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?"