An unwelcome visitor who attempts to enter Tres Bullard’s home, half an
hour south of Parkland, Florida, will encounter at least three
obstacles: Bullard’s ninety-pound pit bull, Storm; his electronic alarm
system; and his guns. Bullard, a forty-two-year-old business-development
manager, who lives with his wife and their four-year-old son, describes
himself as a “pretty libertarian-leaning person.” He keeps a loaded
pistol beside his bed, in a touch-pad safe. When I visited, it had been
five days since the Parkland mass shooting, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas
High
School,
allegedly carried out by a nineteen-year-old former student named
Nikolas Cruz, using an AR-15 assault rifle, which left seventeen dead
and more than a dozen injured. Bullard contrasted his home
fortifications with the openness of the Stoneman Douglas campus. “My
house doesn’t represent the path of least resistance. But if someone
still enters? I don’t want to have to deal with that person with a
baseball bat. I’d rather have something that hits a little harder.”
Later on, Bullard invoked the fighters of the American Revolution. “They
didn’t beat the English using pitchforks and knives. They did it using
firearms.”
An outwardly relaxed and voluble man who has worked as a bartender and a
blogger, Bullard currently owns four guns: a rifle, kept at his parents’
house, and three pistols—including a Glock and a Ruger. “I’m not a big
tactical guy, but I might get an AR in the future, when my son is
older.” (He mentioned storage concerns.) Why an assault rifle? “Given a
bad situation,” Bullard said, “Do you want to have the bare minimum? Or
do you want the best possible weapon? An AR isn’t hard to shoot. The
recoil is pretty minimal. And you’re able to get back on target pretty
quickly. A shotgun is a lot harder to handle and not as precise. It can
push you around. Anybody can shoot an AR.”
Dan Vidal, a thirty-eight-year-old Miami-based data-center expert who
runs the Web site regularguyguns.com, put it similarly. “I could put you
behind the AR-15 and have you hitting the target at twenty-five yards,
accurately, within an hour,” Vidal e-mailed me on Sunday. (I have done
some target shooting with an AR-15; the learning curve is, indeed,
short.) “When you’re talking about a defensive tool, you want one that
is reliable, easy-to-use, and accurate. All of which are attributes of
the AR.” Vidal went on, “An AR can be made to fit you. You can adjust
the stock to fit the length of your arm, you can spend $15 and get a
better grip for your hand size, you can invest in better sights for more
accuracy. … The whole idea behind the AR is ease of use.”
Within days of the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas, it was revealed
that, in February of 2017, Nikolas Cruz had patronized Parkland’s
Sunrise Tactical Supply, a family-run gun shop situated in a strip mall
between Just Kids Hairstyling and a wellness center. This is where Cruz
bought the AR-15 he allegedly used to kill seventeen people last week.
According to Douglas Rudman, a lawyer representing the proprietors of
the shop, Michael and Lisa Morrison, Cruz “just pointed to a gun on the
shelf and said, ‘O.K., I’ll take that one.’ He didn’t even ask any
questions.” His selection was, Rudman told me, a “base-model weapon.
Stock. Nothing modified or accessorized. Standard, off-the-shelf.”
Rudman said that it cost around a thousand dollars, and that Cruz paid
cash.
On Sunday night, when I pulled up outside, Sunrise Tactical Supply was
shuttered. A handwritten sign on the door said “closed.” Another, to the
side, said, “God Bless Our Troops. Especially Our Snipers.” Rudman had
told me that the shop would be closed “for the foreseeable future, out
of respect for the victims and the tremendous loss that’s happened to
this community.” The Morrisons, he went on, “want to help heal the
community.” Rudman added that the owners have “already been completely
exonerated as far as any question pertaining to wrongdoing in this case.
This is a shop that did everything right pertaining to the sale, the
transaction. There were no red flags. It was the same transaction that
probably occurs all over the country every single day.”
Rudman also noted that the Morrisons had, in the past, refused to sell
to would-be gun buyers based upon the appearance of mental instability.
Cruz, Rudman said, had passed the proprietors’ “eyeball test.” He added
that the Morrisons would, in the future, “appreciate more information,
to allow greater discretion about who should be able to buy a gun.”
Rudman was hesitant to use the word “regulations,” though that seemed to
be what his clients, who are not speaking directly to media, were open
to.
Bullard, for his part, told me that he “disagrees with some of the
N.R.A.’s broad-stroking over this stuff,” and finds some regulation
sensible. But he blames other factors for the Stoneman Douglas shooting.
“There were signs with Cruz,” he said. “The government didn’t act.” (On
Friday, the Times reported that the F.B.I. had received a
tip,
on January 5th, about Cruz, and had failed to follow up.) Vidal,
meanwhile, lays the blame on mental illness, which he sees as the common
thread in mass shootings. “None of these killers were happy-family
types, selling cars at the local AutoMax one day, and the next day they
decided to pick up a gun and go on a rampage.” (Stephen Paddock, who
killed fifty-eight people, and injured hundreds more, last October, in
Las Vegas, did not leave a long trail of behavioral
indicators;
his brother said Paddock was “a private guy.”) Vidal added, in our
e-mail exchange, that, “regulation would have had no effect” in the
Stoneman Douglas shooting.
But some conservatives appear, for the moment, to be open to
restrictions. Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, who has accepted more
than three million dollars in campaign donations from the National Rifle
Association in the course of his career, said on Sunday that Florida
should consider what some describe as a “red-flag
law,”
which would allow the removal of guns from the home of someone suspected
of being dangerous to themselves or others. Speaking with Miami’s CBS
affiliate, Rubio called this idea “a restraining-order-type thing.”
Jason Krollpfeiffer, a thirty-four-year-old firearms instructor who
lives in Miami and owns multiple assault rifles, told me that he has
stayed away from the news and social media this past week—the
“gun-blaming” frustrates him. I asked him why he owns AR-15s. “Why do
people own Corvettes?” he asked, rhetorically. “Or Lamborghinis? Seventy
miles per hour is the speed limit, so why do you need a vehicle that
does two hundred? You enjoy a high-performance item.” He added, “I could
hop in my truck, pop a curb in a crowded place and take out twenty
people. But that’s not my intention.” Krollpfeiffer is open to very
limited firearm regulation. “I’ll take a lot of flak from my
fellow-instructors for saying this,” he told me, “but I feel like
personal sales that require no background check, I think that’s messed
up.”
Yet wholesale weapon bans and additional regulations, he feels, make no
sense. “You’re never gonna stop it. You could stop selling guns right
now and, in a hundred years, you’ll still have people getting shot.” Or,
he argued, stabbed. “I mean, a few days after the shooting in Florida,
there was a stabbing in China and twenty-six people were killed,” he
said. There was a stabbing at a mall in
Beijing,
on February 11th; only one person was reported killed, with twelve
injured. Krollpfeiffer couldn’t recall the source that reported the
stabbing he had in mind; “I’m sure I saw it on Facebook,” he said.
According to one detailed tally, there have been thirty-three mass
shootings in the U.S. in 2018 so
far, which have killed
more than fifty people. Krollpfeiffer maintained that the stabbing he
heard about was relevant to the discussion. “No one says anything about
banning cutlery,” he said.