Con Games: Got Myself A Gun
By Michael Conniff
RIDGWAY – The security guard lay dead at my feet with a gun in his hand and I had no time for long searching questions about the right to bear arms and/or the role of guns in our world after 9/11.
I picked up the gun and it was as if there were a man whispering over my shoulder into my ear, neither devil nor angel but a welcome Rambo with a bald head reminding me that I knew how to hold this gun, that I knew how to gun down the terrorists who had taken over the hotel and set fire to it.
The only way out was through because there was no other way out. The only way out was to follow the EXIT signs smoking red in the man-made smoke and to kill anyone who happened to get in my way. There was no help coming or forthcoming other than the man over my shoulder because everybody was either dead or about to be. Except me. This hotel outside Telluride was so far off the grid that dialing 911 was not nearly so helpful as rolling the dice and running like a scared rabbit.
Was I scared? Not a bit. I was terrified and the gun now in my hand made it worse because I knew how it worked and I had seen what it could do in a shooting range when you had headphones on to kill the noise and plastic goggles so no harm could come to your eyes as the paper target with the bad-guy bull’s-eye moved closer and closer to where you stood.
I moved down the hall looking for trouble, for terrorists, for hostages – but there was nothing until I turned the first corner and fired without thinking because the voice whispering over my shoulder said to think was to die and that you just had to be. So I fired when I saw the terrorists and fired fast enough to get me down the next hall and then the next into a bedroom where it looked like somebody was sleeping but I knew they were as dead as a cigar store dummy.
I pointed the gun at the dummy with two hands for nor reason, the way I was taught to, and then I moved into a kitchen. There were gunshots all over the wall of the kitchen and in one corner of the room a terrorist was holding a hostage, a young woman, in a choke hold. I had no way to know their cause, to understand what it might be like to have all those virgins waiting for you in Paradise if you had the luck to kill the right people. I only had time to kill. So I fired instead of negotiating or wondering about the kind of standoff you always see on TV right before the commercial break.
By some miracle I hit the terrorist right between the eyes and he slumped to the floor like he was punch-drunk. But the woman fell to the floor too and I could see there was no life to her, she had become nothing so much as a boneless mass held together by clothes that would now be taken off her and perhaps given to someone else who could use them. I told her how sorry I was and how I wished I’d gotten there sooner instead of now but at least I had killed the bastard who had probably killed her. I promised I would come back when I could and that I would make sure she was treated with the proper respect even in a time of war at home.
But there I was: when the time comes to be a hero, you have to see both who you are and who you might be.
Was it a dream? No – this was no dream: this was a drill that will be performed by many of the guests here at the brand-new Elk Mountain Resort, a luxury resort on 275 acres where they also happen to have the Valhalla Shooting Club and Training Center, all of it surrounded on all sides by the 14,000-foot high peaks of the San Juan Mountains. The Elk Mountain Resort is a beautiful family resort with state-of-the-art fly fishing, snowmobiling, horseback riding, some of the best food you will ever find, and enough guns to die for.
Michael Conniff is the Aspen Daily News Critic-at-Large.