Gun Guys

by Dan Baum

  The Air Force isn’t the thing anyway, his cousin Jimmy told him. They didn’t have enough pilot slots. Let’s go Army and fly Black Hawks! The Army, embroiled in two wars, would have been happy to have them—not as pilots, because they weren’t college grads, but as the true hot dogs on a combat chopper: crew chiefs. They could have stood in back, manned the door gun, and managed everything going on behind the cockpit. The Army would have given a rank for every year of JROTC, so the kid could have gone in as an E-3. Hell, yes, Jimmy had said, it’ll be awesome. And Jimmy had signed up, shipped out, and done three tours downrange.

  “I chickened out,” the kid told me listlessly, pawing damp fries from their waxed-paper bag. “Makes me feel I missed out.”

  I wanted to take him in my lap, chuck him under the chin, and tell him to buck up. “It’s not for everyone,” I said. “Are you still interested in flying?” His voice went flat as he told of enrolling at a commuter college in Denver to study aviation. Each semester had cost two thousand dollars in tuition and twice that again for flying lessons. His grades weren’t good enough to win him scholarships, so after three semesters he’d found himself five thousand dollars in debt, with no clear prospect of digging out. He’d said the hell with it and dropped out. And there went his dream of becoming a pilot.

  “So now what?”

  “I worked at a Burger King for a while, and as a contractor for Dell, until that ran out. I’m taking courses at the community college. In IT. You know.” The kid balled up his sandwich wrapping and licked a tomato seed off his ring finger. The conversation was spiraling toward dark matter. To wrench us up, I asked about the AR.

  “Well,” he said, sitting up straight again, animated. “Honestly, I really got into firearms because of computer games. I play the Battlefield series. You know that one? Counter Strike really got me into it.” He talked for a long time about the shooter games he liked—Battlefield 1942, Armed Assault II, and Call of Duty 4. Each was a point-of-view Internet fight game, in which the player was not merely controlling a digital proxy but was there. Human players operated every other soldier on the screen, he explained; that was the miracle of it. He was playing against real people, all over the world, each seeing the battlefield from a different perspective. Kids’ gun fantasy had morphed from Mattel Shootin’ Shell cap guns to Call of Duty, but otherwise this kid was a lot like my childhood self.

  It was Call of Duty 4 that got him interested in the AR-15. As he accumulated points, he earned the right to use and modify progressively deadlier weapons. Descriptions of ACOGs, lasers, and other gadgets appeared on the screen for him to choose. The descriptions were ads, really, extolling the virtues of brand-name devices.

  Video games may have explained why the AR-15 was the hope of a firearms industry worried about its aging customer base. My nephew, for example, who had lived his entire life within a few blocks of his Greenwich Village birthplace and had less experience with guns than almost anybody, knew AR-15 terminology—ACOGs, Magpuls, etc.—better than I did because he played video games. He didn’t transfer his virtual enthusiasm to a real AR-15 the way the kid in Denver did, but in one of its endless gun-market surveys, the National Shooting Sports Foundation found that lots of young people apparently had. While gun guys overall showed up in the gun-industry surveys as mostly over forty, rural, middling educated, and white, the people who shot AR-15s tended to be younger, more urban, better educated, and more racially diverse. In other words, they looked more like where America was going than where it had been.

  The NSSF found that not only were AR shooters younger and more diverse, they also took their guns out to the range and shot them more often than owners of other guns did. They’d made the AR-15’s .223 cartridge the biggest-selling caliber of rifle ammunition. AR shooters could be counted on to buy, with real dollars, in real life, the endless stream of parts and accessories that they earned playing Call of Duty 4 in cyberspace. And AR shooters did the thing the industry most depended on: They evangelized the pleasures of shooting, just as the kid had done when he held out his rifle for me to try.

  On his twenty-first birthday, the kid had been home alone, bored. Federal law prevented gun stores from selling handguns to anyone younger than twenty-one, and this gave the kid an inspiration. “I think to myself, I have a wad of cash. I want a gun.” He drove to a nearby gun store and, after a fifteen-minute computerized background check, walked out with a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson Sigma pistol. “It was impulsive,” he said. “I didn’t do any research. I just saw it, liked it, and bought it.” Four months later, he sold the pistol at a gun show for fifty dollars less than he’d paid for it and went to a pawnshop to buy a nine-millimeter Hi-Point 995 carbine—another impulse buy, he said, because it was “cool looking.” Eric Harris had thought so, too; he wrote that it looked like the gun in the video game Doom, right before he fired ninety-six shots from one at Columbine High School.

  “Did the video games have anything to do with your decision to buy a real gun?” I asked.

  “Everything!” he said. “I wanted to take the next step—feel the recoil and pull the trigger.” He cocked his head, studied me for a moment, and seemed to realize that it sounded a little odd. He dropped his voice a manly octave. “In a world of stuff you throw away, firearms are something you can hand down for generations, right?”

  The day after he bought the Hi-Point carbine, he went to another pawnshop and bought a Springfield XD pistol, also in nine-millimeter; it seemed cool to own two guns of the same caliber. “I still wasn’t telling my parents I had these.” He giggled and sipped his Sprite. “I kept them in my closet.”

  He was home alone again one day, bored, playing with the pistol in his bedroom. He was dry-firing, pulling the trigger on an empty chamber, which normally is a fine way to practice a trigger pull. With a loaded magazine in the gun, though, it’s textbook stupid. He pulled the trigger and racked the slide to recock the gun. Alas, racking the slide scooped a cartridge from the magazine into the chamber. He pulled the trigger again.

  “It took me about ten seconds to realize what had happened,” he said. “I was completely deaf, but I could smell the powder. I’m running around in a total panic, looking for the bullet. Then I stop, take a deep breath. I go upstairs and I can see the drywall punched out of the floor of my parents’ dressing room. I go back downstairs, and I can see that it’s gone through a vent in my ceiling, missing the ceiling fan by this much. Ultimately, it lodged in a wall stud.” He laughed and sucked at the ice at the bottom of his Sprite. “I explained to my dad when he got home. I told him, ‘I just had a negligent discharge. This is for you—it’s a pistol, and a bag with forty-nine rounds.’ He was like ‘Oh, okay, thank you.’ He didn’t show any emotion. That was it. My mom still doesn’t know.” His face burned scarlet; he looked like a pomegranate. Equally sodden with gun fantasy as a kid, I might have made a similar mistake—but for my rigorous range time with Hank Hilliard.

  “And the AR-15?”

  He sighed, relieved to be back on that subject. “I started building that after getting into the game America’s Army, which is released by the Army for recruiting purposes. I liked it. You’ve got to go through basic training, marksmanship, and an obstacle course before you can actually play.” In that game, he’d used the shortened, commando version of the M16—the M4. And once again, he’d set down the gaming console and gone to the gun store—this time, to buy a real AR-15. In his telling of the story, he was switching back and forth from virtual gun to real gun so quickly that I had trouble keeping track. I wondered if he sometimes had the same problem.

  Pushing aside the detritus of our lunch, he told of the parts and accessories he had swapped on and off of his AR-15 in the year since he’d bought it. He kept lapsing into such phrases as “At that point I got the new railed hand-guard from LaRue Tactical, which made me replace the gas block.” I found the details hard to follow. In my experience, about the only things you could change on a rifle were the sights and the sling tha
t hung it from your shoulder. But I gathered that he had changed something on the rifle about every four days since he bought it, the way I’d swapped derailleurs and hubs on and off my ten-speed bike back in the seventies. “I like the shooting,” he said. “I like shooting as cleanly as possible. But I really like the engineering—the springs, the detents, the catches. I sometimes think, Hmm, this piece hangs a bit, or This roller pin wobbles. I like taking the whole gun apart in my room. Whenever I shoot, I roll out my cleaning mat and take it all down. I take the bolt apart every time, cut off small pieces of patch, and run them through the firing-pin channel.” The kid kept talking, losing himself in the arcana of direct impingement and chamber pressure, recoil spring and trigger pack. His eyes were sparkling. The light on his face had grown rosy, and I realized we’d been sitting there for hours.

  “Sounds like you really dig it,” I said. “Have you thought about designing guns for a living?”

  His eyes went flat. “I’ve thought about it,” he said, his voice sliding back down the drain, “but I’m not very imaginative.”

  An app called Gun Store Finder on my iPod Touch directed me to two Denver stores, but one was boarded up and the other had become a nail salon. The afternoon was so crisp, and the sight of the aspens turning in the mountains was so lovely—great yellow brushstrokes across the pines—that I ended up driving all the way to Colorado Springs, ninety minutes out of Denver. They’d had snow already, and it lingered in the shadows thrown by trees. As I pulled into a slushy parking space at Specialty Sports & Supply, a black Lab stuck his head out the window of a huge Ford pickup and gave me a baleful stare, as though to ask, “What are you doing here?” He wasn’t fooled a minute by my NRA cap.

  Most gun stores in my experience were intimate, cluttered, invitingly musty little shops, the owner leaning on the counter, talking football or ballistics, while customers ambled freely among racks of used rifles. Specialty Sports & Supply, though, smelled like the future—a vast, airy bigbox gun store with the fragrance of hand sanitizer.

  All the rifles stood in racks behind counters, out of reach. Employees in matching blue vests leaned on the counters, waiting, under bright fluorescent lights. The only things customers could touch without permission were the nonlethal merchandise: clothes, cleaning kits, targets, beef jerky, and 5-Hour Energy Shots—which seemed about as appropriate to sell in a gun store as pints of Jack Daniel’s. I’d once made the mistake of drinking an Energy Shot and spent a day ricocheting around the inside of my own skull.

  When I visited stores, I always looked for guns from the early to mid-twentieth century. Besides the Krag (made in 1900), I had a Savage .32 pistol from 1907; Smith & Wesson revolvers in both .45 and .38, from 1917 and 1921; a 1920 Luger; a Chinese army Mauser rifle from 1934; a Hungarian Femaru pistol from 1937; and a Colt Detective Special made in 1956—the year I was born. Guns of that era were usually milled from solid steel rather than cast. They were knurled with an eye to artistry, and their stocks glowed with the kind of deeply grained woods no longer affordable to gunmakers. They evoked an era that I enjoyed thinking about, an era smelling of coal smoke and damp wool overcoats. And they usually fell into the sweet spot, price-wise, between modern guns and the genuine antiques of the nineteenth century and earlier. At Specialty Sports & Supply, alas, the racks of rich brown walnut stocks gave way within a few yards to vast ranks of coal-black plastic.

  I stood at the counter waiting for one of the many clerks to wait on me. None did. Several looked at me and turned away. Finally I motioned to a blue-vested clerk with a pimpled, hatchet-shaped face and a red, high-fade haircut, and he walked over with a vaguely quizzical look. NRA cap or no, I wasn’t his typical customer. Too old, perhaps. Too urban. I introduced myself as a newcomer to the AR-15 and asked what he would recommend. He cocked an eyebrow, as though to say, Seriously? But he was polite.

  Running a finger along a line of what looked to be identical rifles, he selected one, slid open the breech to ascertain that it was unloaded, and handed it over. Like the kid’s, it was toy-gun light, almost hard to take seriously.

  “How’d you pick this one?”

  “Price, mostly, sir. That one’s a DPMS.” He looked at the tag dangling from the trigger guard. “Eight hundred dollars.”

  “How high do they go?”

  “Oh, you can spend a lot, sir.” He listed attributes—metal thickness, barrel twist, direct impingement versus piston, and competition triggers—none of which meant a thing to me. After he’d called me “sir” about five times, I asked whether he was ex-military. “Yes, sir. Marine Corps.”

  “Iraq?”

  “Afghanistan.”

  “And you like these?”

  “It’s the only rifle I’d carry into combat, sir.”

  “But I’m not going into combat. Why would I want it?”

  “Accuracy. Shootability. Compared to others, the ammo is cheap and available.”

  From over my shoulder came a rumbling whisper: “Don’t do it, man.”

  I turned, and there stood Mutt and Jeff—one slight and compact in a short high school athletic jacket and pressed jeans, the other an unshaven giant in open galoshes, an earflaps hat, and a quilted, olive-green coat over coveralls. “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Don’t do it,” the big man said quietly. “That eight hundred bucks is just the beginning. Once they got you, they got you.”

  “Yeah,” said his wiry friend, gazing raptly into a case full of gun parts. “It’s like heroin; the first taste is cheap.”

  The clerk laughed nervously. “Yeah, there’s a lot of cool pieces-parts to buy, that’s for sure.”

  The big guy snorted. “I bought that same rifle right here in this store back in September for eight hundred dollars,” he said. “I’ve spent, what, another two thousand? Three?” His friend nodded. “I’m not saying I’m sorry. I’ve got a very cool rifle, and I love to shoot it. But you open Guns & Ammo, or just walk in here, and every month there’s something else you gotta have.”

  “Like what?” I set the rifle on the counter, and the big guy launched into a techno-rap like the kid’s.

  “What’d I do?” he asked his friend, and began bending back carrot fingers. “First it was the Magpul stock; that was like a hundred and a half. Then the Command Arms grip—another forty. Then the forearm with the Picatinny rails, another hundred and something …”

  “And then you’re in real trouble,” said the friend, getting down on one knee to peer into the case.

  “Right. Because then it’s all the stuff you can hang on the rails. Your lasers, your lights. There was that SureFire Universal WeaponLight I saw in Blood Diamond and had to have …”

  “It fucking never stops.”

  “It fucking never stops. Scopes, trigger packs, sights. You get one on there, and the next week they come out with something even cooler, and you have to get that.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You’re saying you change the stock?” The stock is the body of a gun—on a traditional rifle, it’s the wooden part. The idea of modifying a rifle that way seemed as bizarre as customizing a car by replacing the chassis.

  “The stock, the barrel, the trigger, the grip—anything,” the little guy said, his face still pressed to the glass. “I even changed the caliber on mine—bought a 6.5 Grendel upper so I could hunt deer. That cost me, shit, almost seven hundred before I was done.” The red-haired clerk turned to the rifle on the counter and began snapping it apart. In about ten seconds, using no tools, he’d reduced it to six or seven components, a disassembled Lego toy.

  “It’s like that small-block Chevy,” the clerk said. “You could take and use it for almost infinite applications by changing the intake manifold, the cylinder heads, the pistons, and the cranks.”

  As they chattered on, I couldn’t tell whether they were describing an undiagnosed gear addiction or merely a reasonable affection for a device as versatile as a Leatherman pocket tool. Shooters could not only trick out ARs, they explained; they could
turn them into entirely different guns. Swap this part and that part, and your basic .223-caliber AR-15 could shoot everything from a diminutive .22 rimfire up to a deer-killing 6.5 Grendel. Swap parts again and the AR could shoot the AK-47 round favored by every third-world army and guerrilla movement from Venezuela to the Congo. Swap again and it could shoot the .50 Beowulf, whose cartridge, proportioned like a ChapStick, had shattered Taliban Land Rover engine blocks in Afghanistan. You could even buy parts to transform an AR-15 into a shotgun or a crossbow. In one afternoon, you could knock tin cans from a fence, hunt rabbits, kill a bear, and shoot skeet—all with the same gun. It seemed both weird and revolutionary—like grocery shopping in a Toyota Prius, then pushing a button on the dash and transforming it into a Dodge Ram to haul trash to the dump. It let a gun guy do all his different kinds of shooting and always be handling the same grip and stock. “Beware the man with one rifle,” the red-haired clerk said, quoting an old saying. “He probably knows how to shoot it.”

  The unshaven giant sighed loudly and gazed at the parts counter with red-rimmed eyes. “You know what it is, right?” he said. “It’s Barbie for men.”

  2. CONDITION YELLOW

  People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society.

  —Major L. Caudill, USMC (Ret.)

  I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn’t need a gun, you’d better take one along that worked.

  —Raymond Chandler, Farewell My Lovely, 1940

  Back home, I kept replaying that quizzical look from the clerk at Specialty Sports & Supply. My NRA cap clearly was not the perfect camouflage. Slapping it over my pointy bald head was likely to camouflage me at gun venues in Arizona and Kentucky about as effectively as sticking a sprig of parsley on a Panzer. I was likely to get frozen out, if not run off the property with a shotgun, as I ambled around asking people about their gun lives.