The Enemy Inside the Gates

I have a friend named Nick who telephoned the other day to say he had to see me right away.

The tone of his voice indicated that either his wife had left him, which would seem plausible, or he had just been bitten by a rabid squirrel, which also seemed somehow plausible.

We sat under the old oak tree where we often met to discuss weighty matters. Things like speculating on the wisdom of acquiring an online Viagra franchise, or pondering whether the dogs of foreign-speaking owners should be classified as bilingual.

This time the subject was nothing as amusing. Without preamble, Nick announced defiantly that he was going to buy a gun. A Glock or a Mauser or something.

I’ve got to admit that of all the things he might have told me, this surprised me the most. Up until that very moment, he had been the most anti-gun person I had ever known.

“But you hate guns!” I said.

“I know,” he replied, “but that was before we came under attack.”

“You’re arming,” I said, “to fight the terrorists?”

“It doesn’t hurt to be ready.”

“Like the farmers and village smithies of ’76 who took on the redcoats, right? Grab the old muzzle-loader and head for the hills.”

“If necessary.”

“I don’t know, Nick,” I said. “CPAs just don’t seem to be well-suited for that kind of guerrilla warfare.”

“You may be wrong about that!” he declared, sitting up straight.

I just looked at him and shook my head.

There must be a lot of Nicks around these days. Gun sales shot up by 50% in California the week after Sept. 11 and remain about 32% over last year’s sales. Those are figures released by the state Department of Justice, not the National Rifle Assn. But a spokesman for an NRA splinter group was quick to tell us why sales are up: “In light of what happened in New York City,” he said, “people have stopped taking for granted their own security.”

The terrorist attacks that sent surges of anger and patriotism through the country are just what the gun lobbyists needed to promote their own agenda in an otherwise faltering industry. God, guns and the American Way just seem to go together.

Why else would the California Rifle and Pistol Assn. suddenly come up with 300 billboards across the state promoting gun ownership? Good timing is everything.

Then there’s that ruling last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., acting on a Texas case. It says it’s OK for the people next door to “privately possess and bear their own firearms.” There must have been dancing in the streets of Dallas when the court handed that bouquet to the NRA.

All in all, it’s a good time for gunslingers in America.

“People for the first time realize that the government can’t protect them,” an L.A. gun-store manager said the other day. He asked me not to use his name because, as everyone knows, the media always twist things around. “There’s been an increase in gun sales since Sept. 11 because they know they’re going to have to protect themselves.”

One of my e-mail companions, a self-described hardcore gun advocate named Jerry Parsons, suggests that it’s not the terrorists we’re going to have to worry about but the desperate people whose survival has been put into question by the acts of terrorists. People like unemployed construction workers.

“When thousands of scared, angry and hungry people are roaming the streets,” Parsons wrote, “a firearm would seem like a good thing to have, preferably a high capacity semiautomatic rifle.”

So Nick is going to arm himself to fight terrorists storming the beaches at Paradise Cove, and Jerry is thinking maybe it’s a good idea to be ready to fend off the people, crazed by hunger, raiding your supply of rice and beans.

What we’re apparently anticipating with the proliferation of guns is not only a war on terrorism but on each other too. Neighbor against neighbor. Brother against sister. Ma against pa. I’m going to have one hell of a time deciding whose side I’m actually on.

This is not too different from the manner in which a lot of frightened little people greeted the new millennium. Think back to that Jan. 1 not long ago. Planes were going to fall from the skies, computers were going to cease to function and the food supply was going to dry up. No more Froot Loops or Hamburger Helper. Gone, all gone.

We feared the scared and hungry people back then too. Gun owners were ready to kill to guard their chicken coops. One man told me he was going to shoot anyone who came to his door that didn’t know his special password. God help the starving kid sneaking around his carrot patch. Bam!

The events of Sept. 11 have made us all a little crazy. Terrorism counts on that. I’m just hoping we come to our senses before armed vigilantes start roaming the streets looking for someone to lynch. We’d have to fight them too. Even Winston Churchill never envisioned a three-front war all in the same neighborhood.

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Al Martinez can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.