Squeezing a gun with both hands sent sensations racing down his spine to a semi-firm, half-inch point between his legs. Gordon Dillow (pictured, for illustration purposes, on his knees with the steel collar around his neck) wanted to moan–purr, really–like he did in the privacy of his home. But he'd been warned twice before about fondling weapons inside Orange County Register headquarters.
There was also the problem of his co-workers: in his mind, a bunch of unapologetic liberals, women, homosexuals, Jews and “gooks.”** He knew they didn't sympathize with the depths of his love for men in uniform, weapons, badges, boots, steel neck collars and cop domination techniques–particularly ones performed on young brown people who haven't yet learned to quickly salute state authority.
Dillow's memory flashed to the time in the men's room when he had reached out to another Register employee in hopes of finding an ideological soul mate. The man flushed, called him a “sick douche bag” and stormed out. Weeks later the Pentagon's PR unit sent Dillow to Iraq under the ruse that he was an independent embedded journalist.
Men. Uniforms. Weapons. Heat. Torture. Dead civilians. He felt so blessed he tried to stay indefinitely.
But that was several years ago. Dillow gripped the gun tightly, squeezed his eyelids and recalled his favorite photograph: a smirking, erect Heinrich Himmler, dressed spectacularly in a Nazi uniform and surrounded by shirtless males ready to obey. He sighed and let his mind wonder about the possibility of a master race.
A tingling returned. He rolled his chair over to his office door, cracked it open slightly and saw David Whiting smiling at him affectionately. He quickly locked the door shut. Whiting's relentless fawning reminded him of Smithers on The Simpsons. He got Whiting out of his mind by thinking of Doogie Howser wearing a crisp doctor's uniform.
Deadline for his next column was 15 minutes away. What could he write about? Cops? Soldiers? Cop/soldiers? A coin flip wouldn't help.
His eyes searched his office in hopes of sparking an idea. A Donna Summer song played softly in the background. There–partially hidden underneath his prized copy of a My Lai massacre movie (actual footage!) and a stack of photographs he'd secretly taken of men entering an Army recruiting station in Stanton on successive Saturdays–he found inspiration: a Register crime story.
I'll let him tell describe his excitement:
“It happened earlier this month in Irvine,” Dillow wrote for today's column. “Police were looking for a man suspected of raping an 18-year-old woman in her home. As the cops searched, the fleeing suspect, a 27-year-old L.A. gang member, tried to hide by breaking into another home. Inside, the homeowner, a man who had recently undergone defensive firearms training, heard the commotion, grabbed a handgun and confronted the suspect.”
Men. Uniforms. Gun. Action.
Dillow swiveled repeatedly in his seat, purred and looked over his shoulder. Yes, the office door remained shut. In the distance he heard Tony Saavedra snoring through the afternoon, Frank Mickadeit bragging about his own popularity among Gulfstream Republican insiders and Martin Wisckol slowly repeating a series of orders from GOP boss Mike Schroeder. Even for Dillow, those noises were troublesome. He re-focused his attention on the rapist article.
“Well, I don't have enough space to go into all the Second Amendment arguments,” he wrote. “But to me it's obvious that a homeowner in Irvine or any other law-abiding citizen has a constitutional right to have a firearm.”
Dillow finished typing and smiled. His left hand dropped to his lap region. Nobody–not a single person on the entire planet–had argued that this homeowner wasn't legally entitled to possess a gun or use it in self-defense.
The 57-year-old columnist marveled at his ability to produce imaginary dilemmas.
And get paid!
For the first time since the California Supreme Court strengthened police secrecy and lethal force laws, Dillow laughed out loud, packed up and went to CVS to buy more hand lotion.
— R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
**In a column, Dillow once admitted “there was a time when I called [Vietnamese] gooks without so much as a second thought.” Repentant? Nope. Later, in 1999, he defended–imagine this!–caucasian police officers in Orange County's Little Saigon calling Vietnamese Americans “gooks.”
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.