The Shooting. James Boice

talk circles around the most technical gun nut you could find. Outshoot him too.

      The first big victory came when pro-RSA single-issue voter turnout was credited with dumping three members of the Ohio state legislature based on their pro-NRA voting records. The second big victory came when they got a version of the ammo tax on the ballot and came within a percentage point of passing it. Wayne LaPierre shat himself, See-You-Next-Tuesday heard. Rush Limbaugh exploded all over his studio like a microwaved metal bowl of grease and pills. That’s about the time they started calling her what they call her. When asked about the C-word on Meet the Press, she slaughtered it: Finally, she said, the NRA’s base is being honest about how they see women. And that’s about the time they took their first shot at her, outside Houston. Missed. As a result money flowed in to the RSA, membership jumped by 11 percent. So they took another shot at her, in Florida, as she was leaving a meeting with a shooting victim. More money, more members.

      RSA membership has since passed 1 million (she’s just getting started—the NRA boasts 4.5 million). They have hired a full-time lobbying operation to camp out on the Hill. The board has increased her salary to $500,000 a year. The NRA’s board, she’s heard, pays LaPierre more than double that. So she wants double that. It’s not greed—that kind of salary means you’re winning the war, that you’re the best. RSA has built a new state-of-the-art headquarters on 1-66 in Fairfax, Virginia, right across the street from the NRA’s. Know about the NRA’s National Firearms Museum—Pilgrim guns, colonist guns, Civil War guns, presidential guns, cowboy guns, War on Terror guns—all the dusty, teary-eyed symbols of the American Myth? Well, the RSA built its own National Firearms Museum, containing not symbols but reality: graphic, bloody, heart-wrenching exhibits of JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Biggie, Tupac, Trayvon Martin. Of Columbine; Pearl, Mississippi; Jonesboro, Arkansas; Aurora; Newtown. Of the Beltway Sniper, Virginia Tech, DC Navy Yard, Fort Hood, Chiraq, San Bernadino, etc., etc., etc., and the rest of the dozens of mass shootings a year, plus an exhibit for all the women killed each year by a man with a gun (women in the United States are eleven times more likely to be murdered with a gun than in any other first world country), or raped by a man with a gun, or otherwise intimidated and abused by a man with a gun, not to mention (and no one else does!) the thousands and thousands of black and Latino children routinely and unremarkably slaughtered or permanently maimed by gunfire every year in Chicago; New York City; Los Angeles; Washington, DC; New Orleans; etc., etc., etc. It’s a beautiful museum—for every war- and frontier- and horseshit-celebrating exhibit at the NRA’s museum, there is an exhibit of reality at the RSA’s: unspeakable heartbreak and ruined lives and death, death, death. Mine eyes have seen the glory...!

      Women like her. Part of why women like her is because she likes women. Few others seem to. The NRA certainly does not seem to. In the hallway outside her hotel room in Utah someone once left her a female mannequin that had been stripped naked and riddled with bullets. It had been shot so many times with such high-caliber rounds that it looked like it’d been hacked at with a dull hatchet. Not the worst thing they have left for her outside a hotel room. The worst was on this past Mother’s Day, when they got inside her hotel room in Tennessee while she was out and wrote on the picture of her Michelle that she travels with and always hangs on her hotel room wall: If only my teacher had had a gun! She made sure to tweet the pictures of these, to send out press releases to the American and international media to ensure maximum humiliating exposure for the NRA by proxy.

      She’s cool about these things—once you’ve been through what she has, dolls and graffiti do not bother you as much—and cool in general, naturally beautiful, dynamic, throws Scandal references into conversations as often as possible, cries in public when she feels like crying, laughs at herself but can eviscerate dunderheaded conservative male Republican nemeses with an offhand joke that has women re-clicking and retweeting for days after, but she’s authoritative, can and does quote Supreme Court precedents and constitutional texts and firearms statistics from memory, uses a teleprompter as often as she wears bulletproof vests, and could give and has given a barn-burning speech on the side of I-84 in the rain, has just enough intimidating alpha-female mean-girl energy wafting off her to make women trust her without feeling like she does not like them. She’s Sheryl Sandberg meets Shonda Rhimes meets Judge Judy. She’s a girl version of 2008 Obama.

      It is vital that women like her. As every rock band knows, you get the girls to your show and the boys will follow. That is what will be the downfall of the NRA, she knows: no women. No love for half the population. Soon all those old white men will die. So will their "values" and "traditions." Which, when you look closely enough at them, are nothing but fear. And when they die, women and people of color will remain, eager for the future, not scared of it. Men versus women. As in every other arena, the women and people of color may not be winning (yet), but they sure have the momentum. Perfect. It is happening like it was meant to be. This was the meaning of Michelle’s death, she has realized: To do this great thing for future little girls and boys. To do what the Founding Fathers intended for America, which was to change the Constitution, to change ourselves as needed, to protect our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

      She is in Kentucky—small town in the mountains called Brownmore. A three-year-old girl played with the little shotgun-for-kids left leaning like a broom in the corner of her trailer while her mom cooked dinner and, wouldn’t you know it, the little girl shot herself, took off half her little head, and the reaction from folks around here was Well, it’s a tragedy, but guns are our tradition, you see, so whatcha gonna do? So See-You-Next-Tuesday goes there to raise hell and exacerbate the media coverage to highlight the casual horror of gun culture, to try to convince the mom to do an ad spot supporting the ammo tax in Kentucky, and to maybe even, if all goes well, get herself shot at again. That is the Triple Crown—viral news coverage, ad spot, shot at—whatever it takes to fortify the story so it does not rinse out in the one-hour news cycle, so something meaningful comes out of such a meaningless, stupid tragedy, be it money or membership or media or all three of what she calls the three M’s—and when her work seems to be done in Brownmore, she hears about a new shooting, this one in New York City. A teenage boy knocked on his neighbor’s door and his neighbor emptied his gun through the door, killing the boy. Was the boy black? Duh. Was the shooter white? Double duh. Was the shooter rich? Triple duh. Was the black boy poor? Sold! And is the ammo tax on the ballot in New York this fall? I said, Sold! Sold, sold, sold! The Brownmore mom seems like she’s going to be amenable to the ad spot and no one seems to be planning to take a shot at See-You-Next-Tuesday and the media is all over this, two of the three goals met, so she entrusts Kentucky to her deputies and heads to the airport.

      As she waits at her gate a man walks up to her. He is tall and thin and dark-eyed and serious and white, wearing a Carhartt jacket and an old worn baseball cap. He says, —Ain’t you...?

      Before she can deny it, he lunges toward her and she screams and puts her hands to her face and—

       2

       THE GUN

      A screeching gaggle of children comes roving through the park—dozens of them, big red faces cleaved by open-mouthed grins, all their breaths bursting out in gobs of fog, and their short arms pumping and swinging, fists balled to bone in their mittens, as the gaggle careens in their winter coats, scarves flapping behind them. The herd of little boys and little girls—brown, white, tanned, pale, black, yellow—all strangers to one another, none knowing another’s name or who they are, knowing nothing about each other but that they too have been brought here and plopped down, and that they too saw the puppy scampering free off its leash through the playground where the children swing. Their nannies and mommies first laughing and following slowly, then, their calls unheeded, jogging and crying out, demanding the children return—but the puppy must be chased, the puppy is fast and little and they are gaining no ground, but they are not tiring, especially not the largest boy ambling after the rear, his nanny calling his name with dwindling amusement and increasing concern as the gaggle roves on into the distant trees in the horizon:—Lee! Lee Fisher! It’s time to go home.