Authors: Dan Baum
“You sell to the Army?” I said.
“No, but every guy who comes home is used to the platform and is going to want to continue with it.” Continue with it? The last thing that the Vietnam vets I knew wanted was to “continue” with the M16. Was it because they hadn’t been lionized during their war the way soldiers were nowadays? Was it because so many more of them had died? Or was it simply the times?
DeSomma unlocked a safe and handed me one of his rifles. It was heavier, beefier, and tighter-feeling than the kid’s AR-15 I’d shot in Denver. The reviews had been phenomenal. Many considered it the finest AR-15 on the market.
Gun Digest
had called it the “ultimate AR,” capable of firing an unbelievable 100,000 rounds between cleanings.
DeSomma wore his emotions close to the surface and kept lapsing into standard, ugly comments about liberals, Obama, and the “gun grabbers.” But he was also a man with a deeply felt vision of the America in which he wanted to live and a commitment to using his business to bring it about. The miracle of the U.S. Constitution, he told me, was that it went out of its way to give ordinary citizens the means to unseat a tyrannical government. “Name me another country that ever did such a thing,” he said, turning his sweaty head sideways and inserting it enthusiastically
between my face and my notebook as I tried to jot notes. The way he put it, enshrining an armed citizenry into a country’s founding document did seem to imply a rather extraordinary amount of trust in ordinary people. DeSomma believed the framers of the Constitution wanted every American to have, hanging over his fireplace as a bulwark against tyranny, the latest battlefield technology: a flintlock musket. Its equivalent today, he said, was the AR-15. Far from banning it, we should consider the AR the firearm
most
protected by the Second Amendment. To manufacture AR-15s was a privilege, almost a sacred calling; it gave DeSomma a role in realizing the dreams of the founders. Sure, he was proud of how well and how quickly he’d built his business. “But this isn’t about money; it’s not even really about guns,” he said, sweeping a hand to take in the factory grounds. “This is about the power of the states and the people!”
As a gunmaker, DeSomma paid an 11 percent excise tax on top of his income and business taxes, the same as someone making booze or cigarettes, products whose consumption the government wanted to discourage. His gripe with the excise tax wasn’t about parting with money; it was about the insult. “It’s as though we’re something evil, something dirty,” he said, with an emotional catch in his gravelly voice. When he’d applied for a line of credit at Chase Bank, which held all his accounts and knew his excellent credit rating, they’d told him they didn’t conduct “that type of business.”
“Like I’m running a whorehouse or something!” He thrust out his arms in a classic sue-me gesture. “Last year I had a twelve-million-dollar backlog, and Chase wouldn’t give me a line of credit!”
DeSomma seemed more than hurt. He was genuinely, deeply confused: Chase and the people who’d decided that the gun business should pay an excise tax—to say nothing of those who wanted guns banned or restricted—seemed
wrong
about guns. They seemed to think that guns were
bad
and, by extension, that the people who liked them should be punished.
DeSomma’s friends, all gun guys, were among the finest, safest, most upstanding and law-abiding people in Greater Phoenix. Their guns were simply a piece of equipment, designed ingeniously and—DeSomma’s especially—manufactured with a jeweler’s precision; anybody who’d ever held and fired one could see that. The police and military needed high-quality firearms to keep the country safe, but DeSomma didn’t want to hide behind that argument.
Private
gun ownership was what made America unique; the Second Amendment was what separated a citizen from
a subject. The people who reviled DeSomma’s products—who placed sin taxes on them, discriminated against them in business dealings, and wanted them banned as “assault rifles”—were either massively ignorant or held a genuine disdain for the freedom such weapons represented. They were either the worst kind of elitists—trying to control something they couldn’t be bothered to understand—or fundamentally un-American. They boggled his mind.
He dug his iPhone from his pocket. “Watch this,” he said, and punched up a YouTube video of Ronald Reagan delivering his first inaugural address. “We have a country with a government, not the other way around,” Reagan’s tiny, stern image said. “The federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government.”
“That man was like a grandfather to me,” DeSomma said sadly as he put his phone away. “He was the only president of my lifetime who really cared about America.”
Sensing he’d harangued me enough, he motioned me to follow him into the factory, a warren of windowless warehouses. Despite the suburban setting, I expected to see throngs of men in leather aprons forging gun parts amid deafening noise and showers of sparks. Instead we found ourselves in a nearly silent hangar full of computerized-numerical-control (CNC) machines—cube-shaped, ten-foot-tall behemoths of steel and glass. Before each stood a man studying code, the computer screen silently reflected in the lens of his safety glasses. These guys looked less like factory workers than like air-traffic controllers.
We approached one of the CNC machines. “The receiver is designed on a computer and transmitted digitally to these machines,” DeSomma said. The receiver is the body of the gun, a hollow metal box about the size of a videocassette. The gun’s trigger parts are fitted inside, and the barrel, buttstock, and everything else is attached to it.
The operator opened the hatch of the CNC and clamped in a short board of silver-gray metal—an aluminum blank. He consulted an LCD screen bearing a long list of numbers—the computerized instructions—and pushed a few buttons.
Behind the glass, robotic drills and routers bored into the blank, sending up curls of aluminum, transforming it, in about twenty-five minutes, into an AR-15 receiver. DeSomma handed it to me; it weighed nothing.
Legally, the hollow metal slab I was holding—the receiver—was a firearm. It would be the only part of the rifle that would carry a serial number. To buy one—even an empty, naked, harmless, and inert one
like the one I was holding—would require filling out a federal 4473 form and submitting to the same background check as for a fully functioning Glock or shotgun. But after that, all the bits that made an AR-15 shootable were, under the law, just parts. The bolt, barrel, magazine, stock, trigger, and so on could be bought, sold, and sent through the mail as freely as fishing gear or kitchen supplies. So once a shooter owned a receiver, he could build himself a nearly infinite variety of weapons without ever again encountering a background check or a federal form. Despite shooting, essentially, a variety of guns, an AR-15 owner had to confront state and federal bureaucracies only once. On the flip side, the ATF no longer knew what caliber weapons were out there. The AR-15 made that impossible. It was constantly shape-shifting.
It was easy to see, then, why the AR-15 was so popular. It was fun to shoot. It was a geek’s dream of limitless high-tech parts. It made everybody a bit player in the global war on terror and the march of American history. It worked for whatever kind of shooting a gun guy might want. It limited a shooter’s exposure to the federal firearms bureaucracy. And it made life harder for the ATF. It was the perfect gun for the Tea Party era.
DeSomma walked me to my car. I removed my jacket before climbing in, revealing the holstered Colt in my waistband. “Look at
you
!” DeSomma said, beaming. He placed his hand on his heart and closed his eyes. “You honor me by wearing your gun to my place of business.”
Never had I encountered a business or a hobby as tangled up with a political worldview as firearms and shooting. From the range officer with the
Molon labe
button to Erin Jerant to Frank DeSomma, just about everybody I was meeting lapsed, sooner or later, into a conservative aria. It wasn’t as if every tennis player in America was a Jabotinsky Revisionist, or everybody in the tire business was eager to lecture you on the virtues of Peronismo. I decided to make one more stop before leaving metro Phoenix: the Goldwater Institute. Senator Barry Goldwater scared me to death in 1964, but I retained a secret soft spot for him. He may have been a wild-eyed missile rattler, but he was an intellectually consistent wild-eyed missile rattler. He wanted government out of citizens’ lives—and that included homosexuals, women who needed to end their pregnancies, and marijuana users. If anybody could explain to me why a fondness for firearms was so often found on the same chromosome as political conservatism—how a natural
Democrat like the working-class, debt-saddled, and dead-ended kid at the Family Shooting Center could have voted for Sarah Palin—it would be here in the hypothalamus of the conservative movement.
The institute was a modern white-brick building on a leafy side street in central Phoenix. A big bronze bust of the late senator dominated the lobby, and the walls displayed black-and-white photographs of Goldwater posing with a pantheon of the conservative movement: Friedrich Hayek, George Will, Ronald Reagan, Clarence Thomas, Margaret Thatcher, and Arthur Laffer. Goldwater’s forbidding signature glasses glowered from every direction as I approached the receptionist to introduce myself.
“I have just the guy for you,” she said, and pointed me down the hall to Nick Dranias.
In a city of people dressed Western casual—pearl-snap shirts or the golf-shirt-and-yellow-pants uniform of the retiree—Nick, in a blue dress shirt and necktie, looked like the Ambassador from Back East. He occupied the usual politico’s cage—paneled walls covered with handshake photos, certificates of appreciation, and patriotic tchotchkes.
Nick could have been anywhere from thirty-five to fifty, with deep-set eyes and a face held studiously immobile, as though emoting would be somehow
liberal
or amount to giving something away for free. He was gracious about receiving an unscheduled visitor, but I got the feeling that he had a button under his desk that would drop my chair into a spiked pit if I irritated him.
He wrote amicus briefs for a living, injecting a conservative and libertarian viewpoint into legal battles involving everything from election laws to aquarium subsidies to guns. I asked about the relationship of guns to the conservative movement, and he began winding up to DeSomma’s Second Amendment argument that an armed citizenry is a bulwark against tyranny.
“Stop,” I said, holding up a palm. “A bunch of guys with rifles in their closets isn’t going to do much against an army with tanks, helicopters, and jet planes.”
He sat back and regarded me down his nose with a faint smile, as though he’d been waiting years for someone to blunder into such a trap. “That’s an odd thing for someone of your age to say,” he said. “What year were you born?”
“Nineteen fifty-six.”
He sat forward, folded his hands, and leaned forward over them, glowering at me. “Vietnam is the defining war of your lifetime, and the mighty
U.S. military was defeated by an enemy with little more than rifles. Our two current wars are much the same, and neither is looking good. And look at the Russians in Afghanistan.” He leaned back luxuriously in his swivel chair. “Don’t tell me that people with nothing but rifles can’t take on a modern military.”
We looked at each other in silence for a moment. I opened my mouth to respond, and he leaned forward slightly like a panther ready to strike. I closed my mouth and sidestepped.
The Supreme Court had recently struck down Washington, D.C.’s long-standing handgun ban, which conservatives were celebrating as a great victory. Nick himself had written a brief arguing that the ban should go. “I thought conservatives were all about states’ rights,” I said. “Don’t you think the people of Washington, D.C., have the right to decide what gun laws work best for them locally?”
He smacked that one away. “I think we need to get rid of the concept that local government is sacrosanct. If anything, the government that knows where you live is even more dangerous than the government far away in Washington.”
“Tinfoil hat!” I said, and I could feel his finger inching toward the button. Instead he glanced at his watch.
“You on the left look at a problem like gun violence and say, ‘We have to do something,’ ” he said with a kind of bemused sadness, as though describing the pitiable behavior of primitives. “We on the right are more inclined to say, ‘We’re a big, messy, polyglot nation with an extraordinary amount of freedom, and a certain number of bad things are bound to happen.’ Where did you get the idea that you can limit gun violence without infringing on people’s rights?”
Thirty thousand gun deaths a year was a terrible thing, as Nick saw it, but not as bad as limiting the gun rights of Americans—just as 136,000 dead American soldiers had been a heartbreaking catastrophe, but not as bad as letting Europe fall to the Nazis. Freedom had a price. It suddenly seemed less odd that the father of the kid I’d met at the Family Shooting Center had let his son keep guns after the accidental discharge inside the house. Depriving his grown son of firearms after the scary lesson of the accidental shot must have seemed worse to him than letting him keep the guns: His son had learned a lesson, and if he hadn’t, he’d pay the price. This was at the opposite pole from the way I’d always thought about risk and personal sovereignty—whether of a son or of a populace.
“You carry a gun?” I asked Nick.
“I have one; I don’t carry it.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged and stood up, letting me know our time together was over. As he opened the door, he coughed into his fist and lowered his voice. “I have to tell you this, though. I and a lot of us conservatives are appalled at our reaction after 9/11. We got caught up in the bloodlust, and it took us a year or two to recover our principles. The Patriot Act, Guantánamo, the renditions … we should have been out there objecting, and we weren’t. So if today, as you’re traveling around talking to what seem like angry gun owners, and you perceive conservatives doubling down on these principles, our failure after 9/11 may be why.”