Ladies, get your guns

By Abigail Goldman

Saturday, Sept. 27, 2008 | 2 a.m.

A lot of people don’t like Detective Antoine Lane. Most of them are fellow cops.

Lane is a firearms expert from Texas. He travels the country teaching police his technique. His specialized classes are consistently overbooked. And it’s these popular seminars that have quietly, privately, earned Lane the disdain of a certain circle of police. Watching him teach at Metro’s firing range Wednesday, in a portable trailer filled to capacity, it’s easy to see why.

The subject matter is simple firearm skills, textbook stuff. The handouts are basic black and white photocopies. The TV at the front of the room is turned off. The fluorescent lights buzz like fluorescent lights in every boring classroom in the world. The students sit quietly and listen closely. They’re the ones causing all the problems for Lane. They’re the reason he gets grief.

This is Ladies Only Handgun Class. Please load your weapon.

The firing range is a proving ground for cops because it’s a gun and the authority to use it that separate police from civilians. The power and pressure of this responsibility can do funny things to people. Some male officers come to the range and puff up like testosterone-infused peacocks, Lane says. They cover up nerves (What nerves? Never! None!) with bombast. Others are afraid of what their colleagues will think, so they put on a show of bravado.

In this mess of machismo, Lane says, some female officers fade to the background. They’re often intimidated on the range, he says, because they must doubly prove themselves, as women and as marksmen. Lane says all of that and more, and lots of cops don’t like it. They don’t like talking about what Lane calls the “invisible barrier” that separates sexes on the force — a barrier that, he says as a black man, feels familiar.

“Women are always having to prove themselves,” Lane says, “so they never get a chance to focus on the fundamental basics. She becomes an alley cat in a fight, but she doesn’t have good techniques.”

Metro is the only law enforcement agency in the country, other than his own Austin, Texas, Police Department, that’s allowed Lane to give the Ladies Only seminar. He presents general coed courses to other departments, federal and local, but all have been pointedly uninterested in the girls and guns class. It’s a progressive move for Metro, an agency that wants to recruit women just as much as men.

Last month’s payroll included 222 female Metro officers, not counting jail staff. That’s just less than 9 percent of the total. The agency isn’t secretive about it — it wants more women. This class is a sign, it hopes, that the department is different from others.

Lane had to turn more women away than he could accept — he capped the class at 24 students from multiple agencies: Metro, North Las Vegas Police, Nye County sheriff’s deputies and a few officers from Las Cruces, N.M.

The curriculum of the Ladies Only class is identical to that of Lane’s coed classes, with one exception: He plays the ladies a clip from a movie about an empowered policewoman. He shows men a clip from the bloody battle movie “300,” because the guys like the violent action, he said.

In other words, Lane is giving women a comfortable environment in which to learn. A simple act, but it’s socially loaded.

“This is an ego-driven sport and (women) have suffered from that mentality,” he said. “They’ve refused to seek help because of invisible barriers and elephants in the room that we don’t like to talk about.”

Metro Officer Michelle Royal works executive detail in the sheriff’s office. She’s going to be promoted soon, though, and back on the streets. She enrolled in Lane’s class.

“I feel like I can train and learn in this environment without feeling like I have to measure up to a male,” Royal said.

Out on the range, a cardboard target of a curvy woman in tight jeans holding a gun had been replaced with a new mark: A man in a gray three-piece suit holding a briefcase in one hand and a gun in the other.

Royal shot him to Swiss cheese.