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of that crowd, I might need to try a rifle on my back. I drifted slowly through the entire store, from the six-dollar pints of açai berries to the salmon-and-scallop sausages, and reached high—gun hip facing flamboyantly outward—for a bag of muesli. I sat for half an hour on a high stool sipping an Odwalla Mango Tango Smoothie, gun hip out. Men in bicycle-racing Lycra, women in yoga pants, children with flickering lights on their shoes came and went. I watched their eyes. If anybody noticed the gun, I missed it. Nobody said anything, or stared, or alerted store management. I felt like a ghost. Perhaps their eyes saw the pistol but their brains discounted it:
This is Boulder; that can’t be a gun
.
    Fed up, I headed home to ponder the odd results. On the way, I stopped at a gritty little Mexican grocery to buy some tortillas and
crema
. As I locked my bike, a chubby boy ran up and asked, in breathless Spanish, if my gun was real. I assured him it was. Inside the store, everybody swiveled toward the scrawny gringo with the gun. They peered at it, whispered to each other, took their children by the hand. I tried to relax, breathing in the mingled aromas of meat, onions, and votive candles that constitute the Mexican national fragrance. But I couldn’t relax any more than they could.
“¿Por qué la pistola?”
a man in line for the register finally asked.
“¿Por qué no?”
I answered. He shrugged and turned away, shaking his head—not as if I was dangerous, but more to say,
gabacho
fool.
    Maybe the Hispanics in the grocery were simply more candid than the Anglo Boulderites, and more socially relaxed. Maybe they figured I was an agent of
la migra
. Or maybe they tuned in to the handgun because in Mexico almost nobody gets a license to own one, let alone wear one.
    I did not repeat the experiment. I don’t know how many Whole Foods shoppers had started down the overpriced-cheese aisle, only to spot the gun and reverse course toward the overpriced tea, but I’d made people in at least one store anxious. Wearing a visible gun made me feel obnoxious.
    To say nothing of unsafe. The idea that wearing a gun in plain view was a smart precaution now felt completely crazy. I’d worried the whole time that someone would knock me on the back of the head and steal it, or that a nutcase would challenge me to a draw. And that was in genteel, urbane Boulder. I couldn’t imagine carrying openly in places like Phoenix or Detroit.
    Which brought me, inevitably, to the place where, all along, I’d secretly hoped to arrive: concealed carry.
    Gun guys don’t talk about it much, because we don’t want to seem weird, but a huge part of the attraction of guns is the sensual pleasure of handling them, whether shooting them or not. They are exquisitely designed and beautifully made, like clocks or cameras. To manipulate a gun’s moving parts—its “action”—is deeply satisfying to hand and ear. Guys like machines, and guns are machines elevated to high, lethal art.
    Most of us, though, seldom enjoy the pleasure of handling them—perhaps only when we take them from the safe for hunting season, plus a few sessions of target practice. The rest of the time, we read about them, think about them, and watch movies full of them. But we don’t handle them. Imagine a musician who got to touch a guitar for one week a year. Short of joining a police department, shipping out to a combat zone with the Marines, or being willing to carry openly, about the only way to live the quotidian gun life was to go through the trouble of getting licensed to carry one concealed.
    For most of American history, that was hard to do. Laws requiring a license to carry a concealed weapon go back to the early nineteenth century in places like New York City. And right up to the end of the twentieth century, almost every jurisdiction in the country made people prove a need for carrying a hidden gun. Merchants in rough neighborhoods and the well-connected could