“Everything I do gives me callouses,” Aleks Dapkus says, and he crams another bullet into the handgun magazine wedged against his stomach and upper thigh. “I tend to overuse everything on one hand.” His smile turns to a thinner grin as he attempts to fit another round against the magazine’s curved, unmerciful metal lip with the bone-white fingers of his right hand.

Aleks would never think of it that way: his right hand. No, it’s just his Hand, his Wrist, his Elbow and his Arm — the only ones he has. When Aleks was five weeks old, doctors discovered cancer in that left arm. They were forced to amputate at the shoulder.

Today, Aleks is going to shoot some guns.

Aleks is 21, and on a bright February day his thin frame is concealed beneath the black-blue wool of a surplus Italian officer’s coat. He has a friendly, boyish face edged only with a dense brown scruff under his chin, and he wears heavy-duty hearing protection gear over both ears.

The jacket has gold buttons. The left sleeve hangs loose and empty at his side.

Two days before, Aleks was narrowly elected as president of Illini On Target, a Registered Student Organization at the University. Every other Sunday, Aleks and a handful of club members caravan to a local farmer’s property 20 miles southeast of campus. The farmer has allowed the group to set up an ad hoc range on his land. They bring their own targets and gear.

Aleks is aiming a mean-looking .45 caliber USP pistol at a soda can on a bale of hay. He tilts the pistol 45 degrees to the left, so that the recoil will hit the fleshy part of his palm and drive his elbow slightly sideways. If he simply held the pistol upright, as a person with a standard two-handed grip would, the blast would rock the pistol straight up, terminally unbalancing his next shot. It’s the kind of situational adaptability that Aleks has honed his entire life, from the complexity of firing a handgun to the simple task of opening a pickle jar.

“You need to sit down before you open the pickle jar,” he says. “Once you sit down, where do I put it that’s best? Now that I have it open, how do I make it so that it doesn’t spill? So you break down a broad idea into core components.”

Aleks pulls the trigger and fires, shredding the soda can and sending it end-over-end into the air.

***

Aleks doesn’t remember the specific way his grade school classmate made fun of him, but he knows it was about his arm. What he does recall is how he grabbed the boy by the neck and held him hard against a wall.

“I lifted him, and as I dropped him, I punched him in the nose, and his nose just started gushing blood, and he ran off to tell the teacher,” he says. “I was pretty proud of myself.”

He was a fighter in grade school, quick to anger. His obvious difference led to taunting, name-calling and frequent encounters with bullies. During those years, he was wound so tight that anything “offbeat,” as he puts it, would set him off.

“I felt like I was unjustly wronged, and I didn’t want to be wronged anymore,” he says. 

As he got older, Aleks learned restraint, and he received a lot of opportunities to practice it. The taunts continued throughout grade school, middle school, and even into his freshman year of high school. But by his sophomore year, the tide had passed him. There were other distractions in high school, so even the bullies left him alone eventually. But in some form, that old anger still persisted.

So Aleks did what he knew best. He adapted.

“I wanted a purpose again. I always want to be trying to change something and make it better,” he says. “I wanted a purpose to fight for, and my purpose became politics.”

A junior at the University, Aleks is double-majoring in political science and philosophy, and he says that he one day wants to work as a “second-amendment lobbyist.”

“I think the guns come in because it’s a human right of self defense,” he says.

But those years of bullying left Aleks with something more than just a fighter’s instinct. He never forgot what it felt like to be outnumbered and disadvantaged in a fight. He never forgot what that kind weakness felt like.

More than anything, Aleks wants to be able to rely on himself. But when he finds himself on a sidewalk at midnight walking toward an oncoming group of hooded teenagers, he says he can sense the echo of facing down a group of bullies in the first grade. In both situations, it’s the same fear and frustration: It’s knowing that when push comes to shove, you can be made helpless.

Aleks sees government restriction on guns as a handicap upon everyone’s self-reliance and self-protection. It’s that same old story, knowing that when it comes down to it, your life is ultimately dependent on the government. Without a gun, you are not truly free.

“If you can’t defend yourself and you find yourself needing to, that’s life we’re talking about, your freedom, your liberty. Life is life, there’s nothing greater than that. And to be unable to protect your own life, and rely on someone else … seems kind of naive.”

***

Aleks has been waiting for his Glock 19 for nearly a month now, and the anticipation is killing him. He ordered the gun nearly one month ago, paid out of his own pocket, and once it arrives Aleks will be, at long last, a gun owner. He says it feels like waiting for a Christmas present, but it’s even more than that: It’s a validation of his presidency of IOT. Indeed, why would anyone respect the president of a gun enthusiast club who doesn’t own his own gun?

But in a twist of irony, the fear of impending gun control legislation after the Sandy Hook shooting has driven gun owners to stockpile weapons in record numbers, and buying a handgun like the Glock 19 has become has become very difficult for a regular consumer like Aleks. 

Aleks explained that large retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods have been cleaned out for months, and even the website which Aleks ordered his gun from includes a disclaimer on the homepage that all shipments have been delayed due to the large volume of orders. This fear-driven demand has also affected ammunition, and a large percentage of conversation between IOT members revolves around which stores within driving distance still have some bullets left on the shelves. If Aleks could walk into Wal-Mart and simply purchase a gun off the shelves, he could have been testing the sights on his new handgun after 72 hours. Instead, it’s been 27 days and counting since he placed his order, and he has no idea how much longer it could take. For Aleks, gun demand has effectively become gun control.

Yet, even with his own handgun, Aleks still has the misfortune of living in Illinois, the only state in the country currently without a concealed carry law.

“It’s hell,” he says of Illinois’ gun laws. “It’s like you’re looking at the rest of the United States, and they’re teasing you with their rights.” 

However, some form of concealed carry law is expected to go into effect in June after a federal court ruled in December that Illinois’ blanket ban on concealed carry was unconstitutional.

But even when Illinois is pushed, kicking and screaming, to pass its own form of a concealed carry law, Aleks still has one very practical problem: Reloading a pistol with one hand is fantastically difficult and damnably slow.

At best, the options are cumbersome. Aleks could re-holster the pistol, then insert a new magazine and reload it while it is anchored to his hip. He could also use the back of his shoe or belt to pull back the slide, “racking” the weapon. Or he could even get into a half crouch with the pistol wedged behind his right knee to provide leverage and reload the pistol in that position. These methods were originally designed in case a police officer was wounded and lost the use of an arm.

“That’s why I’m completely against magazine capacity bans,” he says, and his argument is uniquely practical relative to the ideological and political debates surrounding high capacity magazines, which have been used in a number of mass shootings.

“I absolutely hate (the ban) for a reason that pretty much no one else I know does. I hate it because it is potentially life ending,” he says. “If I have to a pull out a gun and I had seven rounds or ten rounds, then I’m going to have to reload. A normal criminal can reload in half a second. For me, I have to get down on my knee, rack it on my shoe or my belt. Horrible.”

Aleks wants 15, 20, 33-round magazines — as much ammo as he can carry at one time. If something truly dangerous shows up on that sidewalk at midnight, Aleks doesn’t want to reload. He wants to be ready, and he wants as many bullets as possible.

***

Aleks vividly remembers the first time he fired a gun. It was at the police firing range in Champaign, two years ago.

“I had this anticipation, this excitement, this fear, this anxiety, everything coming together. It was a powerful moment,” he says. “You have the power to do plenty of things, and you could use that power for good or for evil. What it comes down to is responsibility.”

The technique Aleks uses to shoot one-handed — tilting the gun inward to minimize shock on the wrist — was the result of the one lesson he received at the police gun range. Since no one else at the range shot one-handed, he was forced to work on his form and accuracy by himself.

One day at the range, an officer noticed Aleks struggling with his aim and approached him from the right to try to give him some tips on how to better hold the gun. Reaching, he tried to bring up Aleks’s non-existent left arm. The officer immediately began apologizing when he realized his mistake.

For Aleks, it was a surreally reflective moment: As he held his aim downrange, his finger on the trigger, Aleks remembered his younger self, his grade school self, and his childhood anger. He remembered how, at that age, he had fantasized about taking triumphant, justified revenge on his tormentors, hurting them and having power over them. He remembered those terrible moments when someone would call even the slightest attention to his weakness — his arm — setting him off into a meltdown.

But on that day at the range, that was all it was, just a memory.

“When I was younger, that would be something that I would just gotten frustrated by, because it would have reminded me of being different, which would have been horrible. When I was younger, I would have fought him. But this time, here I am standing with the ability to do some horrible things … but I just put the gun down, shook his hand and said ‘No problem. No big deal.’”

Danny can be reached at [email protected].