A Boy and His Gun

By JON D. HULL/OMAHA

DOUG WASN'T EVEN THAT NERVOUS WHEN HE FINALLY GOT HIS GUN. JUST AWFULLY SELF- conscious and kind of giddy, like when he first started making out with girls. A classmate at Father Flanagan High School gave him the beeper number of a dealer in town. An older guy, maybe in his early 30s, answered the page. "Meet me in the parking lot behind the McDonald's at 30th and Ames. Tuesday night, say around 8."

Doug* took his older brother's Ford pickup truck, which has a nice deep rumble and gives Doug's budding tough-guy image some clout. With a blue baseball cap tipped low over his eyebrows, the slightly built sophomore waited in the parking lot, smoking Kools one after another and staring awkwardly at other male customers as they stepped out of their cars. Finally, one man nodded slightly in reply and waved Doug over to his car. Doug walked slowly, attempting a saunter. The man popped his trunk open, and Doug peered inside at a shiny pile of handguns and rifles. Silently, he counted the money in his pocket, suddenly wishing to hell he'd brought more. He stared at the weapons. They said: Power. Authority. Respect. All at entry-level prices.

With only $25 in his wallet -- earnings from mowing a few lawns -- he quickly settled on a used Remington semiautomatic 12-gauge shotgun. He was pleasantly surprised by its heft as he slid it into a canvas bag and scurried back to his truck. At 16, Doug was finally a force to be reckoned with at Father Flanagan High, in his white, working-class neighborhood of Benson and on the streets of Omaha. "If you have a gun, you have power. That's just the way it is," he says. "Guns are just a part of growing up these days." Doug felt older already. With the radio blaring heavy metal, he smiled all the way home.

That evening, while his parents watched television, Doug sneaked into the garage and got his Dad's hacksaw. Carefully selecting a spot along the barrel, he began to cut. He was amazed at how easily the blade sliced through the metal. Smoothing the end with a metal file, he then cut the stock, reducing the gun by almost 2 ft. in length and transforming it into the weapon of choice among many teenage toughs: a pistol-grip, sawed-off shotgun, which he pronounces almost as one word. "Easy to hide and no need to aim. Just bam! and you clear the room," he says. Returning the gun to the canvas bag, he hurried back to his room, paused briefly to consider a hiding place, and then slid the weapon under his mattress before joining his parents for dinner.

Getting the gun was the easy part. Firing it for the first time was terrifying. "Hell, it was pretty beat up, and I didn't know if it would jam or something," says Doug. "I mean, how was I supposed to know whether the damn thing would just blow up in my face because it was busted and maybe that's why the guy sold it to me in the first place?"

Doug and his friend Scott, 15, debated this problem for several days, turning the shotgun over and over in their hands, carefully inspecting and cleaning every part. They bought a box of shells from a friend and practiced loading and unloading the gun. Finally one Saturday, they drove out of town and headed for the countryside. "We didn't know quite what we were going to do until we found this tree near a cornfield that was split right down the middle into a V," says Doug. He loaded one shell and carefully worked the gun into the crotch of the tree until it fit tightly. Then, while both boys crouched behind the sides of the tree, Doug reached around to the gun, felt for the trigger, closed his eyes and squeezed. "I just love that sound," he says.

In four months, Doug figures, he's done nine drive-by shootings, aiming mostly at cars and houses. "It's basically revenge, that sort of thing," he says. Like when he shot five times at a truck that belonged to the boyfriend of a judge's daughter -- a roundabout response to the judge's conviction of several of his friends for various offenses. "I'm not actually aiming at anybody," he says. "But once my older brother missed a baby's head by a quarter of an inch. It was in all the news."

The roar of Doug's shotgun is the sound of a growing national tragedy. America's easy availability of guns and the restlessness of its youth have finally collided with horrific results. Gunshots now cause 1 of every 4 deaths among American teenagers, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Bullets killed nearly 4,200 teenagers in 1990, the most recent year for which figures are available, up from 2,500 in 1985. An estimated 100,000 students carry a gun to school, according to the National Education Association. In a survey released last week, pollster Louis Harris found alarming evidence of a gun culture among the 2,508 students he polled in 96 schools across the U.S. Fifteen percent of students in the sixth through 12th grades said they have carried a handgun in the past 30 days, 11% said they have been shot at, and 59% said they know where to get a gun if they need one.

But even the worst schools are safer than the streets, which is why summer is the deadliest season. For many teenagers, with their undeveloped sense of mortality and craving for thrills, gunplay has become a deadly sport. "You fire a gun and you can just hear the power," says Doug. "It's like yeah!"

Not long ago, many Americans dismissed the slaughter as an inner-city problem. But now the crackle of gunfire echoes from the poor, urban neighborhoods to the suburbs of the heartland. Omaha, with a population of 340,000, is just an average Midwestern city, which is why the story of its armed youth shows how treacherous the problem has become. The Omaha neighborhood of Benson, a tidy grid of suburban-style homes on the northwest side, has been taken by surprise. Three dozen shaken parents and troubled teenagers gathered on a rainy Tuesday night in May at the Benson Community Center, bracing for summer's onslaught and groping for solid ground in a world where cruising can include drive-by shootings and where a semiautomatic handgun can be the most exciting thing in a boy's life, the 1990s equivalent of a shiny new bicycle. "My son was shot last summer," announces Chris Messick, a mother of three. "They almost shot his head off."

Mike Spencer, a divorced father of two, rises slowly to speak but the tears flow before the words. He stammers, "What in God's name are you kids doing with your lives?" In the corner, seven young men sink lower and lower in their chairs, their faces disappearing beneath an assortment of baseball caps. Spencer is too upset to say any more. Joseph Henry, a father of six, stands up. "I've been to four funerals in North Omaha, all kids," he says. "Can't young people get together without slaughtering each other?"

The question preoccupies assistant police chief Larry Roberts, who has been on the Omaha force for 20 years. He says the big surge in youth violence started in 1986, when gang members from Los Angeles moved eastward to colonize smaller cities. Now teenagers throughout the area try to match the firepower of the gang members. "If one kid brings a little .22-cal. pistol and the other has a .357 Magnum, then guess who has status," Roberts says. The gunplay spread quickly beyond the gangs. "For some reason this particular generation of kids has absolutely no value for human life," he says. "They don't know what it is to die or what it means to pull the trigger."

Yet many have seen by first-hand experience. Jennifer Rea, 15, allegedly shot to death her two younger sisters one afternoon last March with a .22-cal. pistol. Carlos Fisher, 16, put a .38-cal. pistol to his head in May while playing with some friends at his house and pulled the trigger, killing himself. Police believe he either was playing Russian roulette or assumed the gun was unloaded. Travis Hogue, 18, is accused of shooting and killing Nikki Chambers, 19, a male rival, in the rest room of a McDonald's in April with four shots from a .38.

Mayor P.J. Morgan and other community leaders take offense at any suggestion that Omaha is dangerous. Compared with most American cities, it is not. So far this year, 16 residents -- about half of them juveniles -- have been murdered, which is just a bad weekend in Los Angeles. But if the battle against youth violence can't be won in Omaha, which has an unemployment rate of only 3.3%, the rest of the nation is in for trouble. So far that battle is being lost. On any Saturday night, Omaha's police radio betrays the city's image as a bastion of conservative heartland values: "Caller reports two youths with guns in a parking lot . . . Anonymous caller reports shots in her neighborhood . . . Drive-by shooting reported . . . Officer reports at least 10 shots . . . One young male wounded by gunfire."

In Doug's ramblings with his sawed-off, he has peppered his neighborhood with shotgun pellets. He can't explain why he shot the dog. "What does it matter?" he asks with a shrug. Late one evening last March, he and a few friends crept up to a house and took several potshots. "I saw this dog sitting on a couch in this big window above the front porch, so I just shot him." Doug's expression is devoid of remorse or bravado as he drives by the brown, two-story house, recounting the incident one afternoon. A teenage girl with long brown hair sits on the porch reading. The outer walls of the house are still pocked with pellet holes. "I'm not sure what kind of dog it was, but he fell out the window and onto the porch," says Doug. "I could hear him yelping as we ran away."

Doug isn't really sure how he and his friends graduated from Wiffle ball -- once their favorite game -- to guns. "My older brother was into guns, so I've been around this stuff since I was about 13," he says. Both his parents work, and his father is a recovering alcoholic. Doug says that before his dad stopped drinking three years ago, "it was always really violent around my house."

Sometimes the guns are for protection, a youngster's seemingly prudent response to the small-arms race among his peers. But often, guns and gunfights are just a defense against the inexplicable despair that torments so many American teenagers. While the basic destructive impulses of rebellious young men remain unchanged, the methods of rebellion are now far more dangerous. Today's miscreants know that a pistol says much more than long hair or a pierced nose ever could. Not just louder, but forever. With a $25 investment, all the teasing from classmates stops cold. Suddenly, the shortest, ugliest and weakest kid becomes a player.

Saying no to guns is still easy for any self-respecting teenager with a little sense, but dealing with guys who do have guns is an excruciating business. Steve, 14, stopped walking home alone from school last year when many of his fellow seventh-graders at Hale Junior High started talking up guns. "Some guys just started to change. It became cool to say you could get a gun," he says. "Nobody messes with you if they even think you may have a gun." Polite, clean-cut and still displaying the awkwardness of adolescence, Steve says he lives in almost constant apprehension. "Oh boy, summer is really the worst," he says. "You always have to deal with troublemakers who will push you around for no reason, but now it's really scary. I know I look like a fool if I get in an argument and walk away, but these days it's too dangerous to fight."

Some days, guns are just a defense against boredom that comes from a lack of guidance and direction. Asked to name a single hobby, Doug, who is remarkably guileless for a gunslinger, is stumped. He concedes the craziness of him and his classmates shooting at one another, but wonders how it could be any different. "Parents just don't understand that everything has changed," he says. "You can't just slug it out in the schoolyard anymore and be done with it. Whoever loses can just get a gun."

Doug looks for affirmation of his own violent impulses in such movies as South-Central and Boyz 'N the Hood. He misses their point, embracing the life- style they portray rather than heeding any cautionary tale they offer. His favorite book is Do or Die, an account of the lives of gang members in Los Angeles. "If there were more books like that, I'd read a lot more," he says, without a hint of sarcasm.

Doug floors his Ford truck through a yellow light, turns sharply and then slows, carefully checking out the other cars as he cruises the largely white working-class neighborhoods of Benson. He points to a light blue, wood-frame house. Dozens of pellet holes from two shotgun blasts scar the wall on either side of the front door. In the driveway, an elderly man tinkers with a blue Chevy Caprice, which is also riddled with holes. Doug drives by slowly, confident he won't be recognized. "We did that three months ago. Monday night about 2 a.m. me and six other guys just fired from the street." He shakes his head. "That old man's son has a problem with stealing cars." Doug puts an Ice-T disc on his car CD player and cranks up the volume. "There's a lot of rappers that make a lot of sense," he says. His friend Scott nods reverently. But neither Doug nor Scott can explain what the songs mean to them. While the lyrics may address inner-city issues, the tone resonates among white teenagers like them simply because it's the angriest stuff on the market.

"Now, let's say we were going to shoot that house," says Doug, pointing down the street. "Just about now I'd cut the lights and slow down. Then bang, bang, bang, and I'd punch it out of there." The truck lurches forward. Doug turns the stereo louder.

Most Omaha residents used to dismiss teenage gunplay as a problem confined to the north side of Omaha, which is largely black and poor. That comfortable notion was shattered last August by a seven-minute fire fight among mostly white teenagers in Benson. "I've lived in this area all my life, and now boys are shooting at each other for the hell of it," says Bonnie Elseman, a single mother in the neighborhood. "I now realize that I owe the blacks in Omaha an apology for ignoring all the shootings because I thought it was just their problem. I could just weep for these kids."

Especially for her son Jeff, an only child. He was one of the shooters last summer during the gun battle at 61st and Sprague, part of a tree-lined neighborhood of neatly kept, working-class houses. "We were just planning on < a big fight, like a rumble, when six cars came cruising down the street and the shooting started," says Jeff, 20, whose quick and warm smile defeats even his best efforts at posturing. He ran inside a house, grabbed his .32-cal. pistol and returned fire. Another friend retrieved a mini MAC-10, a semiautomatic he had hidden in the bushes, while a third pulled out a .22-cal. rifle. "That mini MAC saved us," says Jeff, who blindly blazed away at the cars, which circled the block three times. Seven minutes later, two youths lay wounded, one seriously. Neighboring houses were riddled with bullets; one car had 14 puncture holes. "It's weird nobody died," Jeff says. He pauses, running his hands over his neatly shaved head. "I never really did learn to shoot too well."

Not for lack of trying. Jeff's life came apart in adolescence. "I don't know what happened," says Bonnie. "He was such a beautiful child. He still is my beautiful child. But he got so angry." After he was kicked out of Monroe Junior High for misconduct, Bonnie sent him to Boys Town for three years. But Jeff grew more rebellious. He got his first gun, a .25-cal. semiautomatic, in his mid-teens. A year later, he dodged his first bullet; after a fistfight, his opponent returned with a rifle and opened fire. That same year, he did his first drive-by. "We shot at a house, just to let them know that the games were over," he says. Although he doesn't believe he ever hit anyone, he confesses that "one time we almost hit a four-year-old girl by mistake."

Two years ago, Jeff paid $50 to a friend for the stolen .32-cal. pistol he used in last summer's shoot-out. After the gunfight, he tossed it in a lake and bought a 12-gauge, sawed-off shotgun. "You feel invincible with a weapon," he says. In April he was arrested for possession of a .410-gauge shotgun, and now faces felony charges.

All in all, Jeff doesn't consider himself a violent guy, notwithstanding several broken noses. "I don't have a quick temper, but if I'm mad, I'm mad for three weeks," he says, which is a long time in the life of an armed youth. He graduated from Benson High School last year, and works digging fence holes while awaiting trial. "I'm trying to stay away from guns now, but it's like everybody has them. Guys will be like, 'I've got a 9-mm, and you've only got a peashooter.' Or they'll brag that 'my brother has a MAC-10.' As crazy as it's getting, I think it should be illegal to have a gun," he says.

* Bonnie didn't realize that her son was involved with guns until last summer. In June, after Jeff and some friends were shot at in a drive-by, they jumped into a Jeep and went looking for the assailant's car. When they found the car parked in front of a rival's house, Jeff's friend jumped out and pounded on it with a wooden club. But just as they were about to leave, someone crept up and fired a shotgun blast through the back of their Jeep. Jeff ducked, and his friend was hit in the back and shoulder.

It was the shoot-out in August that really got Bonnie's attention. She decided to fight back, and formed the Benson Youth-Parent Association, which chaperones parties and patrols the streets. "There are drive-bys all the time," she says. "They don't even make the newspaper." Bonnie patrols Benson with a police scanner, banking on her belief that mothers still enjoy some diplomatic immunity on the streets. "If I won a million dollars tomorrow, I'd buy a few buses, fill them with kids and flee Omaha," she says. Flee where? "I hadn't thought of that," she responds.

The mayhem has spawned another group, MAD DADS, which stands for Men Against Destruction -- Defending Against Drugs and Social Disorder. They start praying about 10 o'clock every Friday night, just before they hit the streets armed with two-way radios, police scanners, video cameras and a gutsy determination to stop kids from shooting one another. Seven men and two women bow their heads around a small table in the one-story, cinder-block command center in a rough part of town, hoping for peace, or at least enough rain to keep kids off the streets for one more night. "The hour is getting late, and our children need us," says John Foster, a vice president of the city employees union, who founded the group four years ago after his son was badly beaten. The prayer is interrupted by the sound of a gunshot, followed shortly by the wail of an ambulance. Foster shakes his head. "It's becoming so common," he says. "Some of our young people are turning into cold-blooded killers."

Two weeks later, as Foster patrols the largely black, working-class neighborhoods in north Omaha, a gunshot crackles through the air. Foster turns the corner. A mother and three children run toward his car. "Some kids are shooting at people just down the street there," says the woman, pointing nervously. Foster circles the block, slowing as he approaches a pack of kids mingling in front of a house. "We were just having a party, a birthday party," says one, "when these guys drive by and start shooting at us." Twenty minutes later and only blocks away, Foster comes upon a teenage boy being treated by an ambulance team for a gunshot wound in the arm. "It's so sad," he says. "I remember when you could settle things with fisticuffs. Man, that's antiquated now."

The MAD DADS sponsored two gun-buyback programs last winter, offering up to $50 for a working weapon, with no questions asked. On both days, they ran out of money within half an hour. Total haul: 588 guns, some turned in by juveniles. "It amazed me," says C.R. Bell, president of the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce. In May MAD DADS staged another buyback after sending 100,000 flyers to nine school districts. The take: 1,124 guns, which will be welded into a monument by a local artist. Among them was Doug's 12-gauge shotgun. "I figured it was a safe way to get rid of it," Doug says. "I did a lot of crazy things with that gun, and I didn't want to get caught with it." He plans on getting a handgun next.

The birds disappeared from Tony's neighborhood in central Omaha when he was in the fourth grade, shortly after he got his first BB gun. "I guess I shot a lot of animals," he says sheepishly. Now he totes a sawed-off, 20-gauge, pump-action shotgun he bought for $20 last January from a 16-year-old friend. "The grip was broken, so I got a good price," the 17-year-old says proudly. He doesn't shoot birds anymore, but he fires an occasional salvo into the night sky around Omaha. "Sometimes I just feel like busting it, you know. I just want to pull the trigger and bam!"

An only child, Tony has not seen his father since he was five. He is very protective of his mother, a social worker. "I told her she should get a .380, but she doesn't like guns," he says. A senior this fall at Central High with plans to go on to college, Tony doesn't do drugs because he doesn't want them to interfere with his performance on the football team. He spurns gangs and tough-guy behavior, but feels he needs the gun. "It's not a macho thing for me," he says. "I mean, I'm not into fighting, and I ain't going to shoot anybody. But when you have a gun, you feel like can't nobody get you. You can't get got."

Tony's mom learned he had a gun one Saturday night last May. "I got home around 2 a.m., which is when I'm supposed to be in, and my mom says, 'Hurry inside, there's shooting going on.' I didn't believe her because we rarely have shooting in our neighborhood, but I wasn't going to take any chances, so I turned off all the lights and got my shotgun from under my bed. She wasn't too happy about it, but she's not going to take it away from me."

Tony wants it known that he is not nearly as wild as his friend, Mike, who admits to a quick temper and a violent streak. Raised alternately by his divorced mother and father in Omaha, Mike was 16 when he first saw someone get shot. "It was at a party," he says. "This guy was hit in the chest with a .25. He just dropped." So far, Mike claims, he's been shot at five times, including the big gunfight last August, which persuaded him not to travel unarmed. "Sometimes you need a gun to get out of a situation," he says. "You could be in a parking lot just kicking it, and people start shooting."

Mike started carrying a gun to school at Central High last winter. "I wasn't trying to be hard or anything. It was just for protection," says the lanky 18-year-old, who wears three gold earrings and favors a black baseball cap emblazoned with a marijuana leaf. "I don't know why, but stuff just started getting hectic, real rough. I mean you can get jumped for no reason." The small, .25-cal. Raven pistol, which he bought from a friend, fit snugly in the pocket of his winter vest. He even took it along to his telemarketing job after work, where he earns $6.50 an hour manning the phones. He says, "If people know you have a gun, they just don't mess with you."

Mike got caught last April after running into a friend who had some pot in the school parking lot. "We smoked a lot," says Mike, who had his pistol in the right-hand pocket of his jacket along with two clips, one full and the other empty. As he entered the school, a rubbery smile on his face, a security guard stopped him and took him to the principal's office. "They knew I was high, and I was being a dick," he says. "They told me to empty my pockets, and I was like, man, everything hit me. I was like, f, I messed up!" At the police station, Mike wolfed down a pizza and promptly fell asleep.

The high school expelled Mike, and the court put him on probation for one year. He transferred to Father Flanagan High and managed to graduate in May. Like Tony, he intends to go to college and considers all the gunplay just a part of growing up. "I'm a pretty normal guy," he says earnestly. "I like to water-ski and read Stephen King books and stuff." He proudly announces that he owns three different kinds of Bibles, which he likes to study. He says he prays every night. After his arrest, Mike's parents were supportive and enrolled him in therapy. "My counselor says I'm susceptible to peer pressure," he says. "I'm trying to work on that."

On a Saturday night in June, Mike and Tony cruise the town in Tony's six- year-old Ford subcompact. The windows are down, and the tape deck blasts one of their favorite songs, Six Feet Deep by the Geto Boys, a Houston rap group. Tony rocks back and forth to the music. Mike wonders out loud how many kids are going to get shot this summer. "I bet one of our friends is going to get it," says Tony, who is wearing a Green Bay Packers cap and an Oakland Athletics shirt. "All the gun stuff used to be fun, but now it's old. You can't even go to a party without worrying about being shot. Someone's always got a gun." Mike agrees and mentions the need to bring along friends: "You've got to go deep."

They drop by Mike's two-story white house in a nice neighborhood in north- west Omaha, where he lives with his dad, so he can change baseball caps and grab some more tapes. "You have, like, a home life and a street life," he explains. "I'm so different at home you wouldn't believe it." Back in the car, they slow down occasionally to reach out through the windows and slap hands as they pass friends who are hanging out. "People think we are just punks and farmers in Omaha, but they're wrong," says Tony. "A lot happens here. It's just a smaller scale than L.A."

Mike nervously taps his fingers against the dashboard and then turns down the music. "Don't you think it is going to be pretty crazy this summer?" he asks, with a mixture of fear and excitement. "Real crazy," says Tony, who plans to sell his shotgun and get an easier-to-hide .38-cal. pistol. Mike stares out the window, worrying about how his probationary status will leave him unarmed. "Man, Tony," he says, shaking his head slowly. "I just don't see how I'm going to get through this summer without a gun."

Norman Johnson carries no gun anymore, but for a different reason. One afternoon last May, as he rode in the backseat of his cousin's Ford Escort on a city street, a car pulled up and the occupants opened fire. "I was just laying in the backseat, you know, resting, when my friend says there's a car right on our tail. Next thing you know, I felt this incredible shock. No ; noise, just shock." A bullet slammed into the back of Johnson's neck, crushing two vertebrae. "I looked up, and I saw bullet holes in the window," he says, speaking in a raspy voice and pausing frequently to gasp for air. "I looked down at my body, and, well, I didn't feel anything."

Almost completely paralyzed from the neck down, Johnson, who is 6 ft. 3 in. and 20 years old, spent the first month after the shooting on a breathing machine. He lost 50 lbs. Between hours of physical therapy each day, Johnson has had plenty of time to rethink his attitude toward guns.

The youngest of six and a high school dropout, Johnson drifted into gangs for support and identity. Asked why he was shot, he says, "It's a long story," which means someone was out for revenge. Recalling the streets, he tries to cling to some of his former toughness. "I guess I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time," he says. "It could happen to anyone." But that's not enough. "Sometimes it's so hard," he whispers. "I get high temperatures and real sweaty, and I get these pains." He breathes on his own through a hole in his trachea, which a nurse closes with a plug when Johnson wants to talk. "At first I wanted to die. Now I'm happy to be alive, but I just want to get more feeling back." His voice is meek, beaten, almost hollow. When talk turns to football and basketball, he makes gulping, swallowing noises. Among cards and photos taped to the wall of his hospital bed, an old award certificate is proudly displayed. It reads, BANQUET OF CHAMPIONS FOR LITTLE PRO BASKETBALL. BOYS' CLUB OF OMAHA. 1984. "I always loved sports, you know. I mean I was pretty good." He pauses for air. "I had speed," he murmurs. He is too tired to continue. The nurse pulls the trachea plug so he can breathe.

FOOTNOTE: *Where only first names are used, they are pseudonyms.