Sam Bowden's gun purchase and target practice

Sam Bowden's gun purchase and target practice is the hinge on which the entire novel turns: the moment when a self-described "sedentary, forty-year-old office worker, with a mortgage, a family and an insurance program" deliberately arms himself against Max Cady. It is the point at which the lawyer's faith in the law's protective power gives way to the recognition that he must become, in his own sardonic phrase, "a target that can shoot back." The sequence transforms Sam from a man who believes the law is "an ethical structure" based on "the inviolability of the freedom of every citizen" into a man who will ultimately kill another human being — and it is this transformation, rehearsed in the drawing-and-firing drills on the hill, that makes the novel's climax possible.

The Decision to Arm

The decision to purchase a gun grows directly out of Sam's growing realization that the legal system cannot protect his family. He had already told Carol that he felt "ineffectual" as "the king of this little tribe," unable to "go put the fear of God in Cady" because of his "office-type physique" — Cady, he noted, "looks like he's got muscles they haven't named yet." The law, which Sam elsewhere defended as "a creaking, shambling, infuriating structure" that nevertheless works "a hell of a lot more often than it doesnt," had proven unable to restrain Cady: the police captain had refused to act, and Cady had received only a hundred-dollar fine and thirty days in city jail for striking an officer. When Sam announced to Carol that he was "becoming a dashing and dangerous figure, with the help of Captain Button," he was acknowledging that the law's procedures had reached their limit. Button, who had earlier refused Sam's request to have Cady beaten, was "arranging the permit" — a telling reversal, as the same captain who would not sanction vigilante violence was willing to help Sam arm himself legally.

The Weapon and the Holster

The gun itself was "a very ugly and efficient device manufactured by Smith and Wesson," a short-barreled revolver designed, as Sam later explained, "for maximum speed and maximum killing power for its size." It was to be carried in a spring-clip holster, a device with a specific tactical logic: "Nobody can snatch it away, but when I reach for it properly it will, Button claims, jump right into my hand." The holster's design reveals the nature of the threat Sam anticipated — not a distant sniper but a close-quarters attack, the kind of encounter Cady had already staged in the parking lot and would later attempt against Carol. When Sam wore the revolver home on Tuesday night, the harness chafed him, and he realized "it would be a long time before he could become accustomed to it." He wore it back to the office "feeling vastly foolish, and suspecting that everyone who glanced at him on the street saw the suspicious bulge under his left arm." Carol, circling him in inspection, offered a gentler assessment: "I know it's there so I can see the sort of lump it makes, but actually, darling, I guess you're the type. You're thin and you like your jackets cut loosely anyway."

The Hillside Drills

Sam's practice sessions on the hill were a study in dogged self-improvement. He went up "with three boxes of shells, and a piece of sheeting and some twine," tying the sheeting around a tree "thick enough to simulate a man's torso" and penciling "a crude heart on the left side of the chest." At first he was "discouragingly slow, awkward and inaccurate," the weapon's "flat, gutty bark" far more authoritative than the snapping of the twenty-two he had apparently used before. He fired "a couple of dozen rounds for accuracy, and then went back to the routine of drawing and firing, improving doggedly." Carol, coming up the hill, compared the sound to "a South American revolution," and Sam admitted, "This is trickier than I thought." The target itself became a point of contention between them — Carol objected that the heart was "too small and it should be more in the middle," and Sam told her to stop "bossng the job." The exchange captures the strange domesticity of the scene: a married couple bickering over the placement of a heart drawn on a target meant to represent a man Sam intended to kill.

The drills culminated in a demonstration that genuinely awed Carol. Sam positioned himself "half turned away" from the target, "hands at my sides. Casual and relaxed," and told her to yell "go" when she felt like it. When she did, he "caught the grip cleanly, found the trigger as he wheeled, and emptied the cylinder," putting "five black holes in the target, the first one in the abdominal area, one at the waist, and three fairly well centered in the chest." Carol's "Wow!" was "genuinely awed," and Sam's response — "Did one miss?" — was a dry acknowledgment that the performance, however impressive, was not perfect. The scene is a rehearsal for the novel's climax, when Sam would again wheel and fire at a moving target, this time in earnest.

The Moral Weight of the Gun

Carol's reaction to the revolver was more complicated than simple admiration. She looked "slightly pale" and her throat worked as she swallowed, confessing that the weapon seemed "so horribly functional." Sam's reply was unflinching: "It's completely functional. It's designed to be used on people." He broke the gun, ejected the cases, and reloaded, then asked, "Want to try it?" — an invitation that Carol apparently declined. The exchange reveals the gulf between Sam's growing acceptance of violence and Carol's lingering horror at it. Sam's own doubts were deeper than his confident words suggested. He told Carol about Captain Dutton's warning that the armed forces had "a lot of trouble in World War Two and in Korea with boys who would not fire their weapons" — men who would do "exactly as he's been taught, right up to the point of aiming, and with his finger on the trigger," and then stop, with fatal consequences. Sam's confession was stark: "I don't know about myself. I can really kill hell out of that tree, lips drawn back in a killer's sneer. But if it was flesh and blood? I don't know. I don't really know." His solution was to make the act automatic: "I've got to make this so automatic with me that pulling the trigger is a part of the total action, and not a separate piece at the end. Then if I can start, I can go through it all the way. I hope."

Carol's response to this confession was a rare moment of unqualified affirmation. She told him, "There isnt much pretense about you, Sam. I mean you take such long, cold looks at yourself," and then, holding his wrists, declared, "you are not a white mouse. You are as brave as any man. You have warmth and strength. You know how to love and be loved. This is a great and rare art." Sam had earlier described himself as feeling "like a white mouse in a snake pit," and Carol's refusal to accept that self-image was both a comfort and a challenge. The scene establishes the emotional stakes of Sam's transformation: he is not a natural killer, and his willingness to become one is a sacrifice he makes for his family, not an expression of his true nature.

The Gun in the Climax

The hillside drills proved decisive in the novel's climax. When Sam fired at Cady on the hill, one of his last two shots "tore his right arm on the inside, just below the armpit," opening an artery. Cady "climbed another three hundred feet before he ran out of blood." The shot that killed Cady was not a clean, heroic kill but a wound that bled him out slowly as he fled — a grim fulfillment of Sam's training, which had emphasized accuracy under pressure. Afterward, Sam's reaction was not triumph but exhaustion. He walked back to the house, stopped, turned to look at the body as it was picked up, and said tonelessly, "Thanks." He had wanted to "throw his head back and yell at the sky" and "dance around the body and chant of the defeat of the enemy," but instead he sat down listlessly, too weak to go upstairs. The man who had trained himself to kill had done so, and the act had cost him more than he had anticipated.

Aftermath and Reflection

In the aftermath, Sam's understanding of his own transformation deepened. He told Carol that the experience was "like recovering from a serious illness. All the world looks fresh and new. Everything looks special. I feel enormously alive." He had been "getting stuffy," he admitted, idealizing his profession and leaning on it too heavily. Now he knew the law was "just a tool. You use it like any other tool. Use it wisely and it can help you. And when it's of no use to you, you take a course of action that will be of use." The gun purchase and target practice were the first steps on that course — the moment when Sam Bowden, the lawyer who believed in the law's "solid framework of equity," accepted that the law could not save his family and that he would have to save them himself. The revolver he bought with Captain Button's help was the instrument of that acceptance, and the hillside target with its penciled heart was the rehearsal for the killing that would end the siege.