Gun Guys (2 page)

And then every summer it was back to Sunapee’s rifle range, where the merest suggestion of James Bond or Sergeant Saunders would get a kid banished, because the range was about marksmanship, not fantasy. Year by year, guns were working their way into my chromosomes from
two directions—the manly discipline of precision shooting, rooted in the coldest imaginable reality; and the wildly sexy mythology of soldiers, cowboys, gangsters, and spies that made firearms overwhelmingly glamorous. I didn’t stand a chance.

All of this was fine until about 1967, when, like the sun passing behind a cloud, my gun thing went vaguely dark. The signals were subtle but unmistakable: Guns were uncool, my obsession with them icky. At eleven years old, my friends were outgrowing Army playing; I remember precisely the day the nickel dropped. Chucky, Arthur Lewis, and I were up at the vacant lot on Irving Avenue, assaulting the same Nazi pillbox we’d been trying to take for longer than the duration of the real Second World War. I ran my heart out, serpentining like a demon to avoid enemy fire, biting my fist and heaving air grenades,
k’tow-k’tow
ing sound effects. I could tell, though, that Chucky and Arthur were simply going through the motions, slow and listless as we advanced under enemy fire. As I looked back to signal them to flank left, I found them sitting off to the side, talking and tossing pebbles at a can, their guns resting casually in their laps. It hit me like a rock in the forehead—
they’re humoring me
. And walking home, the death blow: We ran into Susan Stern and Caroline Bell, both of whom we’d known since kindergarten. They looked different now; slinkier, wiser—
pretty
. They wrinkled their foreheads at our toy guns as though to say, “Really, guys.…” Chucky and Arthur instantly began swinging their rifles like baseball bats, as though, surprised to find these long things in their hands, they’d discovered something reasonable to do with them. I was losing my lifelong platoon buddies to baseball and football—precisely the kind of impossible athletics that had driven me to the Camp Sunapee rifle range in the first place. I felt like a baby the size of a parade balloon—not merely abandoned: humiliated.

The other tsunami flooding my gun obsession with disgrace was Vietnam. Opposition to the war was nearly universal in our suburb, where regiments of allergists and orthopedists stood ready to write young men excuses. The task of lining up a way out of the draft was preoccupying my oldest brother, and the war was becoming an unignorable presence in our lives. The cool kids in school were way out in front with flamboyant opposition, even in sixth grade, adopting the peace-and-love aesthetic that was blooming across America. To be seen with a toy gun, to be drawing
war pictures, to be playing with toy soldiers: All of it was completely wrong. I was against the war, too, and aspired to the hippie aesthetic as much as any sixth grader. But that didn’t keep me from liking guns. To me, they were separate.

I tried to make the transition with Chucky and the others; really, I did. I trooped off to Little League tryouts, hoping to wear one of those uniforms with
BECK
’
S HARDWARE
or
SHOP-RITE
on the back. Alas, I was shunted off to the so-called Pee-Wee League, a uniformless sump of the halt and uncoordinated known informally as “Fat-Kid League.” I gamely stuck with it for a season, playing right field for the Washington Senators, and my parents did all they could to encourage me. My father even had one of those fake front pages printed with a headline:
DAN BAUM GIVES UP GUNS, BECOMES BASEBALL STAR
.

But I didn’t give up guns any more than I became a baseball star. I merely transitioned to the kind of guns a bigger kid might reasonably justify—a spring-loaded BB rifle and a CO
₂
-powered air pistol. These verged on acceptable because they were more about hitting targets than fantasizing battle scenes. I couldn’t play Army anymore, but setting up paper targets in the backyard reawakened the pleasure I’d taken at camp in the disciplined practice of squeezing down a gun’s tremendous force and delivering it precisely to a distant point. Air-gun shooting let me keep guns in my life. It satisfied my hand’s urge for stock, grip, and trigger.

In the rural South or the Rocky Mountains, nobody would have thought twice about my gun thing. I’d have gotten a shotgun for my twelfth birthday, taken hunter safety at fourteen, acquired a deer rifle for Christmas, and spent autumn tramping through the outdoors with my dad and uncles. Guns would have become a normal part of growing up, like chasing girls and learning to drive. In my New Jersey suburb, though, they made me a mutant, and my hobby was equally verboten at the private colleges I attended in the 1970s. When I bought my first real gun, during junior year at New York University—an elegant old Remington .22 rifle much like the ones I’d shot at camp—I kept quiet about it.

By the time I was a voting adult, I’d begun to perceive the gun lover in me as some kind of malevolent twin. My upbringing, reading, and experience kept me believing in unions, gay rights, progressive taxation, the United Nations, public works, permissive immigration, single-payer health care, reproductive choice, negotiation rather than preemptive force, regulation of business to protect workers and the environment, and scientifically informed rather than religion-based policies. Guns were as
firmly delineated a political battlefield as abortion or school prayer, and guns belonged to the other guys. When gun-control measures passed, my people won; when gun rights expanded, the other team won. Because I wasn’t yet thinking very seriously about the issue, I went along with my side, reliably lending my support to the calls for background checks, registration, assault-rifle bans, and waiting periods. None interfered with my enjoyment of guns because, aside from my .22, I didn’t own any.

What did bother me, though, was the gut reaction of my friends to any mention of guns. “Ugh. I
hate
guns,” was the way they usually expressed it. And my friends’ contempt went beyond guns to the people who liked them. They wouldn’t have dreamed of saying “nigger” or “fag,” but they laughed at “gun nuts” or “gun loons.” I’d stay quiet during such talk, like Tom Hanks chuckling along at the anti-gay jokes in the first reel of
Philadelphia
.

In my early thirties, I taught myself to hunt deer, partly as a new way to experience the outdoors but also as a “legitimate” reason to keep guns in my life. Unfortunately, applying for licenses and buying ammunition put me on the radar of the National Rifle Association, which pestered me endlessly to join. By this time, the NRA had transformed itself from the marksmanship-and-safety organization of my youth into what sometimes seemed like the armed wing of the Republican Party, bent on stirring up class resentment against those who, in the words of the NRA monthly magazine,
America’s 1st Freedom
,
“sip tea and nibble biscuits while musing about how to restrict the rest of us.” The NRA wasn’t my only problem. The diatribes of the gun-rights movement often came wrapped in appeals to limit government, deport immigrants, cut taxes, and elect conservatives—everything I opposed. I felt like the child of a bitter divorce with allegiance to both parents.

I was a gun guy, but I didn’t belong to gun culture, and I didn’t know much about how guns fit into people’s lives. Did the gigantic megaphone of the NRA reflect gun culture? Distort it? Create it? I hadn’t a clue.

The winter the Obamas moved into the White House seemed a good time to start learning. Gun-owning America had reacted to the prospect of an Obama presidency by buying up guns and stockpiling ammunition in a panic. Prodded endlessly by the NRA, the gun industry, and the gun press, gun owners had come to believe that confiscation was nigh. Along with all the other divisions the United States suffered, America seemed to be cleaving along the gun-guy fault. And there I was, straddling it.

To begin figuring out my fellow gun guys, I read a tower of books on
the history of American gun culture, mined FBI crime data for trends, ground through books arguing for more and less gun control, perused studies on the dangers and benefits of gun ownership, and hung out on countless gun-guy websites. At a certain point, though, I realized what I was avoiding. The overwhelming majority of gun owners didn’t show up in crime statistics, weren’t players in gun policy, didn’t hang out on the Internet’s vitriolic gun forums, and didn’t physically threaten anybody. A lot of assumptions were made about gun people—by the NRA and Fox News on one side and by the editorial board of
The New York Times
and a slew of Democratic politicians on the other. What nobody seemed to be doing was
listening
to gun people—asking the questions that most puzzled me about myself: Why do we like these things? Why do they move us so deeply?

I didn’t want to rewrite the history of America’s unique relationship with guns that other writers had plumbed so thoroughly. Nor did I wish to wallow in the minutiae of gun control and formulate my own policy proposals. I was after something more visceral: the essential quality that, like anchovies on pizza, impassioned some people and disgusted others. Guns were beyond reason; either you loved them or hated them. But why? And why, as surely as the shopping network came with basic cable, did a fondness for guns come with political conservatism?

Gun owners were, in any case, almost half of our population—worth knowing because their enthusiasm for firearms said something about us as a people, worth listening to because nothing lasting or decent could happen in gun policy without them.

If I was going to get to know my fellow gun owners, I would have to approach them one by one, at ranges and gun shows, at contests and auctions, in the woods and in garages. A look in the mirror, though, told me that it wouldn’t be easy. A stoop-shouldered, bald-headed, middle-aged Jew in pleated pants and glasses, I looked like a card-carrying biscuit nibbler. So I held my nose and joined the NRA, which brought me not only subscriptions to its monthly magazines,
American Rifleman
and
America’s 1st Freedom
, but also a snappy blue-and-gold NRA cap and lapel pin—excellent camouflage.

The best place to observe social behavior is in a species’ natural habitat, so one blazing autumn morning, I went looking for a gun range.

A
gun range is an odd place. It’s communal, in that it gathers people to engage in a shared activity, but it’s solitary, because when you’re behind a gun, you’re on your own. The practice is sort of like hitting a bucket of golf balls on a driving range, except that instead of whooshing balls onto a quiet greensward while chatting with people waiting their turn, you’re blasting copper-jacketed bullets downrange at 2,900 feet per second, wrapped in hearing protectors and a cocoon of ear-shattering noise. I always preferred to do my shooting deep in the woods or out in the desert, where I didn’t have to listen to anybody’s gunfire but my own.

But I had to start my gun-guy walkabout somewhere, so I drove down to the Family Shooting Center, a private gun range within Cherry Creek State Park, about an hour south of my house in suburban Denver. I found my way around a man-made pond and parked in front of a chain-link fence. No doubt I was at the right place. From beyond the fence came a racket like the Battle of Fallujah.

At the end of a long chain-link corridor stood a tall range officer in an orange vest and earmuffs, hands on hips and feet slightly spread—that same all-business, slightly forbidding stance that Hank Hilliard had assumed on Camp Sunapee’s range. On his vest, one button read,
BLESSED BE THE INFIDELS, FOR THEY SHALL ENJOY FREEDOM, ART AND MUSIC
. Another said simply,
MOLON LABE
.

“What’s that?” I asked, shouting to be heard through our hearing protectors and above the gunshots.

“You know your history?”

“Some.”

“Battle of Thermopylae?”

“No.”

“Four-eighty
B.C.
: Xerxes of Persia asked Leonidas I, king of the Spartans, to lay down his spear. Leonidas said,
‘Molon labe.’
‘Come and take it.’ You hear what I’m telling you?” He stared into my eyes for a long moment. I blinked. He said, “Please take firing position four.”

I took my place at a wooden shooting bench and unpacked my rifle, a .30-40 Krag-Jørgensen made in 1900 for the Spanish-American War. I’d bought it twenty years earlier at a Montana gun show for $115, when I was broke and needed something to shoot at deer and antelope. I’d figured that someday I’d be financially solvent beyond my wildest dreams. That’s when I’d buy myself a proper hunting rifle. But the Krag fit me well and shot so straight that I’d never needed to trade up. Showing up at hunts with a 110-year-old rifle made me something of an oddball. But everybody who liked guns grooved on their longevity; it was hard to think of another consumer product that, a century after its manufacture, was as functional as on the day it was made. I got points, too, for hunting with plain iron sights instead of a scope.

I stepped up to position number 4 and, like a boy in the junior high gym shower, furtively looked over the other guys’ equipment. Out of six men shooting—two old guys like me and four in their thirties or younger—I was the only one with a traditional wooden rifle. Everybody else was shooting a black AR-15—the civilian version of the military’s M16. I might as well have been on the range at Fort Benning.

I’d seen these guns creeping into stores and ranges and had never understood the attraction. With their plastic stocks and high-tech man-killer look, they lacked the elegance of traditional firearms. The most common reason that people bought guns was for protection against crime, but shotguns and handguns were best for close-order shooting. The second most common reason was target shooting, like here at Cherry Creek. Hunting came third, but rarely with the AR-15. Most states didn’t allow the taking of deer with the tiny .223 bullet fired by the basic AR.