Gun Guys (32 page)

“You’re drinking beer while you’re shooting,” Margaret said.

“No beer in this room; when you’re not shooting you’re out in the fellowship halls with the wives. You want to shoot early so you’re not drunk.” Shooting nights were once a month.

Mike didn’t even like guns, he said. Just about the only ones he’d ever shot were the club’s .22s. “I have no tradition of seeing people go shooting. I like hiking. I like the outdoors. But buying a gun and shooting is a serious choice. You have to be shown how. I never thought it was attractive or necessary. In a life of limited choices, am I going to shoot guns?”

“Yet this you like.”

He spread his hands. “It’s like Fred and Barney at the Water Buffalo Lodge. I like the shooting, but mostly it’s a social thing. We drink beer. We smoke cigars. We talk. And we shoot. It’s helped connect me with my German heritage. And there are some great moments. One shooting night in June 1994, the fiftieth anniversary of D-day, a friend was telling the story of his father, a merchant marine who was bringing men to shore, how scary it was knowing every German up on the cliff was aiming at him. So he’s telling this, and from down the bar an old-timer calls”—here Mike put on a heavy German accent—“ ‘Yeah? Vell vat do you think it vas like to look out and see all those fucking ships?’ ”

Mike laughed. “Everybody went silent, and we went back to our beers.”

Getting back to the beers seemed to be the point of the
schützenverein
, not the shooting. Three-gun had been real competition. Here, the rifles were really just bigger, noisier barroom darts—fun things to play with while drinking beer and telling stories with the fellas. It wasn’t exactly shuffleboard, though. Because it involved guns, it divided the men from the women. We’d evolved enough as a society to understand that if the gunplay was about skill and scoring points, we couldn’t very well exclude the women any more than we could exclude blacks or the disabled. But
if it was all about Fred and Barney at the Water Buffalo Lodge, then the rifles of
schützen
could be the equivalent of the needles at a sewing circle or the eyeliner at an Iona Cosmetics party—tools for giving a single sex cover for enjoying its own good company. For all the lederhosen and cloisonné hat pins, the fact that
schützen
gave Mike Rademacher “a chance to connect” with his German heritage seemed incidental to the pleasure of hanging with the fellas.

We walked out into the social hall—a vaulted room with exposed beams in faux Bavarian-castle style, draped with the colorful flags of the German states. At big round tables, families were bravely hunched over plates of steaming sauerbraten and spaetzle. If I’d tried to eat such winter food on a stifling day like this, I’d have seized up like a tube of caulk.

When we reached the garden, everybody who had been lounging at the tables was standing, crowded at the rail, watching eagerly. Next to me, a teetering young man wore a beer-sloshed T-shirt silk-screened with a picture of Jesus over the words
IF YOU DON
’
T SIN, I DIED IN VAIN
. All that remained of the eagle was a tiny matchstick. Instead of three men firing at once, the shooters were taking turns, one bullet at a time.
Pop! Pop! Pop!
A roar went up as a toothpick fluttered earthward: Long live the king! We moved in a solid wave—hundreds of us—toward the beer kegs, where the king was hosting free beer for everybody, the start of his twenty-thousand-dollar year.

F
or a guy who didn’t look the part and had to depend on camouflage, I’d been having pretty good luck getting people to talk about their gun lives. People like sharing their hobbies, and that proved true even of conservative gun guys who knew my politics. Many shared a belief that liberals and the media were institutionally hostile to guns and gun people. Most of them were delighted finally to be approached.

But not all.

That book I’d found at the Grand Island gun show, about caching guns, made me want to learn more about why people would take an expensive firearm and bury it. On
AR15.com
, I found a forum devoted to burying guns in preparation for what participants called TEOTWAWKI—the end of the world as we know it—an acronym that, pronounced as a word, sounded like an upstate New York summer camp. The guys on the forum discussed TEOTWAWKI and SHTF—shit hits the fan—coming in the form of bird flu, the circuit-killing electromagnetic pulse of an ionospheric North Korean nuke, the eruption of the Yellowstone caldera, an asteroid strike, peak oil, nuclear war, and starvation brought about by climate change. None of which were beyond the realm of possibility. What puzzled me was why guns topped the list of things one might need at such a time. I’d been through the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and had never felt the need for a gun. Despite the
purple press reports about marauding predators and babies being raped in the Superdome, people at the height of the disaster were a lot more focused on helping one another than on preying on one another. (Yes, I saw looting. But as Rebecca Solnit aptly writes in
A Paradise Built in Hell
, about the way disaster brings people together instead of turning them into savages, “Who cares if electronics are moving around without benefit of purchase when children’s corpses are floating in filthy water and stranded grandmothers are dying of heat and dehydration?”) It turned out that just about the only wanton killing during the Katrina disaster was done by the New Orleans Police Department.

That, of course, was the other possibility cited by the “Arfcom army” on
AR15.com
: that government, in the form of the police, the Army, or the black-helicopter forces of tyranny, would become the people’s enemy and start rounding up all the guns. As with the teachers of my concealed-carry class, the gun guys on Arfcom made it hard to delineate between preparing for disaster to strike and praying for disaster to strike. After all, if you’ve gone to the expense and trouble to buy and bury guns and ammunition and then you never need them, you’ve wasted a lot of time and treasure.

I learned a lot from reading the forum. A Chinese SKS rifle is cheap, short, powerful, and easy to hide. Smearing its workings with grease and putting desiccants in the tube will prevent rust. The PVC tube containing it should be buried vertically to make it harder to find with a metal detector. Forgetting where it’s buried is a real danger. After reading the forum for a while, I wanted to interview a cacher. I was smart enough to know that anybody burying his guns wouldn’t want to go public about it but not smart enough to realize that, even offering anonymity, asking people about something as secretive and sensitive as TEOTWAWKI preparations was offensive, threatening, and, well, stupid.

The cachers went completely crazy. In torrents of anonymous vitriol, they accused me of being an ATF agent, a gun grabber, a troll. They dug off the Internet pictures of Margaret and Rosa and called them ugly names. Then they found photos of us at Barack Obama’s nomination-acceptance speech, which really sent them around the bend. It went on for weeks, at one point becoming genuinely scary. Even two years after, if I published anything about guns, these same guys rose up to denounce me en masse without reading what I’d written. “You’re a brand,” one gun blogger told me. It was awful. Even writing about it here makes me shudder, because I know that when this book appears, they’ll be back.

There was another group of gun guys I wanted to interview who I
figured would be equally resistant to exposure. Unlike cachers, though, these other ones weren’t marginal to the gun-guy story but instead were at its absolute center: criminals. Even though crime wasn’t “out of control” and was falling fast, the United States still experienced more than its share. Much of what was said and done about guns in America had to do with violent crime; millions of people owned and carried firearms to protect themselves from armed criminals, and the gun debate was all about whether, and how, to try to keep guns “out of the hands of criminals.” Halfway through my year of traveling around talking to gun guys, I realized that I had a thug-shaped hole at the center of my story. Vicious armed predators risked becoming an unrepresented constituency. So I went looking for one to speak for the profession, as it were, to explain how it feels to use a gun in a life of crime.

This time, I trod more delicately. Unlike the cachers lobbing insults from the safety of the Internet, gangsters were accustomed to pointing guns at people and pulling the trigger. I quickly established that I wasn’t going to find these guys in online forums; Thug.com was about music, and ExThug.com didn’t exist. But I discovered that every major city had at least one organization either founded or assisted by former gangbangers, devoted to keeping young men from taking the same deadly path—Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, Beyond Bullets in New York, Vision Regeneration in Dallas, the Miami-Dade Anti-Gang Coalition, CeaseFire-Chicago, and so on. I began calling them, asking if any of the former drug-dealing, baby-shooting savages standing around the office might want to unpack his entire criminal life for publication. “You paying?” asked one. When I said no, he hung up. But at least he didn’t broadcast pictures of my daughter or call me an Obamatron libtard troll.

Finally, I got a call from a man named Tim White, who said that yes, he’d been in the life, had “done it all,” and that, sure, he’d be willing to talk about it. Just to be sure he was the guy I wanted, I asked him if he’d used a gun in his criminal undertakings. He gave one of those short laughs that aren’t intended to be funny.

“Lots of guns,” he said on the phone. “Guns all the time. I’ve been shot twice, too, so I know ’em from both ends.”

We met in a coffee shop near Chicago’s Humboldt Park, in a neighborhood trying mightily to gentrify itself out of the odium of being simply
“West Side.” Tim, at forty-six, was engaged in a related exercise: attempting a personal transformation through Christ to elevate himself to the role of elder sage. He worked with CeaseFire-Chicago, traveling around the city and the country trying to teach younger versions of himself to settle their disagreements in some way other than gunfire. “I’m not telling them to give up drug dealing or anything like that,” he’d told me on the phone. “I don’t make judgments. You got to do what you got to do. I’m all about, ‘You got a problem, you settle it some other way.’ Violence is a learned behavior. If you can learn it, you can unlearn it.”

For a man who claimed to have been so fearsome, he was awfully benign-looking—stocky, with baby cheeks and a wide, toothy smile. He wore a black ball cap and a Raiders hoodie. When he sat down, he laid his smartphone on the table where he could see it, indicating that while he was willing to talk, he wasn’t going to interrupt his important business for our conversation. He reminded me of a riverboat gambler casually placing a derringer beside his chips—not making a big deal of it, just letting everybody know what’s what.

I started to ask a question, but he already knew where he wanted to take the conversation, and without preamble pulled up his hoodie to expose a muscular torso of milk-and-coffee brown. “This is where his bullet hit me; see that red mark?”

A young white woman at the next table glanced over, and quickly away. Tim’s fingertip found a raspberry-colored pock on the outboard side of his left pectoral, then slid to another at the center of his sternum. “It bounced off my rib and came out over here.”

Pulling the hoodie back down, he started at the beginning. Tim had grown up at Kedzie Avenue and Ohio Street, in deep West Side. But his wasn’t a typical story of a neglected, fatherless childhood. Just the opposite, in fact, which may have been the problem.

“It was ghetto for sure, but I grew up in a good family. Didn’t want for nothing. My father was a minister; I never saw him smoke or drink. My mother was first lady of the church. There was seven of us kids—three girls and four boys, and I’m second to the last. Until I was twelve or so, I did the thing—went to school, played drums in the church, all that. Them streets, though, man. Them streets. When you’re eleven, twelve years old, they call to you.”

His phone buzzed. He put it to his ear, listened for a moment, said, “I’m doin’ the interview,” and set it back on the table.

“Dad was always gone, building the ministry,” he went on. “Mentally,
me and him didn’t connect. He was all fire and brimstone, and I didn’t understand that. He had a way of talking, not listening. Like, ‘This is how it’s going to be.’ And I’d say, ‘Not with me.’ I was like, ‘No matter how much you whip me, preach to me, I’ll be walking away.’ This is when I’m like twelve years old, and my father’s always talking, talking, talking. But what you want at that age is a family that
listens
. So I went out and found one in the streets.”

In 1977 and ’78, roller disco was big, and the hot hangout for people Tim’s age was a rink called Hot Wheels, at the corner of Chicago and Pulaski. “Everybody from everywhere went there. You skate. You dance. You get into fights with them from other neighborhoods. That’s where we formed our identity—who could fight and who couldn’t.

“My dad, he’d say, ‘You can’t go to that devil place,’ and I’d say, ‘I’m going.’ I’d get home and my dad would be like, ‘Gimme a shoe.’ I’d say, ‘You can go ahead and whup me, but I’m going back there tomorrow.’ The whuppings became numb to me.”

Tim, at least, had parents. “Other kids’ parents, they were, like, gone. This one’s dad’s in jail, that one’s mom’s on aid, or she’s using. So these cats would be way out there, staying out late, showing around big wads of money. They was daredevils. This one boy, Curt, I seen him snatch a chain off a lady’s neck on a bus. He pulled the cord and snatched that chain, and I was, like, shocked. We ran, and I was all ‘What you
doin’
?’ Man, he showed me that money, and my eyes was like
baseballs
.”