Looking Back at the Lions

Sharon Derman is what you might call Today’s Woman. She is young, single, has an excellent job and is fully armed.

At her apartment in the San Fernando Valley, she has a .357-caliber magnum (loaded when she’s home) and a 60-pound Rottweiler.

On her person, she carries Mace and a knife, and she has signed up for a class that will add pepper spray to her armament.

It hasn’t always been that way. She carried no defensive weaponry in New York when she lived there and none when she moved to L.A. eight years ago.

But this isn’t the same city it was back then. Violence has increased, and with it an almost palpable fear that its next victim might be you.

What turned Derman militant was the sudden realization of her own vulnerability. The epiphany came with the murder of Sherri Foreman.

“She’d be alive today if she had been prepared,” Derman says softly, seated in the lobby of the Firing Line, an indoor shooting range in Northridge.

The death of Foreman last April clearly continues to mean something to Derman. Foreman was 29 and pregnant when she was stabbed to death in front of a Sherman Oaks ATM machine.

Stunned by the killing, Derman decided to take whatever steps necessary to protect herself. She bought the gun and learned how to shoot it at the Firing Line. Then she qualified to carry Mace, and bought a knife and a dog.

Pepper spray is next . . . and she’s thinking about learning karate.

*

I had gone to the Firing Line to learn about the latest wrinkle in civilian armament, a cayenne pepper extract in an oil base that can incapacitate a human being for up to 45 minutes.

The spray was legalized in California on March 1 for those properly trained to use it, and folks are lining up to qualify.

About 25 applicants a day visit the Firing Line to watch a 30-minute video and get their state permits to carry a canister of the spray. It costs them $17 for the license and another $20 to buy the spray.

“I hear all kinds of stories about being a victim,” says Jim Ness, general manager of three shooting ranges in L.A. and Orange counties owned by the same company.

“The other day a father brought his daughter in. Two guys had tried to drag her into a van as she was walking to a night class at Cal State Northridge. She got away that time, but he was afraid it could happen again.”

The first person at the scene of a crime, Ness likes to say, is the victim, and no one’s going to drop from the sky to protect him or her at the time the crime is being committed. Superman is fiction. Batman doesn’t exist.

He believes that women are especially vulnerable--”They don’t have the upper body strength”--and ought to be armed with Mace or pepper spray or a stun gun.

Sharon Derman is convinced he’s right. She refuses to live in fear, she says, but she’s got to be ready. Caution is an element of preparedness. She is aware of those around her at all times . . . when she walks, when she shops, when she drives.

She also won’t say specifically where she lives in the Valley or the company she works for as an executive secretary in Westwood.

“It just isn’t safe,” she says, and repeats it as a kind of final litany. “It just isn’t safe.”

*

So now we’ve got pepper spray. It’s there suddenly, abruptly legal, tucked in a purse or a pocket, whipped out and pointed, a liquid stream that burns and chokes and forces an attacker back like the mad dog he is.

Well, yes, there are bound to be accidents or flares of temper or misjudgments that will target the wrong person with a face full of oleoresin capsicum , but that happens, right?

Pepper spray ain’t a gun, and it’s better to have an innocent get zapped with a juice that only incapacitates than to get killed yourself. Better wrong than dead.

But missing in the dialogue that surrounds new civilian weaponry is an essential unnerving truth. We’re reaching a point where there are only going to be two kinds of people: predators and victims.

Guys like Ness will tell you if you’re not armed with something, you’re like an eland at a watering hole frequented by lions. A lion only understands teeth and claws, and that’s what pepper spray represents.

When I left the Firing Line I couldn’t help but feel a terrible sadness for the state we’ve gotten ourselves into: a world of us and them in the darkest jungle of human existence.

It’s painful to acknowledge, but in terms of vulnerability, we’re all just elands at the same watering hole, looking back uneasily at the lions.