‘PEOPLE ARE FRAGILE’
DISTANT ECHOES Teen anti-firearm activist fights to be heard in the heart of gun-loving Wyoming
Alan Engdahl was driving home after an overnight shift in the oilfield when his truck picked up a scratchy radio signal out of Gillette. It was the first sign of civilization since he had disappeared the afternoon before down 80 kilometres of wind-whipped prairie and rutted gravel roads, so Alan and his co-worker listened to the disc jockey tick through community news. Cattle prices were flat. T&T Guns had antique rifles on special. The Cowboy Draw lotto was up to $1 million. “And here’s something you don’t hear every day,” the radio host said. “We apparently have a liberal gun protest happening right here in Gillette.”
Alan had rarely heard anything described as liberal in northeast Wyoming, and now he listened as the DJ explained how 10 Campbell County High School students had marched downtown the previous afternoon to demand tighter gun laws. They said they wanted mandatory background checks on all gun purchases. They said they wanted to build a gun-control movement in solidarity with survivors of a shooting in Parkland, Fla., and tens of thousands of other teenagers protesting across the country. But this was Wyoming, where the high school yearbook devoted four pages to “Hunting: No Greater Sport,” and a local club funded scholarships by raffling off AR-15s. The protesters had been met downtown with middle fingers and the warning of suspensions.
“They should be expelled,” Alan remembered joking to his co-worker once the radio switched back to classic rock and they turned onto the highway toward Gillette. “That bleeding-heart nonsense might fly in New York or D.C., but in Wyoming ? That’s treason.”
If America had in fact begun to reconsider its relationship with guns after two decades of escalating mass shootings, then a crucial test was now arriving in the rural West, where that relationship has long been inseparable. Wyoming has more guns per capita than any other state, with sales rising in each of the past five years, and more than 80 per cent of adults in Campbell County have firearms in their homes. Alan once owned more than 250 — an entire storage unit of rifles, handguns and antiques — until he committed a drug felony in 2006 and lost his legal right to own guns. A popular state slogan remained taped to one of his trucks: “Welcome to Wyoming: Consider Everyone Armed.”
He parked at a ramshackle house on the outskirts of town, where the newspaper waited at the kitchen table. On the front page he noticed a story about the gun protest, the first that anyone could remember in Gillette. “A Walkout for Change,” the headline read. Above that was a picture of several students marching, and there in the midst of them, holding a sign, was his 16-year-old daughter, Moriah.
Now a week later, that sign was in his house, tucked into the closet of a bedroom where Moriah had been spending much of her time, with her door closed, since the protest. In the days since the march, the “Campbell County Ten” had become the object of profane graffiti, the inspiration for a rival Freedom March and the favourite target of a new Instagram account, “Campbell County Students for America,” which shared memes comparing gun protesters to Hitler. For his part, Alan had considered grounding Moriah for skipping school but decided against it.
“I’m pretty sure the rest of Wyoming is going to punish her for me,” he said, so instead he had chosen to needle Moriah at every opportunity, including now, when she came out from her bedroom and walked into the kitchen.
“Win any popularity contests at school today?” he asked her. She rolled her eyes and ignored him, so he tried again.
“Did you manage to get everyone’s guns yet?” he said.
“How many times do I have to tell you it’s not about that?” she said. “We’re just pushing for more safety, a little more control.”
“That’s a bad word,” Alan said. “First it’s gun control, then it’s confiscation. I don’t know where you learned any different.”
She was the youngest of his four daughters, each a bit more empowered than the last, and by the time Moriah turned 12 she had begun questioning her parents’ Christianity, and then started favouring abortion rights, and then calling herself a feminist, and then refusing to eat the pigs her family sometimes slaughtered for meat.
“The mouthy, hard-headed one,” Alan called her, with some pride, because that was how he saw himself, too, even if they often disagreed.
She advocated for gay rights in her high school, and he thought acceptance was “part of the problem, because that stuff is better off staying hidden.” She was dating a Mexican-American boy named Jon, whom Alan liked but also occasionally referred to as “Mexican Juan.” She was a journalist at the high school newspaper. He thought that journalists were partially to blame for ruining America and that “the fake news wouldn’t give Trump a slap on the back if he saved two babies from a fire.”
But one thing they had rarely argued about was guns, at least until 17 people were killed at a Parkland high school in February.
Moriah occasionally went target shooting at the range on “ladies day” with her mother, who was remarried and living across town.
Her mother’s freezer was filled with fresh venison from her latest October kill.
Her father and his friends had sometimes fired off 1,500 rounds in a day of target shooting before he went to prison for distribution of methamphetamine.
Like her parents, Moriah had usually blamed Gillette’s high rates of gun violence not on firearms but on the character of the town itself. The coal and oil boomtown had sprung up amid the dust and antelope of northeast Wyoming, nearly doubling in size since the 1990s to about 32,000 people, many of whom worked to extract the natural resources below ground.
“Gillette syndrome” was the term popularized by one psychologist, and it had become the favourite local explanation for all kinds of economic and emotional instability.
After Parkland, though, Moriah began reading online about guns and became interested in research suggesting that guns are part of the mental health crisis, too. She read that suicides account for almost two-thirds of gun deaths, and that people are five times more likely to successfully commit suicide if they own or have access to a gun. Her cousin had killed himself with a hunting rifle in 2015. One of her classmates had brought a gun to school in his backpack a year later. And now, in the wake of the Parkland shooting, school districts across Wyoming were considering arming teachers with concealed firearms and abolishing gun-free zones.
“Why is the answer here always more guns?” Moriah asked her father now, as they sat together in the kitchen.
“It’s been 20 years since Columbine, and you’re still hiding under desks,” Alan said. “How’s that been working?”
“What if someone gets depressed at school, grabs a gun and pops off ?” Moriah asked. “People are fragile.”
Moriah had sometimes suffered from what she considered her own version of Gillette syndrome, waves of anxiety that led her to visit a local hospital for help in 2016. She had decided that what she needed most was a fresh start, so she eventually moved out of her mother’s house and in with her father on the far edge of town.
Theirs was a single-storey place wedged between a cow pasture and a coal mine. A dartboard hung in the kitchen, and red plastic cups filled the cabinets. Her father styled himself as gruff and imposing, with a mangy beard, broad shoulders built by swinging a sledgehammer on the rig and a stomach rounded out by peppermint schnapps. But he was also a big-hearted saviour of damaged cars and lost people, both of which populated his five acres. There was Luke, who had nowhere to live until Alan offered up his shed; and a drifter who called himself “Tennessee”; and Scotty, who spent his days trying to fix some of the 17 trucks surrounding the house and his nights sipping Budweiser on the couch. “Sweet-but-crazy uncles,” Moriah called them.
“You know why I like guns, Moriah?” Tennessee said now. “Because otherwise we’d be under British rule.”
“It’s the foundation for this whole country,” Luke said.
“This is the Cowboy State,” Alan said. “Point a gun at someone, and you’ll have 10 pointing right back at you, and that’s how we like it.”
She stood up and grabbed a dart out of her father’s hand.
“You’re all stuck in an old way of thinking,” she said. “You guys have no idea how many people are with us.”
The truth was that she didn’t exactly know, either, so later that week the Campbell County Ten scheduled a meeting after school for “anyone open to gun solutions.” Moriah met a few friends in the school parking lot, and they walked past the rows of pickup trucks toward an adjacent shopping centre.
Their original protest march had begun with 10 students but dropped quickly to nine, when an irate parent drove downtown and yanked her daughter into the car. In the days since, a few more students had dropped out of the group’s text-messaging chain.
Now the Starbucks table remained mostly empty. There were five of them in all, including one who opened the meeting by reminding everyone that she was not officially in the group and that her parents were trying to get her a job at a shooting range.
“I’m just here to watch,” she said. That meant the Campbell County Ten was in fact down to Moriah and three others: a freshman wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt; a senior who described herself as “fiercely, fiercely liberal”; and the outspoken editor of the school newspaper.
“I want to change so many things about this town,” one of them said now. “We made up a few cheap signs at the Dollar Store, and you would think we declared war.”
A woman at a nearby table looked over. Moriah opened her laptop and adjusted her glasses.
“Let’s stop venting and talk a little quieter,” she said. “What’s our next step?”
Moriah leaned in and spoke just above a whisper. “We need to be completely anger-less, or else people will think we want to take away their guns and melt them into a statue of Obama. We’re not going to win a shouting contest. We need to stay on message and focus on one thing.”
Moriah suggested her preference for what that should be: keeping guns out of Campbell County High. The school board in another Wyoming county had just voted to arm its teachers with concealed handguns after a survey showed 74 per cent of residents supported that idea. Campbell County’s school board had begun meeting with law enforcement to explore a similar possibility. The next school board meeting was just days away. Each meeting was open to public comments.
“Are we going to do this?” Moriah asked, and when there was no definitive answer, she started packing, too.
She wanted to prepare by learning everything she could about guns, so a few days before the school board meeting she travelled across town to a house where four mounted animal heads were on display above the entryway. Moriah’s mother, Tracey, was inside talking about a future hunting trip. Her stepfather was downstairs at his custom-built reloading station, which was stocked with bullet casings and gunpowder.
“What is all of this?” Moriah asked him, pointing to shells and weight scales. “I don’t really understand much about gun stuff.”
“Yeah, I’m starting to see that,” her stepfather said.
She watched him work and began to ask questions about which bullets splintered upon impact and which ones mushroomed. She wanted to know whether people needed a special permit to buy guns in Wyoming. “No,” he said. She asked if Wyoming had specific limits on semi-automatic weapons or magazine sizes. “No,” he said again.
“So there really aren’t that many regulations?” she asked, and her stepfather stopped handling ammunition shells and looked at her.
“I don’t need a bunch of rules to tell me this is serious stuff,” he said. He picked up a tub of gunpowder and held it out toward her. “I mean, this right here is like having a bomb in the basement.”
Moriah took a step backward. “Gun safety is about being able to handle your own business,” he said. “Like with hunting, I’m not a fan of taking the horns and leaving the meat, or just wounding an animal. There might not be a rule against it, but in my opinion it’s the wrong thing to do. I want a clean shot. I want to eat all of it. It’s about taking personal responsibility.”
“What if a person isn’t responsible?” Moriah asked.
She bought a new dress and borrowed her sister’s best lip gloss. She trimmed her speech to the recommended three-minute allotment and practised six times in the living room. Then she went to a nondescript county building and waited for her turn to speak.
She smiled up at 12 school administrators seated on an elevated platform and then began to read from the speech that was now shaking in her hands.
“I’m here to express my concerns about arming teachers,” she said. “I believe allowing firearms in school is an irrational idea to introduce here.”
She told the school board that she was worried about the mental health epidemic in Gillette and that some school employees inevitably suffered from those problems, too. She said that teachers were not trained for shootouts and that even armed school security guards had failed to stop shootings, including the one in Parkland.
The chairwoman said the district was looking into many ways to ensure student safety, including bulletproof glass, door-jamming devices and, possibly, guns.
“It will be a long and careful process,” she said, and then she moved on to the next speaker.
Moriah went back to her father’s house.
“How’d the gun controlling go?” Alan asked, and Moriah started to tell him about the meeting until he cut in.
“I guess it really doesn’t matter if they have guns or not,” Alan said. “Either way, if one of these shootings happened in Wyoming, you’d have parents breaking through the windows with more guns than you’d ever seen.”
“OK,” she said. “But that’s my point. I’m trying to ...”
“If you got a gun, then just bring it,” Tennessee interrupted. “I don’t see why we need much regulation myself.”
“They are trying to push toward confiscation,” Luke said. “First it’s control,” Alan said. Moriah sat there as they talked over and around her, circling the same points. On the other side of the country, Parkland survivors had begun planning ever-bigger marches and protests — the beginning of what they called a “generational movement.”
But here it was just Moriah and a protest that went silent as she sat at the table and waited for her opening to interject. She was trying to be patient. She was trying to compromise. She was treading lightly and remaining anger-less until she couldn’t do it anymore.
“Hey! I’m trying to say something,” she said.
We need to be completely anger-less, or else people will think we want to take away their guns and melt them into a statue of Obama. We’re not going to win a shouting contest. We need to stay on message and focus on one thing.