The Seductive Power of Guns   

Like many journalists, Nell Porter Brown had grown numb to stories about gun-related violence. And like many of her colleagues, she didn't know a TEC-9 semiautomatic assault pistol from a Thompson submachine gun. But squeezing off a few hundred rounds from guns similar to the most deadly on America's streets has since given Brown a new perspective.

"I've shot skeet before...
but to actually have a [weapon] in your hand and pulling the trigger and having it fire automatically, it was just a frighteningly powerful feeling," says Brown, a reporter at the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Massachusetts. "How easy it was to just pick up a gun and shoot with power from such a distance, [I could see] how much easier it might be to kill somebody."

Brown was one of 18 New England reporters and editors who spent an unseasonably warm November day at a Cape Cod military base firing a dozen automatic and semiautomatic weapons and learning the finer points of weaponry from U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents. ATF officials and participating journalists declared the experiment a success, and the agency may repeat it for reporters in other parts of the country.

The idea for the unusual field trip came from Michael Bezdek, an Associated Press news editor in Boston who shares an opinion common inside and outside U.S. newsrooms: journalists, many of whom write regularly about guns, know next to nothing about them (see Free Press, December).

"They didn't know the difference between a revolver and a pistol, between automatic and semiautomatic," Bezdek says. "They didn't even know what made up a shotgun shell and how it functioned." An ATF instructor, who told the journalists their colleagues get the facts about guns wrong "1,000 percent" of the time, seemed a bit surprised by "how really little many of the reporters knew," according to Bezdek.

But the participants, who included reporters and editors from the AP, the Cape Cod Times, WBZ-TV, the Brockton, Massachusetts, Enterprise and the Patriot Ledger, say they now feel much more confident about gun stories following the three-hour morning seminar and an afternoon of range shooting at Camp Edwards.

"In terms of analyzing a crime scene, I feel I'm much more equipped to ask questions without being laughed at by the cops," says Brown.

Cape Cod Times reporter Jack Perry says he has a new appreciation for the dangers of toy guns. During the session, he walked up to a table laden with some 50 weapons, but was unable to pick out the fakes. "The public and reporters have this perception that these toy guns are these plastic squirt-guns that any fool could see for a fake," says Perry, "but I would hate to be a cop coming down an alley and have some kid waving it."

The lesson went far beyond the technical aspects of weaponry. Many of the journalists talked about the raw power of the weapons, and how quickly and easily they could be fired.

Some felt that the hands-on training gave them an insight into criminals. The guns were "really scary, but in a way you can also see how seductive they are," says Perry. "You feel the power when they're in your hand, and you can see how people are so brazen with a gun in their hands. It was a strange feeling. I'm not a gun nut, but I can understand it better."

The experience also offered a window into the world of gun aficionados, who often feel maligned by the press. "It was a lot of fun," says the AP's Michelle Boorstein. "I know we're not supposed to say that sort of thing, but it was."

William E. Pickett Jr., a public information officer for ATF in New England and the organizer of the event, plans to pitch the idea to his PR counterparts at the 23 other ATF field offices during a January meeting in Washington, D.C.

Tom Hill, ATF's public affairs spokesman in Washington, says the session was an effective way to combat media misinformation about guns, adding that participation in such sessions would be encouraged in the future.