Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [18]
Gun magazines feed America’s gun owners a steady diet of advice on how to behave during a gunfight, much of it written by police officers from small-town departments no one has ever heard of and where gun battles are few and far between. Typically, these stories fail to discuss the emotional aftermath of an armed confrontation. Big-city police departments know the psychic toll can be devastating. In Boston, for example, the police department established a “Shoot Team,” composed of officers who have survived shoot-outs, which gathers after each new incident to help the officers involved come to grips with the terror they felt during the confrontation and the emotional upheaval they experienced afterward.
One of its members, who asked not to be identified by name, lived through two shoot-outs. In the first, he and his partner—for narrative purposes, I’ll call them Nolan and Dougherty—wound up in high-speed pursuit of a stolen Lincoln, chasing it up one-way streets against oncoming traffic. “It was like something out of the movies,” Nolan recalled. “I remember my heart was pounding out of my chest.”
The fleeing car rounded a corner and stopped. One suspect leaped from the car and ran headfirst into a telephone pole so hard he was knocked to the ground. (When the officers later caught this suspect, they knew immediately they had the right man by the splinters in his face.) The other suspect drove the big Lincoln into a vacant lot where it struck a boulder, briefly went airborne, then came to rest. The officers positioned their car to provide defensive cover. The suspect fired.
“All I remember is hearing the crack of the gun going off,” Nolan told me. “The next thing I saw was blue pieces of plastic flying all over the place. My partner went down—I thought he’d been shot.”
In fact, Dougherty had ducked for cover as the first bullet struck the blue roof light and shattered it. The suspect was firing a powerful .357 Magnum revolver and carried a speed loader, a device that holds six bullets and allows them to be inserted quickly into the empty chambers.
Nolan fired every shot in his service revolver and reloaded. The suspect took off. Nolan sprinted after him. At one point Nolan told him to halt, then dropped to one knee and aimed at his back. He didn’t fire. “If I had shot him in the back, I’d be in state prison right now,” he said. He and Dougherty returned to the Lincoln, where they found evidence that allowed them to track the suspect to an address in Boston’s Dorchester section. He was hiding inside an oil furnace. “To this day,” Nolan said, “I don’t know how he got in there.”
Until the capture, Nolan had been running on adrenaline. “It happens so quickly,” he recalled. “All these little items, like a checklist. Is it a clear shot? Is everybody out of the way? Then boom, boom, boom—all in a split second. I was trained to do this, but I wasn’t trained how to deal with it.” Afterward, he said, “I came apart at the seams. I just started shaking. I did what I do best. I got absolutely drunk out of my mind.”
The incident had a lasting impact. He became an alcoholic. He lost his wife to divorce. Now on the wagon, he tries to help other officers vent the powerful emotional reactions they experience after a shooting. Nolan agrees people who feel moved to buy a gun for self-defense ought to be able to do so, but with a caveat: “You need to get some extensive training. Appreciate what a handgun is and what it can do.”
On the whole, he said, society needs to take a longer view and examine why it is that many people feel the criminal justice system has failed them. “I don’t want to see any more guns,” he said. “Guns kill people. That’s what they’re for. They kill people. And there’s just too many of them out there already.”
Such concern, however, has little persuasive power for people who see