We scurried off in the car we’d parked a few blocks away, to the site of the original protests on West Florissant. There we watched as people broke into and looted several of the stores on the block, setting a few of them on fire, including a storage space directly across from us. As we continued to broadcast unfolding events, an air of sadness and rage hung over it all. The block took on the smell of a campfire, as the storage space burned. And while the scene was surreal and chaotic, it didn’t feel particularly menacing or dangerous, certainly not the way those gunshots had. Then late in the night, a burst of automatic gunfire rang out just fifty yards away and sent us scurrying indoors.
How darkly magical is the presence of the gun! How remarkable its power to transform the order of things. The scene without the gun had been chaotic, boisterous, and angry, while the one with the gun was dangerous, panicked, and flight-inducing. They existed in two parallel dimensions, and at the first crack of gunfire, we warped from one to the other.
Amid the adrenaline, I felt an acute stab of empathy for those police officers huddled by the cruiser earlier in the night, and then for every cop who moves through this country of ours where there is more than one gun for every man, woman, and child. I saw just for the briefest of instants, with my nose pressed to the pavement beneath the news van, the way the presence of guns, their easy concealability and ubiquity, transforms the very essence of disorder. For those tasked with enforcing the state’s authority, unruliness is uncomfortable. Cops don’t like it anywhere. And cops in any society clash with protesters and use all kinds of tactics, some rough, others less so, to suppress and disperse them.
Many other wealthy democracies have traditions of far more robust street protest than we have in the United States. When I spent six months living and studying in Bologna, leftist protests complete with Molotov cocktails, riot gear, and tear gas were a relatively frequent occurrence. But the difference in Bologna, and almost everywhere else in Europe and Asia, is the near total absence of guns. A gun has transformational power.
Sure enough, before very long, Ferguson saw gun violence against the police. In March, a few months after I saw the gunshots and burned cars outside the Ferguson police department, two police officers were shot, one in the face, while policing a protest in that very same spot where they’d taken cover that night. The gunshots were fired by twenty-year-old Jeffrey Williams—it’s unclear whether he was a protester. Williams told police the shooting had nothing to do with the protests, saying he fired in self-defense when someone else with whom he had a conflict rolled up on him. Both cops survived, thank god. The five Dallas police officers at a 2016 Black Lives Matter protest murdered by a crazed, anticop spree shooter weren’t so lucky. Same for the three officers drawn into a deadly ambush that same year in Baton Rouge.
This threat, the threat of the sudden bullet, extends to every single aspect of policing. Finnish and Japanese police, I’m sure, are summoned to noise complaints all the time, but they arrive at the site without harboring the nagging fear that the interaction will end in gunfire. There simply aren’t very many guns in Finland or Japan. (In 2013, Finnish police fired their weapons collectively a total of six times.) And as rare as it is in the United States for someone during a noise complaint to randomly grab a shotgun and start firing, as happened in my simulation, it’s a possibility one must train for.
THE GUN IS PROTECTION and solace. In neighborhoods that are quiet and far from crime and danger, it represents some kind of last personal means of ensuring your own turf. You live in the Nation, and if the Colony comes knocking in the dead of night, you can keep it at bay. In neighborhoods like Freddie Gray’s in Westside Baltimore, or in the West Side of Chicago, or in Compton, California, where the state’s monopoly on violence is broken or nonexistent, a gun makes a whole heck of a lot of sense. If the law won’t protect you, you need to protect yourself.
The Second Amendment, its most strenuous defenders like to tell us, is the ultimate check against tyranny. (This despite the fact that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world.) They argue that an armed populace repels tyranny, but its practical effect has been the opposite. If the people are armed enough to threaten the state’s control, then the state’s monopoly on violence is in question, and it therefore often acts less like it’s enforcing the law than putting down an insurrection.
An armed populace must be subdued with even greater arms. During the Crack Years, the period in the late 1980s when crack was entering urban America and drug turf wars escalated, mayors in major cities decried the fact that their officers were “outgunned.” American society has witnessed a kind of arms race between its citizens and its police, resulting in forces that in many places patrol and occupy rather than police, that straightforwardly view themselves as waging war. “We have a war. We are going to be successful,” the Los Angeles police department’s infamous Daryl Gates told the press in the late 1980s. “Whatever we need to do to be successful, we will do it.”
It was Gates who first created SWAT teams, whose use, as Radley Balko documents in Rise of the Warrior Cop, has since exploded. We are now a nation in which SWAT teams armed like special forces in Afghanistan show up at quiet homes in the dark of night, shoot dogs, and terrify residents, all to bust someone for growing pot. And what Seth Stoughton calls the “warrior worldview” has infected law enforcement everywhere. “Under this warrior worldview,” he writes, “officers are locked in intermittent and unpredictable combat with unknown but highly lethal enemies.”