Gun Guys (20 page)

Lior and Nitsan, having seen what they needed, shook our hands and left, and Larry and I headed back to the office for a second time. I settled again into the straight-backed chair across from his desk and asked, “What’s it take? What’s the difference between a good armorer and a mediocre one?”

“You need the foundation of real guns, but you have to switch a switch in your brain to make them run right with blanks. Here, we’re taking something that someone else designed and making it do something it wasn’t designed to do. That’s a challenge.”

“What does it cost a movie to rent these guns?”

“A revolver, like in the Western room, fifty-five dollars a week. It goes up from there.”

“That doesn’t seem like much.”

“The average movie takes thirteen weeks to shoot. Usually, they need a lot more than one gun. Then there’s ammo. And then there’s me.”

“You’re on the set with the guns?”

“Always.”

“Making sure they don’t walk away?”

“That’s part of it. I load them, put them in the actors’ hands. The director yells, ‘Cut!’ and Makeup and Hair want to rush onto the set. But in the safety brief, we make clear that nobody moves until I gather up every gun and yell, ‘The weapons are cold.’ ”

“So an actor doesn’t go to lunch with his gun in his holster.”

Larry laughed. “Well, maybe if it’s a rubber gun.”

“Are all armorers gunsmiths?”

“No, you could have a props guy run the guns on set, but if something breaks, he can’t fix it. If you can’t fix the gun on set, you’re not really an armorer. Guns break. Actors drop them—a gun gets dropped in the mud, you have to take that one and set it aside and have a replacement, and then that night you have to take that muddy gun completely apart and clean and oil it, because they’re going to need it in the morning.”

“Do they ever use real bullets? Like if an actor is shooting bottles off a fence?” I was thinking of Warren Beatty in
Bonnie and Clyde
shooting bottles, then smashing the windows in an abandoned farmhouse.

“There are never, ever live rounds on a set. If you see an actor shooting bottles off a fence, there’s a charge in the bottle timed to explode with the shot.”

“So what happened with Brandon Lee?” I asked quietly, and Larry sighed. Armorers, it seemed, got asked this a lot.

Lee, the son of martial arts great Bruce Lee, was twenty-eight years old in 1993, a budding martial arts film star in his own right, when he signed on at a studio in North Carolina to shoot a movie called
The Crow
. The script called for Lee to be shot at close range with a revolver. The bullets in a revolver (unlike a semi-automatic) are visible in the front of the cylinder, so when a camera angle calls for a front view of the gun, an armorer will load it with dummy cartridges. Dummies have bullets on the end, so they look real from the front, but no powder charge or primer, which is the tiny explosive capsule that the firing pin or hammer hits.

“What happened was,” Larry said, “it was a non-union armorer who didn’t know what he was doing and made every conceivable mistake. They showed up on the set without dummy rounds, and instead of saying, ‘Okay, let’s shoot this scene tomorrow and get dummy rounds overnighted,’ he went to a gun store, bought live ammunition, and took the rounds apart in his motel room to get the powder out. They popped out the primers, but missed one. So on the set, they shoot the scene with the dummy rounds, and then to be safe, they point the gun at the floor and click the trigger six times. They don’t hear the pop when that one primer goes off and pushes the bullet into the barrel. They put the gun away without checking it, and the next day they load it up with blanks for the scene. Nobody thinks to look in the barrel; if they had, they’d have seen it was plugged by the bullet. Now you have a blank in the cylinder and a bullet in the barrel—essentially a gun loaded with live ammo. They do the scene; Brandon’s blood pack goes off like it’s supposed to, and he falls, but he’s saying, ‘I don’t feel good, it doesn’t feel right.’ They walk him over to his trailer, and they’re cleaning him up, trying to figure out what is fake blood and real blood, and in those twenty minutes he bleeds to death.”

“Yikes.”

“It’s every armorer’s nightmare. But I’ve never had an actor get hurt. You almost never hear of anybody getting hurt on set with a gun. I once packed up all my guns and walked off a set because the director wanted
something done with a gun that I didn’t think was safe. By the time I got to the bottom of the road, there was a PA with a radio waving me down, telling me to go back up. They did it my way.”

His phone buzzed—time to go. “Tell you this, though,” he said as we stood. “No matter how many times I do this, I have butterflies until the guns are locked up and everything’s done and finished.”

He wanted to get on with his day, but I couldn’t quite let him go. Here, in the flesh, was a high priest of gun culture. Neither Wayne LaPierre of the NRA, nor Dennis Henigan, the arch-gun-controller at the Brady Center, would ever have a tenth of the influence that Larry did over how Americans felt about guns. By making them sexy and powerful on-screen, this stocky, self-effacing Jewish boy was arguably as responsible as anybody for our national conflicted romance with firearms. Blocking his exit from the office, I blurted out the story of my own beginnings as a gun guy, telling how guns had colored my identity ever since. “What is it?” I implored. “What keeps us so firmly in their thrall?”

He rocked back on a heel, folded his arms, and looked at the ceiling. “My own philosophy?” he said. “There was a ruler of Japan in the 1500s: Nobunaga. This is in the era of bows and arrows and swords. Nobunaga had the flintlock and used it to conquer the country. Then he gathered them all up, destroyed them, and outlawed them. Japan is the only society that ever had a weapon of mass destruction and voluntarily stepped back. Why? Because it took years to get good with a bow and arrow and sword, but with a gun, you could train a peasant in a month. For me, that’s part of the fascination with the gun. You can be the poorest peasant in a land of samurai or the fat kid at summer camp, and with a little practice you’re equal to anybody.” Or, as the Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company put it in its ads a century and a half ago, “God made all men, but Samuel Colt made them equal.”

Maybe that helped explain why American movies tended to have more gunplay in them than those of other countries—and maybe even why America itself tended to have more real-life gunplay in it than other countries. Yes, as historians never tire of reminding us, we are a young country with a violent frontier tradition and a unique Second Amendment. But there’s also this: We’re equality freaks. We endlessly congratulate ourselves for our Equal Protection Clause and our founding mythology of classless society. If equal is good, and guns make men equal, then by extension guns are good. They make each of us sovereign and inviolate. An armed man is a little republic unto himself. An armed woman, especially
one who blows away the big, strong villain in the third reel, strikes the ultimate blow for innocent weakness over unjust strength.

Guns on-screen pushed lots of buttons; I was glad to know all that went into getting them there. Guns were so sexy, so powerful, and so central to screen drama that it was a wonder to me that there wasn’t an Oscar for Best Gun in a Supporting Role. Hell, for certain guns—James Bond’s silenced PPK, Dirty Harry’s .44 Magnum, Little Caesar’s tommy gun, the Jackal’s collapsible rifle—they could practically give an Oscar for Best Gun in a Leading Role.

B
oulder sits at the place where the Rocky Mountains jump up from the Great Plains at a nearly ninety-degree angle. To find a place where the topography changes as suddenly, you’d probably need to stand on a beach. Twenty-eighth Street is on the plains. Nineteenth Street is in the mountains.

Full of mountain bikers and rock climbers, Boulder is culturally oriented toward the mountains. But as I packed the car for the next leg of my gun-guy walkabout, I looked forward to heading out into the big, flat open. For one thing, the Plains presented a gun-policy conundrum. Guns were plentiful out there, gun laws were loose, and gun violence was rare, whereas places with superstrict gun laws, like Chicago and Washington, D.C., suffered tremendously from gunfire. Those who supported tougher gun laws said that that made sense: The places bloodied most by guns would want to control them more stringently.

But arguing it that way reversed cause and effect. Tough gun laws were sold to the public on the premise that they would have an effect on violence, not the other way around. Moreover, the high level of violence in places with strict gun control didn’t speak well for gun control’s
effectiveness. Yes, things might have been even worse in Chicago and Washington without tough gun laws, but it was impossible to know. Further confusing matters was that New York City had tough gun laws and relatively low violence. Didn’t that suggest that perhaps other factors went into reducing violence, such as policing strategies, urban design, class differences, and who knew what else? As was often the case when it came to gun policy, the logical path between cause and effect was a hall of mirrors. Maybe I was just being contrary, but since it was the guns in cities that hogged the limelight, I wanted to see the guns that nobody talked about.

I also had a sense—or maybe just a hope—that on the Plains I’d find a calmer variety of gun guy than I’d encountered in the Southwest or on the Internet. Frank DeSomma had been so inflamed by political outrage that he’d had a hard time staying on the subject of his own gun business. Even kindly old Erin Jerant, in her small-town gun shop, had felt the need to get in her digs at President Obama.
Oh well
, I figured,
the Southwest has always been a flinty, individualist place
.

As for the Internet, its anonymous nature no doubt amplified the worst of gun-guy anger. Like a drain at the bottom of the sink, it concentrated the most unpleasant elements. Lots of topics attracted hateful language on the Web, but it was different when the topic was guns. It may have been hot air, but gun-guy hot air was always more disturbing, because there was no forgetting that gun guys had the means to act out their fury. There is no need for an extended tour through the cesspool, but here is an example—rougher than most but by no means unusual—by someone calling himself SinCity2A on
AR15.com
, in response to a question about whether a UN small-arms treaty could infringe on Americans’ Second Amendment rights:

In fairness, one forum participant responded, “Jesus Christ. Tighten the ol’ tin foil hat down,” but others called the post “most excellent.” Nobody seemed to take it as a joke.

It amazed me when I read SinCity2A how thoroughly Timothy McVeigh had dropped down the national amnesia hole. Had a Muslim been raving online this way about jihad, he’d have found himself on an unmarked Gulfstream in short order. The Department of Homeland Security was keeping an eye on people like SinCity2A; it issued an intelligence assessment in 2009, listing reasons to expect a resurgence of militia activity: economic downturn, illegal immigration, a black president, and, interestingly, disgruntled veterans. In the summer of 2010, though, it was hard to know whom to worry about, with Sharron Angle talking of
“Second Amendment remedies” during a U.S. Senate run in Nevada and Sarah Palin telling supporters, over and over, to “reload.”
^*

Anyway, SinCity2A was listed on
AR15.com
as being from Nevada, and I wrote off his rant as just more sunbaked, dust-maddened Southwestern spleen. Out on the grassy, watered prairies, I hoped to find the kind of gentlemen who talk quietly across their back fences, wouldn’t dream of shooting guns at people, and could describe their gun lives to me politely. Sure enough, I found one on my very first day.