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.
New Yorker writers respond to the Parkland school shooting.
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.
