Author's note: See Chapter 1 for disclaimers.
Thanks for the reviews for Chapter 1 - and the suggestions for other gun-related lines! Writing these snippets is surprisingly fun, so keep the suggestions coming...I think I'm probably going to expand out from the original idea of 'lines that followed some variation of "I don't like guns"' so throw in any good ones you can think of - regardless of whom they are said by or too!
Anyhoo, here is the next installment. It's pretty short, but I hope you like it!
"You see, that's why I don't like guns. They have a specific range of efficacy. " - The Miracle Job
It wasn't a particularly hard concept to grasp. In fact most people got at least half of it – the half about being unlikely to hit what you were aiming for if you were too far away – pretty intuitively. Okay, sure, it still took them a while to figure out where "too far" began, and amateurs wasted a lot of bullets taking shots that made Hail Mary passes look like sure things, but the concept of "too far away" generally penetrated.
"Too close" was a completely different story.
And Eliot kind of got that.
For people not trained to deal with guns and not used to confronting them, a gun held close to the face or pressed into the chest or spine was a hell of an intimidating experience. And for an untrained gunman, the high that came off that intimidation was a hell of a hard thing to resist. The thing was –
The thing was that when you were the one holding the gun, you could never be quite sure you wouldn't run up against the target who knew how to disarm and turn the tables on you.
Eliot knew that. He had learnt it the easy way, having it drilled into him during training until he knew not only the specific range of efficacy of every weapon according to its specs, but the specific range of its efficacy when it was in his hands. He had learnt his lesson well, and he did his instructors proud when he was sent out into the field. The gun became more than a tool; it was an extension of himself – something he could rely on to give him that hair's breadth edge over the other guy who didn't know his weapon, or didn't know what he could and couldn't do with it, quite as well as Eliot did. And maybe he started to take it for granted.
And then Aimee got married and Eliot liberated Croatia, and somewhere in the hurt and the anger and the compromises being made to get the job done, he got sloppy. He started to rely on the gun more than on himself. And then he learnt that lesson the hard way. Because whatever else you might forget about a career of violence and an ugly civil war, the day you walk into a room as the only armed man and still wind up with the gun pressed to your temple in a game of Russian roulette, is not one of them.
So, no, Eliot didn't like guns. He knew them, knew how to use them, and definitely knew how to get them away from the people pointing them at him, but he didn't like them. He didn't like how they could make him forget there were other options for attack and defence, and he didn't like how they could make him underestimate his opponents. Looking at a man down the barrel of a gun always changed your view of him, and Eliot knew you got a clearer read when you were looking up the barrel than down it.
Part of this was a simple matter of the data available to you. If you were the one holding the gun then, assuming your target had noticed the situation, all you had to go on was his reaction: how he held himself under threat, whether his eyes were fixed on the mouth of the barrel, or on your eyes, or on your trigger finger. Whether he stood his ground, or tried to run. Moreover, you couldn't devote your entire concentration to your target (or targets): some of it had to remain focused on your own relationship to that gun – how you held it, whether you were within its range of efficacy, whether you had taken into account all variables like wind and glare and recoil that could destroy an otherwise good shot. And that split in concentration, while necessary, was also dangerous. It was why, when Eliot gained control of a gun during a confrontation, he favoured disabling it over turning it on his opponents.
In contrast, when the gun was in the other man's hands you had a wealth of information at your disposal and your full attention to devote to it. You had, first of all, the man's choice of weapon. That could tell you a lot about how and in what circumstances he was likely to use it. Next you had his stance: nervous, confident, or cocky? And his grip on the gun: One- or two-handed? Efficiently cool and business-like or over-dramatized with gangster flare – or white-knuckled and shaking? Was his finger already on the trigger, or hovering outside the trigger guard? Did he maintain a cautious distance, or was he up in your face, trying to intimidate you and clearly not giving a thought to the possibility that you might disarm him? Did he meet your eyes, or focus on the portion of your anatomy he was aiming for, or did his eyes skitter around?
Take Hardison for example, in that warehouse when the job for Dubenich unravelled. He had held the gun reasonably steadily and confidently, but it was a confidence in the gun and what he expected it to achieve rather than in his experience with it...the kind of confidence you'd see on the kid with the high score on the latest shoot 'em up computer game rather than on the guy who had trained with and lived with his gun day in and day out for years. Hardison's face and stance had "I'm holding this gun but not actually planning on shooting it" written all over them, and his finger was so far from the trigger that Eliot could have disarmed him and broken that finger before Hardison could even have gotten it into place to take the shot. Not to mention the fact that Hardison was standing too damn close – particularly considering that he had watched Eliot take out five armed men in the time it took a bag to drop six feet the night before. Clearly, Hardison hadn't spent much time around either guns or guys who spent a lot of time around guns.
So, yeah, Eliot had been pretty relaxed for a guy with a gun pointed at him when Nate arrived. He was relaxed because, while Hardison had the gun, Eliot had control. That gun was only pointed at him because he had left it there... so far. Oh – and the safety was on. And even if it hadn't been (And, seriously, Hardison fell for that? Smart guy like that should have been able to figure out that, whether the gun's safety was on or not, you didn't look down to check.), Eliot's safety was.
(When Parker showed up, now, it was a different story. Parker held the gun like she meant business, kept herself out of range of anyone trying to disarm her until she was ready to have the gun lowered, and had reflexes like a cat. The gun's safety was off and, well, Eliot had already figured out that Parker didn't have a safety. He was therefore perfectly willing to let Nathan be the one to approach her and take the gun out of active play.)
But anyway, what Hardison didn't know about guns clearly would have filled the hard drive on one of his laptops. For the safety of the team, Eliot couldn't let that situation stand. Besides which he was growing grudgingly fond of the guy – or, at least, used to his particular kind of techno-geek annoyingness. So when they found themselves in the bridge tunnel with the Mexican gangsters who had rolled Nate's priest friend, and one of them put a gun to Eliot's head, he took advantage of the Teachable Moment. He wasn't entirely sure the lesson penetrated – Hardison seemed distracted by his success in the niche of fighting the injured – but it was a start. Until the kid learnt to respect guns, and their limitations, he was only a danger to himself.
A day or so later, when Eliot watched Hardison miss Saint Nicholas with the paintball gun from a distance of eighteen inches, he revised that thought: Hardison was a danger to everyone in the vicinity – except probably the guy he was aiming for.
He brought a dartboard into the office to try to reduce at least one of those dangers, but mostly Eliot tried to keep the danger in check and the guns out of his team mates' hands simply by getting there first. And he didn't mind if the other guy brought a gun to the fight – he might even prefer it. Because a guy with a gun tended not to think past the gun for combat options, and was much less likely to anticipate an unarmed man as a threat.
That was why Eliot didn't like to use guns himself: he didn't like putting his fighting mind in a box, and he didn't like underestimating his opponent.
The other guy was welcome to, however. He could start the fight with a gun if he wanted to – but Eliot would end it without one.
The End (Part Deux).