What It's Like to Be Shot At

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has another dynamite post up at Making Light (yes, I know that phrase is redundant) pertaining to the Virginia Tech shooting spree last Monday. It largely consists of lengthy quotes from two other posts. The first, promoted from Making Light's comments is a detailed description of what it takes to be competent to carry a gun, to answer the people who think that arming eighteen-year-olds on a college campus is a safe way to curb campus violence.

The second is by one Libby Spencer, who has no patience with John Derbyshire's macho blustering in which he asserted that the students at Virginia Tech were cowards for not taking out the shooter while he was reloading.

It’s so easy to be brave if you’ve never actually faced down a gunman, Spencer writes. I have. Twice. So I found this fool Derbyshire and his loyal fan’s insipid posts especially offensive. They should keep their adolescent daydreams of glory to themselves until after they’ve looked down the barrel of a gun wielded by a hostile hand. Spencer goes on to describe her experiences at gunpoint.

No one knows what they will do at gunpoint until they find out. John Derbyshire sounds to me like he's imagining himself to be a comic-book hero up against Imperial stormtroopers who can't shoot straight. When the real bullets start flying, it isn't like the comic books.

This happened about fourteen years or so ago.

Debbie and I had been out for a pleasant evening. We hopped on BART and went to the Paramount Theater to watch a classic movie for cheap. As it happened, that night, I was one of the lucky winners of Deco-Win, and my prize was dinner for two at Mexicali Rose. Naturally, after the movie was over we walked twelve blocks to Mexicali Rose to claim my prize. We had a lovely meal. When it was over, it was late enough and we were tired enough not to want to walk all the way back to the BART station, so we chose to take a taxi home instead.

We rode in the cab to the north end of Oakland. The cab turned off of Shattuck Avenue onto our street and pulled over in front of our house. Debbie, in the right-hand seat was paying the driver. I opened the left-hand passenger door, got out, and closed the door. Debbie got out of her side of the cab.

I heard a noise behind me and turned to look. A car heading south on Shattuck had stopped. I heard a loud pop and saw a flash from the car. Without taking time to think, I knew it was gunfire. There was no time to think logically -- what I did do was immediately try to present as small a profile to the shooter as I could, by dropping to the ground, prone, with my feet pointed towards the car with the shooter.

There was more popping. One of the taxi's doors slammed. Its wheels squealed, and it drove away.

The car on Shattuck drove away also. I chanced a look behind me and saw that the coast seemed to be clear. Debbie was nowhere to be seen -- she had gotten back into the cab when the firing started. I got up and ran up the steps, unlocked the door, and closed it behind me.

The action was over, and I could think again. I was unharmed and relatively safe, but where was Debbie? She was in the taxi as it drove off. Had she been hit? The enormity of what had just happened was starting to sink in: without my knowing who or why, someone had just tried to kill me. I grew more worried about Debbie.

I called 911 to report the shooting. I explained to the dispatcher that I was unhurt, but I didn't know what became of my partner in the taxi. She told me to wait, that police officers would be there shortly. I believe that after about half an hour with no police showing up, I called 911 again to relay my concern about Debbie. I hadn't heard from her, and was afraid she was in the hospital. The dispatcher asked me what color was the taxi. I remembered it being yellow. (It was actually two-toned, part of the fleet of Metro Yellow Taxi Co., with blue lower body and yellow canopy.) My memory of the rest of the evening is vague.

Debbie tells me she got back into the cab when the shooting started. The driver gunned the accelerator and took off. The cab driver was angry, thinking that we were drug dealers who had lured him into the middle of some kind of war. He wouldn't drive her home again. Eventually they wound up by Alta Bates hospital, where Debbie found a pay phone and called home. Not long after that the driver took her to the corner nearest to our house -- but would not turn onto our street -- and Debbie was home, to my immense relief.

At some point the police came by to take statements, and they told us that there had been reports of someone firing up a nearby street earlier in the evening. Some time, I think that night, because the streets were completely clear, I went to the intersection and looked around, and found some shell casings -- something close to .38 caliber or 9 mm. I still have one of them among some old kipple I keep on a bookshelf in my room.

Debbie had been carrying a canvas bag with a manuscript in it that she had been working on, some sort of editing project or other. In the next day or so, she turned her attention to the manuscript and discovered that the pages were dented. Evidently a bullet hit the manuscript in the bag, which Deb says she was carrying in front of her thigh. She tells me she has no recollection of the bullet's impact, however.