(8 of 10)
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.