by Dan Baum
I mentioned that I’d found a couple of gun stores closed and asked how business was.
“Last year was good, when Obama got in. I am sure that as soon as he knows this term is over and he’s not going to get reelected, he’ll try to push through all kinds of gun bans, and we’ll have another good few months. But long-term, no, it doesn’t look good. Only people I see in here anymore are almost as old as I am. I’m giving myself five more years and then retiring.”
She leaned on the counter, and a dreamy look came over her. “Last year, though,” she sighed, “I had them standing five deep in here filling out their 4473s;* you could smell the testosterone.”
The specter of a new assault-rifle ban had become, to some gun guys, what the Holocaust was to some Jews: the organizing dread of their lives. The original ban came in 1994, after the country had been brutalized by the crack-cocaine murder wave of the late eighties and early nineties. It was aimed at the AK-47, which was being disgorged by the tens of thousands from China and the collapsed Soviet empire, and at the American-made AR-15. Sponsors of the ban, in their haste to “do something” about gun violence, made enough gaffes to give their opponents endless political ammunition and make the entire exercise as polarizing as possible. They mangled brands and model numbers—a couple of proposed laws would have banned guns that didn’t exist—and garbled gun parts. When Senator Dianne Feinstein said of assault rifles on national television, “They have light triggers, you can spray-fire them, you can hold them with two hands, and you don’t really need to aim,” gun guys were paying attention. They knew that assault rifles didn’t necessarily have lighter triggers than other guns, and any gun could be held with two hands, fired rapidly, or fired without aiming. Feinstein and her allies were trying to ban something they didn’t even understand. Instead of listing every conceivable variant of the AR-15 and AK-47, the law banned characteristics deemed too military for civilian possession, such as pistol grips, bayonet lugs, collapsible stocks, and barrel shrouds that protect shooters’ hands from heat. Banning guns by characteristic turned out to be like banning Pontiacs for their chrome pipes and death’s-head shift knobs. Smart entrepreneurs simply churned out “post-ban” AK-47 and AR-15 knockoffs that lacked the cosmetics but were every bit as lethal. Ironically, it’s entirely possible that the bill’s mostly Democratic sponsors ended up putting more assault rifles and high-capacity magazines on the street, rather than fewer. The long debate in 1993 and 1994 that led to the ban, and the additional months before the law took effect, gave everybody who wanted such things, or thought he might someday, ample time to stock up. I was living in Montana at the time; gun stores were selling AK-47s off pallets for $110 apiece—along with hastily manufactured thirty-two-round magazines by the case. It was like watching people preparing for a zombie invasion.
A sunset provision, in any case, gave Congress and President George W. Bush the chance to let the ban expire a decade later. When Representative Carolyn McCarthy of New York was pushing to reinstate it, the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson asked her on television if she knew what a barrel shroud was. After trying to evade the question, she eventually blurted, “a shoulder thing that goes up,” a line that instantly became infamous. Senator Charles Schumer was given to declaring that machine guns, assault weapons, and cheaply made pistols were available “in cyberspace for the taking.” In truth, you could find guns through the Internet, but actually buying one required following all the standard background-check and paperwork rules, and machine guns weren’t available that way at all. Once again, gun guys were watching. They saw the ban supporters’ inability to domonstrate even a passing familiarity with the things they were presuming to ban as the height of elitism. They convinced Congress to block reinstatement, and “pre-ban” AR-15s and AK-47s returned to gun stores.
Whether the short-lived ban saved lives is a topic of unending contention. What is undeniable is that it contributed to one historic death—that of the Democratic majority in Congress. The November after President Clinton signed the assault-rifle ban, gun guys helped give the Democrats their worst drubbing since 1946, ending their hold on both houses.
Even though they beat reinstatement, gun guys did not stand down from red alert. The ban had so permanently inflamed their outrage gland—an organ prodded ceaselessly by the NRA and the gun press—that when it looked as if another Democrat was going to win the White House in 2008, the gun industry had its best year ever. A common novelty at gun stores was a poster of Obama’s smiling face over the words FIREARMS SALESMAN OF THE YEAR. And in fairness, the petite Erin Jerant’s fear may not have been entirely irrational. Soon after the election, the new attorney general, Eric Holder, let slip that reinstating the assault-rifle ban was one of “a few gun-related changes that we would like to make.” The comment set off such a shitstorm that within weeks he was mumbling that all he’d meant was “enforcing the laws we have,” exactly the NRA’s position.
The AR-15 was so prevalent everywhere I’d been so far that it was starting to feel like one of my story’s protagonists. The more I read about it, the more it seemed like the future—the iGun, perhaps. Even the business surrounding it was different from the gun industry of the past. While the big traditional firearms companies—Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Remington, and Colt—made AR-15s, they were hardly the whole game. At least thirty American companies, some of them two- and three-man shops, were making them. It was an industry that lived not in huge, smoky factories, but largely among the engine shops, custom extruders, and welders in edge-of-town industrial parks. When I reached the Grand Canyon State, I went looking for one.
I showed up in Phoenix the week that Congress passed President Obama’s health-care bill, and the city was undergoing a collective nervous breakdown. It made it hard to talk to Arizonans about anything else, even their guns. In the airless waiting room of a Jiffy Lube, an elderly gentleman became so distraught over the new law that he was making himself short of breath; I feared he might suffer a stroke. “It’s been socialism for the past fifty years, but now it’s out-of-the-closet, bare-assed naked!” he cried, as overture to a twenty-minute monologue delivered at top volume to an audience of two—me and a heavyset woman glancing nervously over her copy of Prensa Hispana.
“Sir,” I finally said, reaching over to pat his seersucker knee. “Allow me to reassure you: All that has happened is that you lost one. It happens to my side all the time. Believe me; the republic is fine.”
He refused to be consoled.
I had some time to kill before an appointment, so I roamed Phoenix in my freshly lubricated car, following the lead of Gun Store Finder. The first store it sent me to was out of business—the GUNS sign creaking in the hot breeze but the windows were whitewashed over—and so was the second. Peering through the glass door, I could see that it had been vacated recently: A poster on the wall advertised the Taurus Judge revolver, which had been a hot new item that year. I was beginning to feel like an epidemiologist on the trail of a mysterious plague that was leaving behind a string of desiccated gun-store corpses. At a time when gun sales were strong, something was killing off the stores.
But it was time to get to Glendale, so I hacked my way through the traffic to a vast grid of gray, unlandscaped, steel-sided buildings adorned with vaguely technological but opaque corporate names like Technotron and Tronotech. I drove around and around until I was sure I was lost, and at that moment, directly in front of me, a sign appeared for the place I was seeking: Patriot Ordnance Factory. I parked and banged on an unmarked steel door.
After a rattling of locks, the door swung open, and Frank DeSomma looked me up and down. “You found me,” he said, waving me into a cheaply furnished office and locking the door behind us. DeSomma looked less like an Arizona gunmaker than a discount-electronics salesman on Flatbush Avenue. Short and soft, he wore a powder-blue leisure suit, gold chains, and a big, knobby gold ring. His dark hair was slicked back, and a Vandyke adorned his meaty features. In an accent so heavily Brooklynese I
could practically smell the pickles, he launched into a predictably despairing monologue about President Obama’s health-care bill. I let him go on for ninety seconds, tapping my foot; it was the cost of doing business in Arizona that week. Finally, I held up a palm. “Spare me. Let’s talk about guns.”
DeSomma shrugged, smiled, and got down to the story of his business. His family had moved to Arizona from Brooklyn when he was eight. All his friends had firearms, and as a budding aerospace machinist in his twenties, he was as enchanted by guns’ mechanical perfection as by the flash and boom. In 2002, with the ten-year assault-rifle ban soon to expire, DeSomma sensed that the market for the AR-15 was about to take off. He sold an apartment building and asked his wife if he could use $25,000 of the proceeds to start a gun-parts business.
All AR-15s are functionally identical; it’s the interchangeability of their parts, after all, that makes them so thrilling. But DeSomma thought he could make a better gun. The AR-15 had been known since the Vietnam War for being lightweight and accurate but finicky and prone to jamming. DeSomma figured the problem was the way it used gases from one firing round to eject the casing and insert the next round into the chamber. Pushing the bolt directly with hot gases meant covering it with dirt, eventually fouling the rifle, so DeSomma revived an idea from semi-automatic rifles that predated the M16. He engineered a way to use the gases to push a rod, or piston, and have the rod push the bolt, adding a little weight but keeping the bolt cleaner. He took his invention to the big gun-industry trade show in 2004, and people thought he was crazy for taking AR-15 development in a reverse direction.
Thus began one of those signature stories of ingenuity and pluck that crop up often enough to sustain the American dream. For the first four years, DeSomma paid himself zero, plowing every available nickel back into the business. By the time I met him, he was paying himself a meager $250 a week but had twenty-five employees making a thousand rifles a year, which sold for a breathtaking $1,900 to $2,600 a pop. He was selling a few to police departments every year, but the bulk of his sales went to civilians. And he was banking on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“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 recei
ver. 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.