starters, we had moved to the intersection of turfs of two rival Mexican gangs. We got along with them. When they shot at each other—as they did less than a week after we had moved in—they shouted to us in Spanish to get out of the way. We did.

There were other clues. Walking, I would occasionally see brown spots on the sidewalk that, from my experience as a police reporter, I could recognize as bloodstains. I would notice this the way you might notice a scruff of feathers where something has gotten a small bird: a tiny memorial to violence.

One morning, as I was sitting on the wobbly glassed-in porch, I watched a gang of black teenagers pour gasoline all over a parked car and set it on fire. This was at ten o'clock in the morning. Broad daylight.

A few days later, I heard of a robbery two blocks from where we lived: A woman came to the door of a house and asked to use the telephone, said it was an emergency. When the man opened the door, her henchmen came in right behind her. The three of them stabbed the man to death and left his wife barely alive. In the next block a woman was raped twice after her nose and jaw were broken.

Just to be on the safe side, after a kitchen table powwow, we went to a gun shop on Pico Boulevard one Saturday morning and bought a 38 snub-nosed revolver. After all, this was Los Angeles, land of Joe Friday. Strange things had happened here. Sharon Tate had once had a very bad evening here. But a gun! Who had ever owned a gun? I picked the revolver up after the normal fifteen-day waiting period and wrote the guy a check from the Santa Monica Bank. It cost $160. It seemed like a lot for a silly object. I would rather have bought a painting. We put the revolver under the corner of our mattress and there it stayed. For ten days.

One night we went to the Fox Venice to see Forbidden Planet, you know, the movie about monsters from the id. When we returned, the door had been broken in. The stereo was gone, the television was gone, the paintings and cameras and typewriters were gone. The dressers had been turned over and ransacked, the bed had been torn up and the revolver taken; the birdcage had been torn off the wall and the parakeet set free for a while until the cat got it and ate it, leaving the remains on the floor where a rug had been. All the jewelry was gone, such as it was. Including my Cartier watch. I had earned that watch, you know? I had saved for it just as surely as I had saved the money for a house or a car or a couple of new suits. That ended my romance with Cartier watches. There is an enormous black market for them in Los Angeles, but I don't want one now. I wear a Thirties Gruen Curvex now, a sister to the watch Bogart wore in Casablanca. It's worth about the same as a tank watch but very few people know what it is.

Three thousand in after-tax dollars. It took the police two hours and forty-five minutes to show up.

Our revolver, which had begun as a museum piece, a curio, as far as we were concerned, had now entered the underworld. We were unprotected now, and we felt so. We reported the gun stolen, of course. Serial number and all that. Big deal. Five months later, it was used in an assault against a Los Angeles woman. I made up my mind that the way to handle a gun in a dangerous situation was to never let it out of my sight.

Our friends were robbed, burglarized. Carolyn, of her sewing machine, her typewriter, her clothes. Another couple, of all their photographic equipment, used not for a hobby but for their livelihood. Easygoing Boris bought a twelve-gauge riot gun and hid it in a trunk with his sixteen millimeter movie equipment so no one would steal it. And a huge black shepherd dog to protect the trunk. Someone broke in anyway and slit the dog's throat.

We bought a new revolver, a. 38 Special Smith & Wesson, and had the handgrips filed down so my wife could hold it easily. The two weeks while we waited for the permit to go through were the most terrifying of my fife.

It turned out that my wife's work for Los Angeles County was more like a Clint Eastwood movie than a medical practice. One of her street patients quickly fastened on her and began writing her death threats with sexual overtones. There was no place to put him away because there was no money for any serious treatment, and there were no available psychiatric beds in any of the local hospitals. She began carrying the .38 in her briefcase along with her patient case load progress notes.

We quickly developed a pattern: when she came home at night she would park her car and blow the horn; I would go outside and escort her into the house. It dawned on me for the first time that we might be killed. That it was possible we would die here.

I bought a second handgun, a 9mm automatic that would fire as fast as lightning. I phoned around, discovered where to go to practice with it. And I practiced.

A word about revolvers versus automatics: If you don't know much about all this, a revolver is better because it is a simple mechanism. You can see if there are cartridges in it.

I also went to the police and got a carry permit. A carry permit is not as difficult to obtain as a lot of people would have you believe. You have to give a good reason for wanting the permit You have to not be a felon and not have, for example, eleven hundred outstanding parking tickets. If you are a crackpot, someone will sniff it out and you will not be issued the permit.

One night I was awakened by a noise outside on the street. I got up, peeped through the dining room curtains and saw a gang of teenagers taking the fog lights off my car. I raised the curtains and knocked on the window. The sight of a thirty-three year-old naked guy is not going to frighten very many people anymore, but the sight of a thirty-three-year-old naked guy with an automatic did the trick. They fled.

Our lives settled down again. We cut a safe into the floor of our dining room and hid our remaining valuables in it. It was never discovered, even though they took the Oriental rug that covered it.

We went to a wedding in San Francisco on a Friday night. The week before, I had prepped the house as you might prepare for medieval warfare: two-by-six boards bolted into doorframes with lag bolts six inches long and a socket wrench. That sort of thing. Anything we had left that was slightly portable—my wife's doctor bag, a pair of binoculars, our passports and checkbooks—I threw into two suitcases, which I put into storage.

When we returned from the wedding there was no back door and no doorframe, only an enormous hole with smashed edges leading into a set of empty rooms. We were left with a bed, some pots and pans, and a bookcase. It was one of our more memorable Thanksgivings.

On the seventeenth of December in 1978, I saw a woman mugged for her purse—and I watched her run screaming after her assailant until she collapsed, crying in the street.

On the eighteenth or nineteenth of December, my wife was at a meeting, everybody else was busy doing something, and I walked alone to the Venice Sidewalk Cafe for some dinner. It occurred to me that it was silly to put on a shoulder holster just to go out for a beer and a sandwich, but I did it anyway, although I had never been threatened physically, ever, except in foreign countries.

Walking home about six-thirty at night, just off the corner of West Washington Boulevard and Westminster Avenue, I was confronted by five young, well-dressed uptown brothers. Black. Okay. Let's get that right out front. They could just as easily have been white. We were directly under a streetlight and less than fifty feet from an intersection thick with traffic.

I was not dressed as a high roller. I am not a high roller. I don't look like a robber baron or a rich dentist. I look like exactly what I am, a middle-aged guy who's seen a little more than he needs to see. I thought, what are these guys doing?

Their leader pulled a kitchen knife out of his two-hundred-dollar leather jacket. His mistake was that he wasn't close enough to me to use it, only to threaten me. He smiled at me and said, "Just the wallet, man. Won't be no trouble."

That was a very long moment for me. I remember it just as it happened. I remember thinking at the time that it was one of those moments that are supposed to be charged with electricity. It wasn't. It was hollow, silent, and chilly.

I looked at this guy and at his companions and at his knife, and I thought: Don't you see how you're misreading me? I am not a victim. I used to be a victim, but now I'm not. Can't you see the difference?

I pulled the automatic, leveled it at them and said very clearly, "You must be dreaming."

The guy smiled at me and said, "Sheeeit," and his buddies laughed, and he began to move toward me with the knife. I thought, this guy is willing to kill me for thirty-five dollars. I aimed the automatic at the outer edge of his left thigh and shot him.

He dropped like a high jumper hitting the bar and yelled "Goddamn!" three times, the first one from amazement, I guess, and the second two higher pitched and from pain.

He yelled at his buddies, "Ain't you gonna do nothing?" They did do nothing.

I backed off and walked away, right across busy West Washington Boulevard, with the gun still in my hand. I remember thinking, shouldn't I call a doctor? And then I thought, would he have called a doctor for me? And I kept right on walking.

I am not a macho guy. White water to me is club soda. I haven't been skiing in ten years. Anything I order from L.L. Bean ends up on the dining room table and then in a box in the basement. I'm never going to shoot a zebra and have it made into a rug, okay?

I was not coming on like James Bond, and I was not being territorial or aggressive. I was simply protecting my right to walk around town with a lousy thirty-five dollars in my pocket and not be afraid for my life.

I walked home. I felt terribly strange, but it was a strangeness that I could identify. I realized that what I was doing—in our current state of affairs—was a cultural procedure no different from going to the grocery or getting a haircut or buying a shirt. And that I had balked over it and felt strange because it was a new procedure, something I was doing for the first time, not unlike dealing with one of those twenty-four-hour banking devices with the code numbers and the buttons—and that if I wanted to stay alive, it was possible I would have to get used to it.

I am not proud of this. I did not swallow it easily, either. More than a year passed before I talked about it with anybody, not even my wife. But I did it. And I could do it again if I had to.

What happened to us, of course, is that we got hit in the face with time's swinging door. My world changed sometime between 1975 and 1980, and we had a couple of tough years getting from one Pullman car to another. We were lucky. We lost more than eleven thousand dollars of what we owned, but we weren't killed. We adapted. Now the guns are a normal part of our lives. We accept them, just as we accept the seven motors of suburbia. They are a necessary convenience, like the washing machine or refrigerator or one of those devices that zaps mosquitoes with electricity.

Sometimes I think, this is a stupid, abhorrent, exasperating situation. And it is. But we've adapted to other stupid, abhorrent, exasperating situations: 20 percent interest rates. Iran. And now we've adapted to this one.

Let me tell you how we've adapted. We dress low key, we don't flaunt anything, we keep loaded guns in the house, and we don't keep them stashed in some drawer where we can't find them if we need them. We keep them right out in the open, and we always know exactly where they are. The difference is in that exterior framework of protection and in our attitudes toward it: it is something that was not necessary when we were younger, and it is something which most of us, Adam Smith included, still carry on about. We don't even think it's too bad anymore; we're beyond that. We accept it as a fact of life and go right on. And it will stay a fact of life until our fellow countrymen get it out of their heads that they can do as they please, that there is no such thing as social responsibility, that they have a right not to behave. Because the way we see it, if they have the right to mug us, we have the right to shoot them.

I used to believe that these people had some justifications on their side. I used to feel that I ought to have some compassion for them, and I did. I used to believe that a job and some credit would put them on the right path. It isn't true. I also used to believe that much of the human wreckage—the millions upon millions of people with emotional damage—could be repaired. That isn't true either. They can't be, for the most part, because the effort necessary to straighten out a single one of them is enormous: four or five years perhaps of therapy, in an age when there is no time for anything but emergency medicine.

Let's face it. Some of these people are poor Some of them are driven crazy with desire for stuff they will never be able to afford. But not all of them are poor, not by a long shot. A lot of them make as much money, or a great deal more, than you or I do. They do it because it's easy. They do it because they believe no one will stop them. And they're right.

[Continued in next post]