The Whole Nine Yards
I’m not sure how widely known the expression is, but the whole nine yards has always been an interesting expression. Most people (including me originally) thought it had something to do with football. Ten yards being the first down distance that needs to be covered, it was logical to assume that it had something to do with covering the majority of the remaining distance for a first down, perhaps on fourth down to just make it. This is still considered one of the etymological mysteries and has no definitive source, but I have my favorite. Actually, it comes from WWII in the Pacific theater of operation. The famous P-51 Mustang fighter plane (remember Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun standing on the roof yelling, “Go, P-51, the Cadillac of the skies!”) had a gun belt that held 648 .50-caliber bullets in a 27-foot long belt. That would be nine yards long. When a fighter plane came in for refueling and rearmament it was said that the pilot had gone “the whole nine yards” if he had exhausted his entire gun belt on the enemy and was going up for more. I like the romanticism of that explanation because, like Christian Bale on that Japanese POW camp rooftop, I always romanticized the Pacific fighter pilots for some inexplicable reason. If you watched any of the versions of the movies of the battle for Midway you know that it was the dive-bomber that was the real hero. That was not a P-51 Mustang but a Douglas SBD Dauntless and I have no idea if it carried nine yards of ammo for its .30-caliber front and rear guns. Nevertheless, I spent countless hours in my early youth drawing pictures of Pacific Ocean battles that had fighter planes zipping all around the fleet and emerging victorious or going into the sea in a ball of flames. I cannot remember what about that made me so obsessive.
When I was young my mother was against me having toy guns and like most young boys, I wanted nothing more than I wanted toy guns. Maybe that’s why I drew the best examples I could imagine of guns hot action by drawing Pacific Naval battles. I also did the Ralphie A Christmas Story thing of hankering for the BB gun more than anything else in the world. When I got my BB gun rifle I lived in Maine and was twelve years old. It was the perfect place to go out and try to shoot things in the woods. Chipmunks, squirrels and birds lived in fear of me, the big white hunter. My grandfather, up in the Finger Lakes of New York heat a .22 bolt-action rifle in the corner of the kitchen, presumably for shooting varmints on his farm. He always let me shoot it when I visited and he also let me play with the Swiss Army knife with 1,000 blades. He tried to give them both to me and my mother denied me on both, but did say I could get the Swiss Army knife when I turned twelve. When I got it I promptly cut myself and had it taken away, never to come back into my life to my knowledge. Luckily, I never had the opportunity to shoot myself with the .22 rifle.
But I did have the opportunity at the one and only sleep-away summer camp I went to one summer in the wilds of northern Wisconsin, to learn to shoot a .22 rifle. This was all under tight supervision at the camp and was done 100% under the strict NRA shooting range standards of the day. At my age level we were only allowed to shoot from the prone position. If I had gone to the camp another season I would have been able to graduate to kneeling and standing position shooting. It was all 50-foot target shooting with standard round paper targets where you would finish your rounds and all shooters would put their guns down with bolts open and walk up to retrieve the targets. You would then add up your score based on the holes in the target. The way in which you steadied the rifle was with a leather sling that wrapped around your left forearm so that the gun could be held taught. For gun people this is all routine stuff, I’m sure. For me as a ten-year-old it was magical warfare preparation, which was, again, beyond romantic in 1964. The NRA was smart about this whole thing and had different gradations of achievement for target shooting of .22’s. Every gradation came with a certificate and a medal. Wow! That was hot stuff to a ten-year-old.
I excelled in .22 rifle target shooting that summer. I was actually better than most of the other kids by quite a lot. As I recall the steps I worked through and received medals for included Pro-Marksman, Marksman, Marksman First Class, Sharpshooter and then a series of radiation’s called Bar I, Bar II, Bar III, up to Bar IX. I don’t recall what was above that, but I got up to Bar III, which was unusually high for my age and for one season. For years those little medals could be found in a wooden cigar box that held all my memorabilia. I’ve lost track of it somewhere so I suspect it got pitched by someone somewhere. I’ll bet it was my mother, who, despite growing up on a farm, was very anti-gun.
At one point in my adult life I returned to the world of guns for a brief time about twenty-five years ago. I remember going to a gun club on Long Island to let my oldest son shoot skeet and targets. I took a shot at some skeet and was surprisingly good at it. I did likewise on a motorcycle trip to Maine where I shot both a skeet shotgun (scoring a perfect 10/10) and a strange contraption called a potato gun. Both were target shots and not shots at anyone or anything. I even went with a Frenchman I knew to an underground shooting range on the Champs Elyse and fired off $75 worth of Uzzi ammo at a target, just to see what it felt like. But since then I have become increasingly anti-gun and have had no interest in touching the damn things.
We are currently living in a gun world gone mad. I cannot recite all of the gun-related tragedies but ever since Sandy Hook it has just gotten more and more outrageous and sad. As my daughter-in-law Valene said on her Instagram post today, “We interrupt the coverage of the shooting of a thirteen-year-old boy that interrupted coverage of the traffic-stop shooting of a twenty-year-old man that interrupted coverage of the Derek Chauvin trial for the killing of George Floyd (not by a gun) for news of eight people killed by a random shooter at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis.” To say this is crazy is a gross understatement.
America is suffering for its heritage of coming in with guns hot. The Wild West history is plaguing us more and more as we try desperately to break from our history of racial antagonism and police brutality. The blend of racial violence and gun culture is quickly (not slowly anymore) killing our culture. There is absolutely nothing to admire in that cultural spect of America. No rugged individualism or sense of freedom is worth the price of the gun violence we are enduring. The NRA is no longer the friendly vehicle for making sure that kids practiced gun safety on the firing range. It is no longer a good thing for children to draw pictures of war battles with bullets flying through the air. It is bad to play war and to fire guns for pleasure. The whole nine yards has simply gone too far and we need a dramatic cultural adjustment. Let’s stop doing half-measures like tightening gun licensing and go the whole nine yards to dramatically restrict handguns and assault weapons once and for all.