Walking Through Texas with a Gun and a Mission

C.J. Grisham, the founder of Open Carry Texas, on a walkabout in Temple, Texas, August 29, 2015.

When the big drunk guy drives back for the third time, slanting his SUV to the curb, he steps out with a gun on his hip and stops in the middle of the street.

"Who am I talking to?" he says. "Anybody? Everybody?"

On the sidewalk stand thirteen heavily armed Texans, a six-year-old boy, and a baby in a stroller. They've got AR-15's on their shoulders, Glocks on their hips, cute little 9mms in ankle holsters. One of the women has a pink tactical weapon that looks like it might deliver lethal valentines. They're from a group called Open Carry Texas, and they're out on this hot summer night in the small town of Temple, an hour north of Austin, to exercise their constitutional right to carry firearms. The drunk guy, exercising the very same right, keeps tearing away in his truck and then circling back to escalate the conflict, so one of the activists has taken a photograph of his license plate as a safety measure.

Now he's pissed. "This ain't your concern, who I am or what I do," he says.

A calm and confident man steps forward. This is C. J. Grisham, the leader of the group, a forty-one-year-old Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who is just five feet five but blessed with twice his share of command presence. Radiating authority from his bright blue eyes, he tries to pull the big guy aside for a more private conversation.

But the big guy ain't having it. He stands his ground in the middle of the street. "Will you do me a favor and please let me have that picture?"

"No," Grisham says calmly, "because—"

"Because it's their right to do so?"

"It is when you drive and you've been drinking," Grisham says.

The big guy puffs up. "Is that right?"

"Yes," Grisham says.

For a moment, the big guy seems flummoxed. Along with the revolver on his hip, he's got at least eight inches and one hundred pounds on Grisham, but Grisham has those laser eyes, that unsettling air of confidence, and an AR-15 on his shoulder engraved with a quote from Thomas Jefferson: "I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind."

It's a standoff.

"Outstanding!" the big guy finally snaps belligerently.

Grisham glances over at the SUV, noticing a woman in the passenger seat. "If you've got somebody that hasn't been drinking," he says, "it would be better for all of us if she drove."

"All of us? What's best for all of us?"

And just like that, we flash back to a legendary past. Two armed men face each other on a dusty Texas street, testing the limits of individual freedom. The onlookers wait. A dog barks. Time stops.

Theory is about to meet practice.

---

We have always loved our guns. Guns freed us, fed us, protected us from the dangers of the frontier, and served us in war. In an unsettled land where every man was on his own, they became the ultimate talisman of personal security. The result today is more than three hundred million guns in private hands and individual gun rights—despite thirty thousand deaths a year and the ceaseless run of mass shootings in schools, theaters, and churches—steadily affirmed and expanded by legislatures and courts. This might seem like a good time for gun lovers to celebrate. Instead, thousands of Americans like C. J. Grisham are marching with tactical weapons in the streets, pressing their demand for even fewer regulations in the most intimidating way possible, and many say they won't be satisfied until there are no gun regulations at all. But we've become so used to the argument over guns that we might just shrug off Grisham's stand as the same old thing.

It's not. Something very strange is happening in the American mind. Because the more complicated truth is that we've always feared our guns, too. Dueling was such a problem in colonial America, George Washington thought it might derail the revolution. To tame the violence of the frontier, Kentucky passed the first gun-control law in 1813. By the 1840s, lawmakers in states such as Arkansas and Tennessee were already arguing about the implications of the "well-regulated militia" clause of the Second Amendment. The mob violence of Prohibition and the assassination of President Kennedy led to the first federal firearms restrictions, and states and cities continued to pass their own regulations. Often these were bipartisan, especially when black people had the audacity to carry guns; in 1967, Governor Ronald Reagan passed a gun-control law after the Black Panthers held an open-carry event at the California State Capitol.

But the modern era of guns began with the shocking debut of America's new militarized police tactics at the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in 1993, the pivotal event that sparked the rise of the militia movement, the libertarian movement, and eventually the Tea Party. As the National Rifle Association switched its focus from hunting to attacking the government's "jackbooted thugs" and Republicans rose to power in state and federal offices, the gun-rights movement racked up victory after victory, culminating in the Supreme Court's 2008 recognition of the individual right to own guns in District of Columbia v. Heller.

By then, small groups of protesters were already marching with weapons on public streets—first in Ohio, then in Virginia and Utah and Georgia and California, the number rising steadily all through the Bush years. But Heller and the presidency of Barack Obama sent the movement into hyperdrive: Gun sales exploded, gun shows sold Obama targets, the NRA issued constant warnings that Obama had a secret plan to disarm America and impose martial law. Open-carry protests multiplied. Some began dogging Obama events—in New Hampshire, expressing an increasingly common sentiment, one protester carried a sidearm and a sign saying it was "time to water the tree of liberty."

Many states and cities responded by supporting gun rights: Wisconsin legislators wrote a law to remind police officers that carrying a gun wasn't a crime, Chicago abolished its gun registry, a county in Washington state repealed its "no guns allowed" regulation in public parks. In 2012, Oklahoma passed an open-carry law called the Self-Defense Act.

But somehow Texas was a holdout. Police there were fiercely opposed to open carry, saying it would make their lives more dangerous. In the era of mass shootings, they said, how is it even possible to tell the difference between a patriot and a deranged killer? Isn't a pointless tragedy inevitable? The first time Grisham organized a rally in his quiet little central-Texas city, police put snipers on rooftops, called in the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, and took pictures of everyone in the crowd. Outraged, Grisham responded with an onslaught of activism one gun blog called "the biggest social movement in Texas since the Civil Rights days." Over the next two years, he would lead more than two thousand events across the state and recruit fifty thousand active followers, who pestered their local representatives relentlessly. In January 2016, largely because of him, Texans will be able to carry handguns openly for the first time since Reconstruction. The Dallas Morning News made him a finalist for Texan of the Year.

So tonight, the lone cop who showed up was almost apologetic. "You're out here exercising your right; it doesn't bother me any. I'm all for the Second Amendment. But when people call and say I'm scared, I have to check it out."

"We're going to stay away from schools, stay away from residential areas," Grisham reassured him.

"All right, cool."

The group was amiable and easygoing. Most of them were hostile to immigration and skeptical of the president, Barry Soetoro, but they were as suspicious as any liberal of the drug war, the police, the Patriot Act, and the prison system. Few had good words for George W. Bush, the Iraq War, or the Republican party. Gay marriage was a touchier subject, but most took a libertarian attitude. One was wearing a kilt. Another had a ten-inch tattoo of Cartman from South Park—that was Big Jim Everard, the giant cheerful Falstaff of the crew and Grisham's right-hand man, accompanied by his baby and his toddler and Molly, the girlfriend he hadn't quite gotten around to marrying. Grisham's wife, Emily, the one with the pink rifle, was a wholesome Mormon who admitted she would never go to a gun rally on her own.

Grisham gathered them in a circle and went over the rules. "Number one, don't handle your weapon. Watch your hands. Resting them on the stock is not a big deal, but keep your hand away from the trigger assembly. Our purpose is to raise awareness. Look approachable. Smile. Wave."

For the next hour, the reaction couldn't have been more positive: all high fives and honking horns, thanks for standing up for our rights, I'm your Facebook friend, even a promise of discounts at a local store called Love Guns. One soldier parked his car to bring his family over. The only hostile note came from a police officer named Steve Ermis, who roared by a couple times on an electric-green Harley—more on him later.

Then the big guy showed up. He was on foot, dressed in cargo pants and a brown T-shirt. They could smell the booze coming off him from a distance. The funny part is, he was on their side. He said he supported open carry in principle, but in practice he thought it was fucking stupid because you are exposing your fucking ace in the hole—and then he grabbed at Everard's sidearm to demonstrate how vulnerable it was. It was a mock grab, nothing serious, but Everard was already put off by the blue language around his family and instinctively covered the gun with his hand. Now it was the big guy's move.

Grisham was talking to some other people while all this was happening. He saw what was going on and hurried over, trying to distract the big guy by arguing with him. "I want to show my ace in the hole! I want them to fold before they even play the game! You want to play the game!"

"I see what you're doing there," the drunk guy said. "I see what you're doing."

He stumbled off and came back again in his truck, circling the block a few times. That's when they took the picture of his license plate. Then he came back with the gun.

Now he's standing in the middle of the street, flinging out that libertarian-on-libertarian taunt: "All of us? What's best for all of us?"

Grisham doesn't answer. Disgusted, the big guy starts for his truck. Then, suddenly, he stops and turns around in the street, fixing his bleary eyes on Grisham. "You think you know me?"

Grisham goes still, waiting for his next move. The men around him freeze too. "This could get interesting," one says.

---

Like so many modern social movements, this one started with a video posted on the Internet. In the video, taken on a cool day in March 2013, Grisham is walking down the side of a country road with his fifteen-year-old son, who is doing a ten-mile hike for a Boy Scout merit badge. He's wearing a hydration backpack and a bush hat with a red bandanna draped over his neck, and he's carrying his AR-15 slung across his chest like a soldier on patrol—which puts him in a legal gray area because you can carry a rifle in Texas but not "in a manner calculated to alarm."

That's when Officer Steve Ermis pulls up in his police cruiser. He's a heavyset guy with twenty-seven years on the force, as well as the owner of a gun shop and a Harley-Davidson with an unusually ugly paint job.

"Hang on a minute," Ermis says.

Grisham starts walking toward Ermis, with his son waiting behind him. Ermis also has at least eight inches and one hundred pounds on him.

Ermis says, "Don't be touching it."

"Okay," Grisham says, leaving his hands dangling by his sides and the rifle dangling around his neck.

"What are we doing?" Ermis asks.

"We're hiking," Grisham answers.

"We're hiking," Ermis repeats. Then he does a strange thing—without a word, he reaches out and takes hold of Grisham's rifle, lifting it up for a closer look. He seems more fascinated than concerned. "Some reason why you have this?"

"Because I can," Grisham answers.

Without another word, Ermis reaches up to release the clip holding the gun. Grisham's hands come up to the stock and barrel. "Hey, don't disarm me, man," he says—but by the time he gets to "man," Ermis has pulled out his service revolver and pointed it at his head.

Grisham doesn't resist as Ermis pushes him onto the hood of the police car, but he does resist when Ermis tries to force his hands behind his back. "Just let me give my camera to my son and I will do everything you ask," he says. After a brief skirmish, Grisham narrates the sequence to his camera. "I'm taking my camera off. I'm not touching my gun." To his son, he says, "I want you to record this. Is it recording?" Then he tells Ermis, "Now I'm going to do everything you say."

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In a normal time, this small-town squabble might have ended in some innocuous lesser charge. But this was not that time and Grisham was not that man. He sees the right to possess weapons as absolute. His whole life had prepared him for this moment, starting in his disorienting and often lonely childhood with a rule-oriented military stepfather who took the family to bases in Tennessee, Florida, and finally Japan. He was small and scrawny and often the target of bullies. He spent his summers in Texas with his biological father, a libertarian and avid Ron Paul fan who collected historical military weapons—an M1 Garand, a Mosin-Nagant, a Vietnam-era M16, a Mauser, a Thompson submachine gun, an Uzi. While he was still in middle school, they joined Frank Zappa in the fight against warning labels on explicit song lyrics, which turned him into a lifelong music fan with a special taste for heavy metal. During the school year, they maintained their bond through books: The Declaration of Independence arrived when he was ten, followed by the Constitution and the Magna Carta and Thomas Paine, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Frédéric Bastiat. As he puts it, "Politics was something we could do together to make up for the time we'd lost."

When he was about thirteen, a bully pushed him at school and he finally learned that it was better to fight than to submit. He started getting into a lot of fights. His sister got teased and he started fighting her bullies, too. By his senior year, he was a hard-drinking headbanger with long purple hair. But he also converted to Mormonism so he could marry Emily, a deeply religious girl he'd met in Japan. He was conflicted and searching for a cause. For a while, he poured his energy into the battle against video-game censorship. He worked as a DJ. He worked at Blockbuster. Then he joined the Army and found his calling. He was in the first wave of troops into Baghdad in 2003. He was in the thick of the Fallujah uprising. He fought off an ambush with nothing but a pistol and a hand grenade, winning a Bronze Star.

He loved the Army but had trouble with authority. Sometimes this manifested itself heroically: In Fallujah, when he saw soldiers using a cattle prod on reluctant detainees, he protested to the sergeant, then the lieutenant, and finally the colonel until the practice was stopped. When he was wounded, he fought the same Ladder of No for permission to stay with his unit. Other times it was reckless: When he got back to the States, he started one of the earliest milblogs and became so popular that he was invited twice to the White House, once to meet Bush and once to meet Obama, but that didn't stop him from crossing the political lines soldiers in uniform are supposed to respect, attacking Obama with such relish that the Army launched an investigation.

He can have a grandiose sense of destiny and embattlement, and can be flat-out impossible about anything he considers unjust, no matter how trivial. When his kids' school announced a new policy of mandatory uniforms, Grisham raised such a ruckus that the principal of the school said she was afraid of him, and the Army told him to take down a blog post about the squabble. He fought the order all the way up to a four-star general. "You can't tell me to take it down," he said. "This is my personal blog about a nonmilitary topic." The Army ordered him to undergo an Article 15 hearing and he demanded a full court-martial, an escalation so out of proportion that they settled for giving him a letter of reprimand—which he intends to frame someday as a memento of his fight against tyranny.

He got into another battle when he moved to Texas to finish his Army career at Fort Hood, this time over an order that soldiers had to present IDs to any law-enforcement officer who asked for them. Grisham said it was an illegal order because the Fourth Amendment gives Americans the right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects. When he got the brush-off, he filed an Inspector General complaint. When the IG brushed him off, he filed a congressional complaint.

Guns are his latest cause—just nine days before his arrest, he was in front of Temple's city council, fighting for a resolution that would bar the city from enforcing any federal gun laws.

---

So Grisham was primed for battle, and he already had an Internet following. Meanwhile, the city of Temple was doing everything it could to help turn the whole thing into a grudge match—to start with, Ermis wrote in his police report that he had asked Grisham if he would relinquish his gun. This was not true, as Grisham had pointed out quite emphatically at the scene. The city of Temple also refused to release the dashcam video. Outraged, Grisham, who had access to it as part of the trial process, posted pieces of the video that showed quite clearly that Ermis had asked no such question. Shortly afterward, his attorney called to say that the prosecutor had threatened to put a gag order on the video.

"Oh, really?" Grisham said.

A minute later, he told the attorney the prosecutor couldn't put a gag order on the video.

"Why not?"

"Because I just put the whole thing online."

The video went viral—as of today, it has 430,000 views. In the spring of 2013, Grisham started Open Carry Texas and began small rallies in nearby towns. The prosecutors got even more annoyed, accusing him of using the court system just to promote himself and his cause. "This is discovery in the case," one lectured as he turned over more records. "It is not to be disseminated to the press or to any other persons, Internet, Facebook… . That's not what discovery is for."

They charged him with interfering with a police officer, a misdemeanor that carries a $2,000 fine and up to six months in jail, but getting a Texas jury to agree with them was hard. In the first trial, which lasted four days, Grisham devoted most of his energy to the argument that there was no reason to stop him in the first place. He knew that stop-and-frisk without probable cause was a big problem for minorities, but finally understood the indignity when he discovered that white-man-with-a-gun could be the functional equivalent of walking-while-brown: "I was treated like a street thug," he told the media. With public sympathy for him rising, the prosecutors scrambled to justify the stop—he was walking on the wrong side of the road, there was a complaint, they had a right to make sure he didn't have a restraining order or a felony charge. Grisham argued that those standards justified pretty much anything the police wanted to do. Was that the kind of America we wanted to live in?

The jury deliberated for two full days before giving up, deadlocked at five to one for acquittal.

That might have been a wise time to drop the whole thing. But the prosecutors refiled the charges and Grisham's attorney responded with a flurry of truly obnoxious litigation, including a motion for a change in venue and an explosive attack on the judge for comments made in his chambers. "He made numerous statements about my client and his wife, who is not at trial in this matter, as being yokels, referred to them as not being good parents and that he wanted to teach them a lesson." This was small-town law as nuclear war.

When Ermis finally got to testify, he sounded like the soul of reason. The school shooting at Sandy Hook had just happened ninety days earlier, there was a school half a mile away, and Grisham was carrying his rifle in "an offensive-ready combat-carry position," so he'd gone up to make sure it wasn't just a toy. When he saw that it was real, he feared for his life and reached up to unclip the gun, which is when Grisham's hands came up. "I grabbed my sidearm for my defense because I—at this point, I don't know what his intentions are."

But even with a gun pointed at his head, he told the prosecutor, Grisham refused to put his hands behind his back.

"He made it conditional that if you let me give my camera to my son, then I'll comply?"

"Yes, sir."

"And he actually called his son up there to you—asked this guy behind you to approach you … with this weapon right there in his hands."

"Yes, sir, that's correct."

"Do you consider that dangerous?"

"Yes, sir, I do."

This testimony pretty much nailed Grisham—there's no doubt he resisted—but it didn't make much sense. If Ermis had been so nervous about the fifteen-year-old Boy Scout so obviously waiting for the whole thing to be over, he would have approached them both from a distance. If he thought the camera handoff was so dangerous, he wouldn't have let Grisham have his way. More likely, as Grisham's attorney tried to bring out, he didn't like the way Grisham talked back. "You asked him why he was carrying the weapon?"

"Yes, sir."

"And he said, 'Because I can.' "

"That was his answer. Yes, sir."

"And that upset you, didn't it?"

"Sir?"

"That upset you, didn't it?"

"It didn't upset me. No, sir."

And this was Grisham's main point, which went beyond the narrow confines of the law to a matter of simple courtesy. "That's not how you disarm an American citizen," he says. His attorney tried to drive it home over and over. "To be clear, though … as you put your hands on the weapon to release it from the strap, you haven't told Mr. Grisham what you're doing?"

"Not at that point. No, sir."

"So basically you've put hands on him without identifying why you've even detained him?"

"I was going to disarm him and take the weapon. I didn't put a hand on him at that point. No, sir."

Several times, almost plaintively, Ermis said he thought he'd told Grisham what he was doing. Crime scenes are confusing, and being a cop is hard enough without everyone being armed to the teeth. "It all happened so fast," Ermis said.

But under the law, Grisham had resisted a search. The jury found him guilty and imposed a fine of $2,000, which he paid in nickels.

Grisham put out an Internet call for the first rally in Temple and four hundred people showed up. The movement grew very fast.

---

Now, two years later, Grisham is in this bizarre Old West showdown with the big drunk guy and once again things are happening fast—the big guy is in the middle of the street and Grisham is on the sidewalk, the big guy has his little sidearm and Grisham his fearsome black AR-15. They stand there without moving, staring each other down.

Then the big drunk climbs into his SUV and roars off—crisis averted!

The group is a little flustered. Everard stands close to Molly and the baby carriage, keeping an eye out for his son. "This is the first real confrontation I've had at one of these," he says. But Grisham says this is the perfect advertisement for open carry. The big guy was drunk and confrontational, and the moment could have turned ugly. "Did I feel on guard? Yes, I felt on guard. I made sure I watched his eyes and his hands. But the bottom line is, nobody reached for a gun."

Because they were showing thirteen aces.

"I had myself ready to if I needed to," Everard says.

But didn't the presence of guns create the dangerous situation in the first place? What about all the statistics showing that states with fewer guns have fewer killings, not to mention the astonishingly low murder rates in gun-free countries like England and Japan? What about Dylann Roof, who'd slaughtered all those people at church just a month earlier? The real question is, given the cost in blood, why is this so important to you? And why now? What is behind this growing passion for guns?

Everard responds with an invitation to a barbecue. The next day, sitting in his open garage with some burgers grilling in the driveway, his son splashing in an inflatable pool and Molly trying out various types of solid food on the baby, he tries to explain. He grew up on a commune in Madison, Wisconsin. He supports social services, gets very indignant about the way courts and prisons treat the poor, and once promoted LGBT rights as a youth advocate for a progressive social-services group called Briarpatch. Witness the giant Cartman tattoo on his leg, which he did himself during a boring weekend in Iraq. And he's no racist—heck, he lives in the only Muslim neighborhood in the Fort Hood area, half a block from the intersection of Medina and Abu Bakar. But when he was a kid, his father was shot to death in a taxi robbery, which got him interested in self-defense, and he had some delinquent years that ended on a youth farm where he learned to love hunting. Guns gave him discipline, responsibility, and intimations of manly powers to come. In the Army, his gun practically became part of his body. "The only place you don't bring your weapon is when you go into the latrines, and even then you have someone watch it for you."

Everard was in some famous battles, killed a couple insurgents from a tower, called in snipers, and watched heads explode. Once, he had to recover a corpse that had been in the water for three days. "I tried to grab him by his hand, and the skin just …"

"He likes pears!" Molly cries.

The worst was a scene right out of American Sniper. "I had to smoke a kid who was maybe ten years old. He was on a bridge, he threw a grenade at one of our vehicles, I spun the turret and unloaded on him with my .50-cal. You don't get over that."

Now he carries a Glock at all times. There's an AR-15 in a hidden compartment in his trunk and more guns stashed all around the house, and he's weary of all the hassles and hostility that come with them—which is what got him so interested in Grisham, who lives just twenty-five miles away. He started following the story on the day of the arrest, they started talking on Facebook, and soon he was meeting with a group of twenty or thirty people at a nearby coffee shop. If long guns are legal, they agreed, cops shouldn't stop you just for carrying one. And why did they have to conceal their handguns when most other states had open-carry laws? Wasn't this supposed to be Texas? So he made T-shirts and others did graphics for Web sites and flags and they started doing open-carry walkabouts in nearby towns like Harker Heights and Belton, usually just fifteen or twenty people. That October, after Grisham's first jury deadlocked, Everard joined him at an open-carry event at the Alamo that drew four hundred armed protesters.

The movement grew fast. Grisham was charismatic and articulate and had a gift for publicity. He put out an Internet call for the first rally in Temple and four hundred people showed up, some from as far away as New Mexico and Corpus Christi. He got arrested with a toy gun during a Veterans Day ceremony at the state capitol and made national news when he brought forty armed protesters to a suburban Dallas restaurant hosting a meeting of an antigun group called Moms Demand Action. They were outside waiting when the moms walked into the parking lot. "This is their response to the massacre of first-graders," said an outraged mom. "Think how disgusting that is." But Grisham was unrelenting. Just because some people drive their cars into groups of innocent people, he said, doesn't mean you judge all drivers. The crime rates of licensed gun owners are vanishingly small, criminals are always going to get guns, and there were no negative consequences in Arizona after the state expanded open-carry rights in 2010. If people could just see more guns, he sincerely believes, they'd realize that arms are as American as apple pie. Soon there were hundreds of small events happening all the time, all over the state, and thousands of new members joining every week.

The movement definitely drew some hotheads. Grisham had a rule requiring that they notify the police before an event, but a more radical libertarian named Kory Watkins said he didn't "ask for permission" and led an armed group into a Fort Worth Jack-in-the-Box. The terrified employees ran to hide in the freezer, leading the big fast-food chains to announce policies against long guns. Watkins doubled down by leading another armed group into a state legislator's office and refusing to leave, which led to a notorious demand for panic buttons in the Texas State Capitol. Last December, one member of his group was charged with using a gun to kill her husband and stepdaughter. The controversies made Everard and Grisham closer allies. "Do I need to walk into a daycare center with an AK-47 on my back?" Everard says. "I believe in rights, but I believe in people being smart."

Putting the baby on his chest, Everard says that guns have caused a rift with his liberal family, which seems to please him as much as it upsets him. He's also been shot three times, twice in minor hunting accidents and once as a security guard. Most surprising, he readily admits that his intensity on the subject of guns is an aspect of his PTSD from Iraq. "I've come to realize, as I talk to my shrinks, that it's a security thing. I feel more secure having a weapon."

And as long as the average police response time is seven minutes and he has a family to protect, that's not going to change.

---

PTSD turns out to be an important part of Grisham's story, too. He lives in a modest farmhouse between cornfields and an airport, family land. The front porch is full of bicycles, including one they never move because there's a bird's nest in the basket and the bird comes back every year. Inside there's an AR-15 leaning against the door, a rack of board games, and many pictures of Jesus. Every so often his teenage daughter comes through, lying on the sofa and pretending not to listen. "This is an old Chinese SKS. I use it for hunting … this is an around-the-house AR … this is a Punisher from Spike's Tactical, so they didn't make a whole bunch of these … this is more just for fun—everybody's gotta have an AK-47."

He pumps the AK and laughs. "Do I need an AK-47? No. But you know what? It's an AK-47!"

He doesn't pause a beat at the PTSD question. He's given a lot of thought to this very topic. "I think having firearms around does, on a weird level, make me feel a little calmer. Because one of the things about guys like me with PTSD is you have this hypervigilance—I mean, in Iraq, gosh, I slept with my pistol in my sleeping bag. You had to be ready to go at all times."

This has been the subject of much of his therapy. He saw daily combat. A bullet hit his helmet; he was mortared, hit with IEDs. Three times he gave himself up for dead. Like Everard, he has PTSD acute enough (along with some minor wounds) to justify full military disability. Like many other soldiers, he's pursued high-adrenaline activities like skydiving in an effort to placate his flight-or-fight responses. But gradually, he says, he's been able to "deescalate the perceived threat" and retrain his brain. "We're in America," he tells himself. "We're in the United States. It's not as dangerous as you think. It's not a dangerous place."

And depression? Has that trauma of war plagued him too?

He continues unzipping another gun case. "This is my wife's gun. She's got the best gun in the house."

He pulls out the pink AR-15. A company called Black Rain Ordnance built it specifically for Emily, light and low-recoil with a nice Vortex scope and her name engraved on the stock. He speaks as he turns it over in his hands. "You know, I've dealt with PTSD and depression for years now, since—well, since I got back. And I never once thought about reaching for my firearm."

Then he stops. "I take that back. I take that back. Let me be honest here. Hang on, let me just finish puttin' these away."

When the guns are all zipped into their cases, he sits back on the sofa. His eyes are very clear and blue, shadowed by the baseball cap that never leaves his head. Light streams in the windows behind him. The police incident "triggered a massive PTSD relapse," he says. He had already lost his faith in the Army, the central pillar of his life. Friends and acquaintances were turning against him. His stepfather was very critical. His superior officers threatened to give him another Article 15 and he demanded another court-martial. He began to have nightmares of someone pointing a gun at his head or shooting his son, and in the dream he was always helpless—to him the worst feeling of all. It got so bad he moved out of the house and asked for a divorce. "I wanted to end my life and I kind of wanted them to hate me," he says. "If they hated me, it'd be easier to do."

On the sofa, his daughter plays with a Game Boy.

All this was happening during the early days of the movement, when he was leading the first protests at the Alamo and confronting Moms Demand Action. He went into a few restaurants he wishes he hadn't and waffled when a member from Plano posted the phone number of someone who had called the police, defending it on principle before admitting it was a bad idea. He called the Moms "thugs with jugs," and then admitted he was being childish. Once, he made plans to lead a group into a black neighborhood in Houston, though he insists he was trying to encourage them to join the movement. "I was acting most of the time, because it's really hard to lead an organization when in your mind you hate yourself."

Shortly before the verdict came down, on a country road near Temple, he unbuckled his seat belt and drove his car into a tree—but at the last minute he thought of his family and his cause. He couldn't let all those people down. He hit the brakes and totaled his car but emerged unharmed. He moved back into his house and entered an intensive eight-hour-a-day PTSD program.

And what do the therapists want him to change about himself?

He chuckles. "Well, obviously, they tell me I need to be a little calmer when I'm approached by law enforcement."

The therapists also talk about his fear of death. "There's always a question, 'Do you feel as if your life will be cut short in any way?' And I say, 'Yeah, I'm afraid a police officer's gonna shoot me.' "

And what do the therapists say to that?

"Well, we talk our way through it. And they say, 'Just don't put yourself in a position where a police officer is gonna shoot you.' "

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He laughs again, and this time the joke is on the therapists, because none of this self-knowledge means he intends to back down in any way. Just two months ago, at an open-carry rally in Abilene, he greeted police officers with his AR-15 and shouts of "What the hell?" and "Tell your man to stand down!" and then lectured them on the law with a profane fury that seems almost suicidal. Rather than making him empathetic to the fears associated with approaching an armed man, his combat experience appears to have inspired the opposite feeling—he has contempt for their fear. The whole thing reeked of personal psychodrama.

Even so, one officer tried to reason with him. "Look what's going [on] around the world."

"Don't give me that crap!" Grisham snorted.

Now he sits back on the couch, grinning. "I hear this all the time: C. J., you just need to know how to pick your battles. I say, 'I do pick my battles. It's called right or wrong.' There's no degree, you know? Wrong is wrong, whether it's a little bit of wrong or a lot of wrong. Wrong is wrong."

He's making fun of himself, a little, but it's clear that driving his car into that tree did nothing to shake his confidence in his judgment. The impulse to poke him is irresistible.

How tall are you again?

"Sixty-five inches," he says with another grin. "And it's funny, because a lot of people who meet me say, 'I thought you'd be taller.' "

Maybe if you were taller you'd get into fewer fights.

He laughs. "I think that's one of the reasons why that officer thought he could bully me that day. He thought, 'This little guy is gonna roll over.' "

Glancing around the room, it's hard not to let an eye fall on all the Jesus pictures and then the AK, the SKS, the Punisher, and the AR-15.

Have you read the Bible?

"I have read the Bible," he says. "Jesus said that if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one."

He also said to turn the other cheek.

"He also turned over the money changers and drove them out of the temple. That was pretty confrontational."

But the most constant thing is Jesus' kindness. Like the people who forgave Dylann Roof.

"If somebody comes into my church and starts shooting people, does Jesus really want me to just sit there and be killed?" he asks. "Or does he want me to try and save my neighbors?"

He let himself be crucified.

"Well, he had to do that. It was part of the plan."

But there's a reason for the plan.

"There is a reason. It's for forgiveness and the atonement, so when those government officials are abusive to you and you stand up to them, God will forgive them for what they did."

---

The famous City of Belton Fourth of July Parade in central Texas, a small-town celebration of freedom and revolution and bombs bursting in air, seems like the perfect occasion for a gun rally—there are floats from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Maxdale Cowboy Church ("Heading to Greener Pastures"), and the Central Texas Tea Party, which changed its logo from "Taxed enough already" to "Tyrannized enough already." There's even a float from a new indoor shooting range. But they won't let Grisham and his team carry guns in the parade. Insurance, they say.

He hasn't given up. Today he starts at the police station.

"Are you C. J.?" a police officer asks. "I thought you'd be taller."

"Yeah, I get that a lot."

He finds the chief in a briefing room, surrounded by deputies. "How are ya?" he says. "You probably remember me from last year."

"Yes, sir."

"I just wanted to touch base. We're gonna have a float, but obviously no handguns or rifles, so you don't have to worry about that. Just prior to the parade, we'll walk down the sidewalks and hand out information, just like every other time."

"No problem," the chief says.

Back on the sidewalk, Grisham and his troops set up a tent and tables for their flyers, chatting about politics and guns. There are babies, a kid in a Batman hat playing a video game, a Latino from South Africa, a disabled man, a kid with a goatee. Big Jim Everard is there to drive the float. All of the adults are armed. "This corner is going to be a criminal-free zone," one jokes. "I don't think any Muslims are gonna come over here," says the Latino.

Walking the parade route, they hand out the flyers. "The flyer talks about what's legal right now," Grisham tells everyone. "If you go to our Web site, it's updated for what will be legal come January 1." He hands them as enthusiastically to blacks as to whites and greets all the veterans with "Welcome home, sir, I'm glad you made it." Some people say no in a forceful way. One says she'll just throw the flyer away. One calls guns stupid. But every third man reaches eagerly. "I follow you on Twitter," one says.

"Are you passing out guns, too?" says another.

A little boy looks at his AR-15 in awe. "Is that a real gun?"

Halfway up the route, he's out of flyers and having a long, homey chat with the elderly Mervin Walker, the mayor of Weir, Texas. "My grandpa came there in 1893," Walker says, "so he run the town and then my father run the town and I've run it ever since."

"Is your son gonna run it next?"

Walker laughs. "Ain't had but the one daughter, and she lives in Belton—those are my granddaughters with the white boots."

'Course he's carried a gun all his life, Walker says, just like his daddy and his grandpa. "I farmed and ranched and I had lots of cattle. We used to go to that old café in Georgetown every morning about six o'clock, and we had our windows rolled down, and leave our guns in the trucks, loaded, and nobody ever asked us anything."

Grisham lingers too long, listening to Walker talk about the days before factories and war and globalization and this degrading new thing called service industries. Then the parade starts and the floats from black fraternities and businesses—there goes the Illustrious Potentate of the Nubia Temple—get the same waves and applause as the Tea Party and the Cowboy Church. Close to the end, there's a float from a porta-potty company that's being pushed by hand.

"Their engine must have crapped out," Grisham says.

Soon he will announce his campaign for state senator. He's also working on a law degree. He has many goals: get rid of all gun-free zones, make the concealed-carry permit voluntary and cheaper, change the laws to make it easier for people to get their gun rights back after minor nonviolent misdemeanors, and ultimately "Constitutional Carry," in which the only gun restrictions are the ones the founders had when they ratified the Second Amendment in 1791—none.

People keep dropping by the tent. One guy says he likes the element of surprise, and Grisham patiently makes his argument one more time. "From a military standpoint, why do we make it known that we have intercontinental ballistic nukes—because it's a deterrent, right?" A couple men get details on the new open-carry law. A woman introduces her toddler and Grisham digs through his flyers and T-shirts. "Maybe he wants a pen?"

"Bubba, you want a pen?"

The woman is talking about how hard it is to conceal her 9mm in feminine clothing when Bubba interrupts. "I'm a police officer!"

"You're a police officer?" Grisham says. "You're not gonna arrest me, are you?"

Bubba hands him an imaginary ticket.

"Oh, how much do I have to pay?"

Very solemnly, Bubba answers him. "Five."

Grisham grins. "I wouldn't mind that. I'd speed everywhere."

---

As long as Americans are cranky individualists who hate to be told what to do, which is the same as saying "as long as there are Americans," the argument over guns will never end. It's also no accident that Grisham's war for gun rights is happening at the same time as Edward Snowden and the Black Lives Matter movement—there's nothing more bipartisan these days than the fear of a police state. Given all the forms of trauma plaguing our world, even his PTSD points to wider social issues beneath the surface argument, a deeper issue rooted in the physical reality of the gun and the person who holds the gun. So a few days later, Grisham brings his weapons out again, this time for a hands-on lesson.

Different people have different ideas on where you put your cheek, he begins. The Army taught him to keep his nose on the charging handle. That way, your sight picture is always the same. Line the hole in the rear sight with the tip of the front sight until it's halfway through the middle of that hole and it'll kind of disappear. Remember to keep your finger off the trigger assembly. Push in the magazine and give it a little tap to make sure it's in there, then pull back the charging handle until it catches—feel it? Keep going. There you go. "You are now loaded. There's a bullet in the chamber."

He met with his attorney today, he says. His legal bills are more than $100,000. But this isn't the time to think about that.

Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.

He's a patient teacher. When you breathe, he says, think of it as a wave with natural lulls. Shoot during that transition. Eventually you'll get into a pattern, shooting at the top lull and the bottom lull. That's when you know you're getting good.

But the gun is just a .22; it doesn't have any kick or bang. What's the big thrill?

Then he pulls out the AR-15. "It doesn't have that much kick," he says. "It's just gonna be loud."

The explosions echo, the world narrows.

Accuracy was his obsession for a while. In basic training, he used to shoot a happy face onto his targets. Now he's working on reflexive sighting, conditioning himself to bring the weapon up and shoot without looking at the sight. He closes his eyes before pulling the trigger.

"Slow squeeze. It should almost surprise you."

After a while, he shoots a few rounds himself—fast, without hesitation, like he's just setting the bullets free—and finally we are at the heart of the matter, the strangely intimate relationship between an American and his gun. What is the magic that drives so much controversy? How does it make him feel?

"That's actually a good question," he says, pondering for a moment.

"I guess I don't think, I see. I see the target. And I almost become the gun. It's almost an extension of me. I've got the target, the bullet, everything sort of flows from here and out the firearm. I guess that's the best way to describe it. I don't think about what's going on in the house, I don't hear the birds chirping, I don't hear construction in the background. All I focus on is that target. Yeah, it's a calming thing for me. I don't know why. Maybe it's just the raw power."

Emily comes out and says she's going to the mall and he has to pick up the kids, so Grisham starts packing up his guns. He makes sure each one is loaded before he zips it up. This is supposed to be the most dangerous way to store them, exposing your household to the risk of an accidental shooting, but his guns are always loaded and ready to go. Otherwise, he says, what's the point of having them?

Emily comes out again and says it's time to go, really. "Are you done yet?"

But he's not. Are you supposed to fumble for your bullets in the dark? Or call 911 and wait for someone else to protect you? He was on base during the Fort Hood shooting, and it lasted for eight minutes. Do you know how long eight minutes is? Count the seconds. Better yet, fire that gun. Let's say a magazine has seven bullets and you can load and shoot about four clips a minute. That's 224 bullets. The kids are waiting, Emily says, but he's still not finished. Isn't America supposed to be all about self-reliance? Don't we have a right to be secure in our persons and effects? These are the fundamental questions, he says, and he's not done asking them—until then, for Grisham and for all of us, a normal life is just going to have to wait.

Published in the November 2015 issue.