Condition Zero

The .45 auto, model 1911, is generally carried hammer back, with a round in the chamber and the thumb safety engaged. This is known as “cocked and locked,” or Condition One. When you draw the gun, and drop the manual safety, this is called Weapon at Battery, or Condition Zero. There are authorities who frown on carrying cocked-and-locked, for the user’s own safety, but the unspoken concern seems to be that a practiced pistol shooter can acquire the target and get their first round off too fast. It’s muscle memory and discipline. There’s no hesitation, once you know the gun.

This has to do with shooting doctrine. Fashions come and go, and enormous amounts of energy have been spent on whether the 9MM is as effective a defensive round as the .45, the merits of Isosceles over modified Weaver, and revolver vs. autoloader. You do the most damage with your rounds center body mass, it’s the biggest aim point. No, not if the target’s wearing body armor, you have to go with the Mozambique drill, two shots center-body and one to the head. Get two gun guys together, you get an argument about something, going back to black powder or smokeless.

The perceived danger with carrying a 1911 at the ready is that the trigger break is about three-and-a-half pounds on a duty weapon. And the trigger travel is very short. There seems to be an untested theory that the 1911 design is somehow more trigger-happy, because you can point and shoot a hair’s-breadth quicker than the other guy, which is generally speaking the desired result.

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None of this matters if the shooter isn’t prepared. The mechanics are secondary. There are common-sense rules for safely handling guns – never point a gun at anything you don’t intend to shoot, for one - and we’re supposed to know better than to give a loaded gun to a child or a mental defective, but in the end there’s no cure for stupid. Dumb has consequences.

We put Trump in the White House a second time. Did anybody honestly think it would be any different? It’s hard, in fact, to imagine how much more screwed up we could make this. The chaos is unrelieved. You might call it a comedy of errors, if it weren’t for the real world death toll. The loaded gun metaphor is in this case the U.S. military, and the projection of American force, even if the munitions we’ve dropped on Iran are in no way metaphorical. Trump and his sock puppet, the SecDef, have fatally mistaken the show of violence for the exercise of power, and all that Big Dick Energy has done nothing to effect or establish a policy, let alone any coherent ground rules. What we have is a display of threatened manhood, a guy flapping his arms like a flightless bird, and a parade of self-delusion.

The gun doesn’t convey power. It doesn’t give a weak man confidence, or resolve, or bigger balls. The gun is a force multiplier. It’s not a judge of character. You can be a fool and a liar and a thief, or you could cure leprosy with your touch. The gun won’t change that, either way.

Trump is still an impenetrably stupid man. There is no teachable moment, there is no catharsis, there is no escape from the weight of his own vanity. You have to wonder if there’s any escape for us, trapped in this suffocating doom loop that’s collapsing into naked psychosis.