One of the books that I’ve been looking forward to reading the most this year was Pike by Benjamin Whitmer. It seems that the PM Press folks are running a bit behind schedule with getting their books out on time this year (all speculation btw nothing confirmed) so when the release date of July 1st came and went I did something that I’ve never done before, I ordered an e copy from the publisher, easily downloading a .pdf file within minutes. The main reason I mention this is so you know up front, at least for now, the availability of this book. Because you are going to want to read it.

Over at his blog Benjamin Whitmer said that crime fiction is “supposed to be scary”. He also says that noir isn’t “supposed to be the police procedurals and wisecracking detective serials that dominate the crime shelves” and that they should be something different:

“This is nightmare, hunker-down-in-your-soul, how-deep-can-you-dig, release-the-fucking-bats territory.”

Benjamin Whitmer makes these tenants Bible truth in his debut novel Pike. With this novel Whitmer announces his presence with a kick to the teeth and he is the real deal.

The rest.

In one of Allen Ginsberg’s more crazily virtuosic letters to his sometime soul mate, Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg included an apology of sorts. “I was too intent on self-fulfillment, and rather crude about it, with all my harlequinade and conscious manipulation of your pity,” he wrote. He also looked back on his life as an artist and described it witheringly: “Art has been for me, when I did not deceive myself, a meager compensation for what I desire.” And he acknowledged being worn, enervated and world-weary. “I am sick of this damned life!” he complained.

The year was 1945. Ginsberg was a precociously ancient 19-year-old. He would grow friskier, more pragmatic and less self-dramatizing during the course of his long correspondence with Kerouac, but one thing never changed: Ginsberg’s insistence on keeping the friendship alive. It lasted until Kerouac disappeared into an alcoholic haze and died in 1969, despite Ginsberg’s best efforts to save him.

Many of the two men’s letters went to separate university archives, Kerouac’s to Columbia, and Ginsberg’s to the University of Texas. And there they sat for decades, not without good reason. These letters can be as long-winded, rambling, visionary and impenetrable as each man’s writing style would suggest. But they can also be sharp, lucid, funny, tender, intimate, gossipy, jubilant and absolutely honest about the two aspiring authors’ gigantic ambitions.

And if their correspondence sounds one loud cautionary note, it’s a warning to be careful of what you wish for. The free-spirited energy of their early communications can be seen slowly ossifying into the discourse of eminences too busy being famous to be friends. As Kerouac predicted to their mutual friend and mentor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti: “Someday ‘The Letters of Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac’ will make America cry.”

The rest.

Now in Slovenia the structure was that if you wanted to go abroad as a researcher you had to submit an invitation, and if the invitation was a serious one, then it was pretty automatic that you got the money. So, for example, a typical scene consisted of one of my friends coming to me and saying he wanted to go abroad. I say, ‘fine, where do you want to go?’ He says ‘Chicago’. I say ‘let’s see what I have for Chicago’. At some stage I think I have picked up notepaper from the University of Chicago’s German Department, and I think I have some from Northwestern also. ‘So, OK, here is the option, which would you prefer?’ He chooses one, and then I ask what kind of colloquium he would like to be invited to? So we faked it all, whatever was needed, all the data – and of course we always invented the colloquium. I mean, I simply said ‘on behalf of’ and I faked the name so that none of my friends would be offended if it all came out. At some point I remember once that there truly was a colloquium, but I said, no, this is not ethical and so I invented another one. I said I cannot stand writing the truth, it must be a lie. So although it would have been easier to tell the truth, I invented the colloquium. I am a workaholic: I do my work, but I have this terrible desire to fake things at this level; to fake institutional things. I think that everything to do with institutions should be faked. I don’t know what this is, I never analyze myself. I hate the very idea of analyzing myself.

Let’s start with the obvious. According to the same article I linked to above, Mehserle’s firearm was on the right side of his belt — usually known as the strong side hip position, given that he’s right handed — while his taser was on the left side, in what is known as the cross draw position. To illustrate the difference between the two positions, here’s pretty good video of a strong side draw holster and a cross draw holster. They are in as different positions as it is possible to be on a gun belt.

I’m not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I shoot a fair amount, I do presentation and dry-fire exercise a couple of times a week, and I carry every day. And one of the first things I learned about carrying was that my gun had to stay in the same place. That’s the only way I can draw and get a quick sight picture with any kind of consistency. As such, I always know where my carry gun is, and it’s always right where it’s supposed to be, unlike, say, my cell phone, keys, and whatever else I have on me.

And, this should probably go without saying, but I never draw my handgun instead of something else. Not to be flip, but I’ve never accidentally drawn my gun instead of my car keys. Likewise, I’ve never gone to make a phone call and accidentally stuck my gun in my ear. Frankly, I find the idea of accidentally reaching to the wrong side of my gun belt ridiculous.

Which brings us to the difference between Mehserle’s Taser and his handgun.  I don’t know a whole lot about law enforcement Tasers, but according to Wikipedia it was a Taser X26, which in bright yellow — the color of his — would look like this:

You can watch a video promo of the X26 here. It’s ergonomically a hell of a lot different than a handgun, as you can probably tell. It’s also a hell of a lot lighter. Different accounts put it at weighing between one half and one third of his sidearm, which was a Sig Sauer P226.

When I first heard about this incident, I assumed Mehserle was carrying a Glock for a sidearm. It seemed the most likely scenario, Glocks being known for being sometimes a little too quick to fire for two reasons:

1. The Glock has no thumb safety. Meaning, that when you pull it out of your holster the only thing you need to do to fire it is pull the trigger. That’s it. And, as such, Glocks are notorious amongst police firearms instructors for being involved in police shooting accidents.

2. Glocks are often considered double-action only handguns, but they’re not really. With a round in the chamber, the trigger breaks at about 5 pounds on most Glocks. That’s pretty typical for a carry gun — my 1911 is set up at 4.5 pounds. It’s not too light, but it’s sure not very heavy (generally speaking, heavier trigger pulls make it harder to be accurate, and it’s a fine balance). And unlike a true double action gun, like a revolver, the Glock takes a fairly short pull to fire — meaning, the trigger doesn’t have to move backward much.

(Neither of those is a knock on Glocks, by the way. I have a Glock that I sometimes carry, and I love it. But I’ve spent a lot of time working with it in dry-fire exercises to make sure I, as the saying goes, keep my booger hook off the bang switch until I’m ready to fire. I don’t think anyone would disagree that it’s more unforgiving than a double action handgun with a manual safety.)

The Sig Sauer P226, however, is noticeably different. Though it also does not have a thumb safety (thanks for correcting me, Tam), when it is carried with a round in the chamber, it is typically carried with the hammer down in true double action mode so that the trigger pull that fires the first round has to raise the hammer before it can drop it. It’s not unlike a revolver’s trigger pull, meaning that it’s a longer motion that runs about 10 pounds. That’s pretty hard to mistake for anything else besides what it is.

And then there’s the difference between the holsters. Now most of this is speculative, because I can’t tell exactly what holsters Mehserle is using, but I do know that Denver cops, like most cops in the nation, use a simple thumb-break holster for their firearm. There’s an example here from Midway USA. To draw the weapon, you first have to hit that leather tab at the top of the holster, popping open the snap. Taser holsters, on the other hand, are usually setup fairly differently. This is a video demonstration of a US Cavalry Taser X26 holster from BLACKHAWK!, one of the biggest police accessory OEMs on the planet:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Interestingly, in this video from the local news channel, at about 1:10, you can see Mehserle struggling with his holster:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

There’s a couple of things that can account for the problems Mehserle had with his holster. I’m a bit of a geek on this stuff, and everything I’ve read from Suarez, Cooper, Ayoob, etc., all indicates a severe degradation of motor skills in perceived life threatening situations. But what I find unbelievable is that Mehserle didn’t know what he was drawing given the time it took him to draw it. See, somewhere in that process, his brain had to send the command to hit the thumb-break to release his handgun.

So, even discounting the difference between the positions on the officer’s gun belt, I’m having a hard time believing these two weapons could be mistaken. They’re just too different. If it were a scenario where he was carrying a smaller black Taser and a Glock in similar holsters, I could almost see it — though I’d still be amazed. But in this case, everything is different, from the holster and controls, to the color and weight.

And so, back to that claim that this type of Taser confusion has happened six other times. Well, it hasn’t. Not really. See, according to the San Jose Mercury News:

In the previous incidents, (Taser expert) Meyer said, the officers had black Tasers that were mounted on the same side of the body as the officers’ guns. Mehserle’s Taser was yellow and mounted on the opposite side of his body from his gun.

In other words, this specific kind of accident, with all the particulars listed above, has never happened. Not once. (And, though I can’t find the kind of gun used in the above accidents, I would bet that most, if not all, of them are Glocks.) And that’s precisely why Mehserle was carrying a big, yellow Taser in a crossdraw position:

In fact, Meyer admitted, his analysis of the other cases prompted him to advise Taser International, the company that manufactures the stun gun, to warn police agencies Tasers should always be mounted on the opposite of a police officer’s gun.

Moreover, there’s the discrepancy between Mehserle’s reaction and the reaction of all the rest of those cops involved in Taser confusion:

Most of the officers in those previous incidents also immediately told those they shot and fellow officers that they had made a mistake, began to cry immediately after the shooting, and continually asked about the suspects’ conditions as paramedics worked on those shot.

Mehserle’s only reaction, according to witnesses, was to put his hands to his head and say, “Oh (expletive), oh God, I shot him.” Mehserle did not tell other officers he had made a mistake and did not ask about Grant’s condition during the 10 minutes he stayed on Oakland’s Fruitvale BART platform after the shooting.

Maybe I’m missing something, but it doesn’t look to me like there’s any way Mehserle didn’t mean to shoot Oscar Grant. I don’t know what was going through his head. Maybe he’s just got a real short fuse, maybe he has a few skeletons rattling around in his cranium, maybe he’s just very bad under pressure, or maybe something about Grant drove him nuts.

It’s also possible that he got spooked, thought Grant was moving for a handgun in his pocket, and just panicked. That’s what he claims — that he thought Grant might have a gun. And, interestingly, I’ve never read or seen anything from a single police firearms trainer that would tell you to meet a gun with a Taser: you would always use deadly force in that case.

If you think about it, that’s something that really reeks about this case: Mehserle’s stated reason for pulling his Taser would require him to pull his handgun and fire. In fact, Mehserle never told anyone on the night of the shooting that it was an accident. What he told them, time and time again, was that Oscar Grant was digging in his pocket and might have a gun. I don’t think anything’s quite as damning as that.

That doesn’t mean Mehserle wasn’t stunned afterwards when he realized what he’d done (it doesn’t look premeditated to me). It also doesn’t mean that he doesn’t really, really wish he hadn’t shot Grant — he’d be an idiot not to regret it, given what it’s done to his life. It doesn’t even mean that he’s not genuinely remorseful.

But, at the end of the day, it was murder. The argument that he mistook his handgun for his Taser is just laughable. And I think the only reason the defense got away with that line of shit is because so many people are unconscionably ignorant about firearms and firearms training. I will hazard a guess that there wasn’t a single concealed carry permit holder on the jury. (Something which, given that the trial took place in Los Angeles, is probably a good guess.) I’m betting if the trial had take place in, say, Utah, the outcome would have been very different.

Also, to be honest, I’m a little irritated that Mehserle’s intent has to be argued at all. As a concealed carry permit holder, I’m pretty sure that if I were to shoot somebody, my intent to shoot them would be proven by my, well, having shot them. Any attempt I made to say that I meant to pull pepper spray — which I do sometimes also carry, given the situation — would be laughed out of court. The only question would be whether there was a credible threat which warranted deadly force. As responsibilities go when carrying a gun, this is the most very basic: that you only draw your weapon when you mean to. I don’t think that’s an unfair assumption, either for a CCW permit holder, or a cop.

And I think it’s pretty obvious that Mehserle meant to.

Update: Tamara K. of View From The Porch (and knoxnews.com and Concealed Carry Magazine) left a comment letting me know that I was mistaken about the Sig Sauer P226: it does not have a thumb safety. The post has been updated accordingly. Also, as I keep saying, I’m a novice at all this stuff, so I welcome correction from gun types. If I’ve made mistakes, or if you think I’m just dead wrong, please let me know. I’m getting more and more interested in this, and would like to see opinions from folks who know guns.

Update II: I think I’m gonna troll around a bit and see what some of the gun writers/bloggers have been saying. I’ll post what I find, on either side, in the updates.

Update III: From David Codrea, of The War on Guns, one of my favorite gun blogs (and David is not exactly known for being a raving leftist, not that there’s anything wrong with that):

If Grant had popped a prone Mehserle in the back, what do you think the chances are he’d have gotten off with involuntary manslaughter?

That’s pretty much the question, isn’t it? You think if the roles were reversed Grant would have had any opportunity to argue about intention at the trial?

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

And, of course, the cop who murdered Mr. Grant, one Johannes Mehserle, just received the lightest possible sentence: involuntary manslaughter.

Y’know, I’ve been to the range once or twice. I’m no expert, but I make sure I shoot with my carry gun at least once a month. I try for twice a month, but ammunition prices and workload sometimes make that unfeasible. But still. I know where my carry gun is on my belt and I know what it feels like in my hand. I’m just about %100 certain I could never pull it out and not know what was in my hand, even in a high-stress situation, which, contrary to some of the horseshit being floated around the intertubes, this was not.

This was a bunch of cops finishing up restraining a few unarmed kids. That’s it. There’s nothing to indicate that it should have even blipped Mr.  Mehserle’s blood pressure, unless he’s some kind of fucking neurotic. His draw is cool, deliberate, and I have a hard time believing that he did anything but exactly what he meant to do.

Anyway, more later. In the meantime, I’d like to propose that Mr. Mehserle defuse the situation in Northern California by shooting himself in the mouth. It seems the only honorable thing to do.

Update: trm49 makes a great point in the comments.

The cop is probably one of the most unassailable figures in a u.s society that pretends to be anti -authoritarian. This case is unique mostly because the cop was brought to trial and the credit for that goes largely to the Bay Area folks who took to the streets and caused hella disruption over the murder. The Bay Area is probably one of the very few places in the u.s where rallying people against police violence is even remotely possible. Had this happened in other areas of the states it would have rallied about a dozen folks while the shooting would have been dismissed as a justifiable shooting.

To put the high regard cops are held in perspective, consider this. Obama is able to criticize members of congress, the supreme court, wall street & oil execs and even fire a 4 star general. Granted, their is some blowback over this criticism but nothing like when he criticized the Boston beat cop for harassing Prof Gates. Obama even had to make amends by inviting the guy out for a beer while the cop refused to apologize. This when Obama was still popular and fresh from his election victory.

Update II: I’ll have a post later today or tomorrow about exactly why I find it so unlikely that Mehserle accidentally pulled the wrong weapon based on my own concealed carry experience. Admittedly, I haven’t been seriously at this gun stuff for long, and I’m no expert, but I’m finding the whole concept more and more absurd as I dig into it.

I came across Torgovnik’s name in this fantastic article in Guernica, “Living with the Enemy,” which argues that the reconciliation movement that’s so in fashion these days is pretty much horseshit. This from the article:

No group of Rwandans—perhaps no contemporary group of people in the world—epitomize this kind of suffering more than the Tutsi women who were raped and gang-raped during the genocide. Numbers are hard to come by, since many of these women have remained silent, but Human Rights Watch estimates that up to half a million women were raped. Seventy percent of those who survived are HIV-positive, according to UNICEF, and it is thought that ten thousand to twenty-five thousand children were born of these rapes. Their mothers are often ostracized by their communities and live, therefore, in marginalization and immiseration (some have been forced to turn to prostitution); the children are reviled by other Tutsis as “children of bad memories,” “children of hate,” or “little killers.”

In 2006, the Israeli photographer Jonathan Torgovnik traveled to Rwanda and interviewed thirty of these women in their homes; for many, it was the first time they had spoken of their travails. (Talking was difficult but, as a woman named Beata explained, “I think keeping quiet breaks me more.”) His photographs of these mothers and children are hard to look at and hard to look away from. The bright colors of the women’s clothes and the lush greenery of the surrounding fauna explode; there is beauty here, and life. And yet the beauty and life seem to mock the photographs’ human subjects, who look, somehow, frozen in their sorrow. Torgovnik’s photographs resonate with silence, as if the pain they document is beyond lamentation.

Reading their testimonies, it is hard to know how these women survived. Many were passed, for weeks, from man to man, and were raped continuously. They were raped until they bled, until they passed out, until they could not move or walk or talk; often they were forced to witness murders of others in between the rapes. Some were beaten and clubbed; or had nails driven into their bodies or their teeth knocked out; or were forced to drink stones, or urine, or the blood of their families; or had corn stems, wood, or sharp metal shoved into their vaginas. Some begged to be killed; many more contemplated killing themselves (“I…didn’t have money to buy a rope,” Esperance explains) or, later, their infants. Many of the rape victims were young teenagers at the time of the genocide, which means that they were in their late twenties or early thirties when Torgovnik photographed them; it is a shock to realize this, for some now look like old women. Equally shocking is the preternaturally aged, worried solemnity of their children, which refutes everything we like to associate with childhood.

For these women (who are identified only by their first names), the fathers of their children were not only their rapists but also, often, the killers of their families. Needless to say, the women’s emotions are a complicated maelstrom, at which Torgovnik’s interviews can only hint. “There is no reason whatsoever for me to love this girl,” a woman named Marie says of her daughter, Mary. (Marie is the only woman Torgovnik photographs whose eyes fill with tears.) “She reminds me of…the first rape and the second rape and all the rapes that followed… I can’t say that I love her, but I can’t say that I hate her either.” Yvette recalls: “After around six months, I thought I was probably pregnant. This is when I started wishing to die… But I feared suicide and thought instead that I should give birth to that kid and kill it. But…he was so beautiful that I developed love immediately.” Her son, Isaac, who is barefoot and wears a torn shirt, stares at us: he has beautiful almond-shaped eyes, the slightest furrow on his brow, and not a hint of a smile. A woman named Winnie explains of her daughter, Athanse: “I love her so much, even more so because she is the result of suffering.” But Isabelle, mother of Jean-Paul, says, “I feel trauma every time I look at this boy… I regret that I didn’t die in the genocide.” Some of these women grapple not with their hatred per se, but with where to place it. “They say we are leftovers of the militia’s sexual appetite,” Delphine says. “And whenever I think about it, I hate myself.” Philomena says, more simply, “For a long time, I really hated God.”

The wonderful thing—if there is any wonderful thing—that emerges from these photographs and interviews is the stubborn singularity of each woman. Despite their shared history of horror—and despite the génocidaires’ attempt to kill their human-ness—each has defiantly remained an individual. And each struggles, in her own way, with how she and her children might face the future. (“Be friendly. Love one another,” advises Josephine, somewhat miraculously.) Yet in another, decidedly un-wonderful sense, all these women are the sisters of Améry. In their incomprehension, their shame, their scars, their losses, their dislocation, their impotent fury, their bleak loneliness, their irretrievable lack of trust… The worlds of the Rwandan peasant and of the Viennese intellectual are not, it turns out, far apart: whoever was tortured, stays tortured.

The rest.

Back in the fall of 1993, the Denver Metro klavern of the Ku Klux Klan was casting about rather frantically for a means to redeem the humiliation of having been publicly routed by a surging mass of irate black teenagers amidst an attempt to commemorate Adolf Hitler’s birthday on the steps of the Colorado Capitol.

Their solution, brilliant in its way, was to have Thom Robb, fundamentalist minister cum Grand Dragon of the Arkansas-based Knights of the KKK (subsequently retitled “Christian Concepts, Inc.”), to observe the 1994 Martin Luther King holiday by giving a speech in front of the old courthouse adorning Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall.

Predictably  –  at least it can be said with certainty that Robb predicted it – a host of the more purportedly enlightened denizens of the People’s Republic sallied forth at the designated time to denounce the pastor’s unabashed celebration of white supremacist values with chants and placards demanding the utmost “tolerance” of racial/ethnic “diversity.”

Unfortunately – or not, depending on one’s point of view – things didn’t go quite as those on the “antiracist” side of the confrontation anticipated.

Fixing his gaze upon the small sea of hecklers neatly ensconced behind rows of metal barriers erected by the ever-growing overburden of Boulder’s finest – this, it was claimed, was to “ensure his safety,” although it would’ve taken someone a lot less canny than Thom Robb to worry that whatever protestors might turn out in the veritable buckle of the granola belt would so much as sip a cup of herbal tea without first reciting the Pledge of Nonviolence – the pastor seemed downright amused.

Then, having to all appearances extracted a full measure of mirth from the spectacle, and making even fuller use of his PA system, he delivered an utterly devastating blow (albeit, sadly, I can only repeat it in paraphrase). “What’s all this yapping about ‘diversity’?” he wanted to know.

“The town we’re standing in is 94 percent white. That’s why I’m here. This place is exactly what [the Klan] is trying to duplicate all across the country. If it’s racial diversity you’re looking for, you might want to consider moving to Newark or Detroit. But, hey, you’re not about to do that, are you? Ever wonder why that might be?”

Sometimes the effects produced by a little dose of reality can be amazing.

A queasy silence settled over the crowd even before Robb’s verbal roundhouse was complete. People shifted from foot to foot, not-so-figuratively squirming in place, the message boards they’d been holding lowering steadily, as if the signs themselves were wilting.

By ones and twos, then in somewhat larger clots, they began, almost furtively, to slink away.

The rest.

Y’know, it’s not very often I cheer for the klan.

One of the things I learned in the process was that you’ve got to cast everyone in the book. For most of my characters that was pretty difficult, but for the lead character, Douglas Pike, it was a no-brainer: “Mel Gibson, with a beard, hopped up on cocaine, booze, and self-hatred, with strict instructions to tap into his inner Nazi.”

This doesn’t change my mind even a little bit.

Update: The director liked the pitch well enough that he requested a copy of the book, but, as of yet, he hasn’t read it. He’s on a pretty grueling directorial schedule, I hear. Which, as I told my editor, is just how I want it. As long as he doesn’t read it, he can’t reject it, and I get to brag on ever barstool in town that my first novel’s being considered for a Hollywood film.