by Dan Baum
“A non-gun?”
He opened a desk drawer and took out what looked like a Glock pistol. Upon closer inspection, it was solid metal, like a paperweight, with a button where the trigger should have been. With a screwdriver, Larry removed the front half, showing me the electrical mechanism that created a big, harmless spark at the muzzle when an actor pushed the button. The gun looked incredibly blocky and fake. “Later, you enhance the flash, you add the bang and the tinkle of the casing hitting the floor, and it looks very real, believe me,” Larry said. “You’ve seen it a million times and didn’t know it.”
I groaned. Now he’d done it; I would never enjoy a gun movie the same way again.
The door opened, two young men walked in, and Larry leapt to his feet and, to my great surprise, began speaking fluid Hebrew. One of the men was slight, with glasses, the other a matinee idol, with shiny hair swept straight back. They chatted awhile in Hebrew, which, to my secular-Jewish ears, sounded like praying. I’m pretty sure they weren’t praying, though, because they kept laughing and dropping in such English words as “muzzle flash” and “ejection port.” Finally, the slight one extended me his hand. “Lior Chefetz,” he said, in that peculiar Israeli accent that manages to be both whiny and aggressive at the same time. “I directed The Godmother. Perhaps you saw it?” I hadn’t. The matinee idol introduced himself only as Nitsan—he was not an actor after all but a needlessly handsome handgun instructor for the Israel Defense Forces. I looked at Larry. “I was born in Philadelphia,” he said, “but I grew up in Israel.” He hooked a hand at us. “Come.”
Larry led us through a warren of narrow hallways to a chamber about the size of—but hardly decorated as—a child’s bedroom. Hundreds of revolvers encrusted the walls, their barrels slipped over dowels that stuck straight out, their grips pointed outward. The six-guns seemed to be loosely grouped by age, with those from the early twentieth century mounted low on the wall, the newest far above our heads. “This,” Larry said, “is the revolver room.”
Unlike semi-automatics, revolvers don’t depend on the blast of a cartridge to function, so everything in the room could fire live ammunition. “Some of these, though, have been to Mexico on shoots, so they have their barrels pinned,” Larry explained. “Mexico requires any gun coming into the country to have a pin driven through the barrel so it can’t fire live ammo.” Except, I thought, the ones going to the drug cartels.
Larry led us to the Western room—single-action revolvers protruding from one wall, lever-action rifles and Spencer carbines stacked against another, and, in the middle, a gigantic brass Gatling gun. The Colt that Russell Crowe used in 3:10 to Yuma hung on a peg at nose level—I recognized it by the silver cross on the handle—and leaning in a corner was the gigantic eight-gauge shotgun lugged around by Viggo Mortensen in Appaloosa.
“It’s just an ordinary twelve-gauge,” Larry said. “We built pipes around the barrels to make them look bigger.” I looked close: Sure enough.
Onward we went, to semi-automatic pistols, perhaps eight or nine hundred of them, from 1896 Broomhandle Mausers to 2011 Jordanian Vipers. All had been modified to shoot blanks and would never again fire live ammo. “Oh, baby!” yelled Nitsan, the handgun trainer. A big sign on the wall warned, DO NOT HANDLE THE GUNS, but Nitsan couldn’t help himself. He snatched one off the wall, hefting its weight, then tucked it into his armpit so he could grab another, and another. He was like a child in a candy store; Larry finally had to ask him, in singsong Hebrew, to put everything back.
After the rifle room—hundreds of M1 Garands and German Mausers, the backbone of any World War II picture, stacked butt to muzzle to save space—Larry took us to the largest room of all, the grand hall of machine guns. Robert, the midwestern machine-gun collector, had drawn a distinction for me between collectors and accumulators. ISS was an accumulator. Full-auto weaponry covered every inch of every surface. “Ohhh,” Nitsan sighed, and muttered something reverent-sounding in Hebrew. Lior rotated on his heels, head back, eyes wide. Gangster guns, Army guns, Nazi guns, police guns. Piles and piles of machine guns. From Robert and my Wikieup, Arizona, buddies, I had a sense of what machine guns cost; the ISS collection had to be worth several tens of millions of dollars.
“This is not a collection,” Larry insisted. “This is a working inventory.”
On a table in the middle of the room lay three futuristic ray guns. “From Avatar,” Larry said, putting one in my hands. It was green, bizarre, but for all that it appeared completely functional. “We built these.”
“Out of what?”
“All it is inside is a Ruger Mini-14,” Larry said—a common sporting rifle. He opened the side of my green vanquisher of Na’vi to reveal the quotidian gun beneath. “We went through a bunch of designs on the outside, and when we got to where James Cameron liked it, we built them out of plastic.” He pointed to fictional manufacturers’ logos on the barrels. “I especially like this touch; our graphics department made those.”
“Why do you even need the real gun inside?” I asked. “Couldn’t you make the plastic one and let the actors use that? The flash and the sound is added later anyway, right?”
“You could do that, but it wouldn’t feel real to the actor. He’s got to feel the thing shoot. He’s got to hear it go bang and see the flash. Otherwise he’s just faking it, and it wouldn’t look right.”
“So this is for the actor’s sake?”
“Absolutely. He’s got to get into it. He’s got to be feeling it.”
I must confess: It hadn’t occurred to me. On the stage of a theater, sustained by a live audience, sure. But in a ten-second take, the movie actor has to be feeling it? So much of what went into the movies was fake—the rubber guns, the digitized effects—that I’d assumed the acting was a delightful sham.
Larry crooked a hand, and we followed him into a room that looked like a vast art studio in a high school. A dozen or more people worked at long benches; on the one in front of me, a big box brimmed with some kind of foamy blue plastic imprinted with the negative image of a submachine gun. “This is studio art and technology,” Larry said. “These are the people who make the rubber guns. I mean, that’s not all they do—they make everything—but with the guns, if I’m using a new one, one that we don’t already have rubber for, I bring it to them and they’ll make it.” He pulled us over to another bench, where a woman was pressing a branch of a tree, about three feet long, into a box of blue plastic. “We have a show coming up in which a character is beaten to death with a tree branch. She’s making the branch.” At another bench, a man flicked an airbrush to make the stock of a rubber M14 rifle look like wood. Even up close, it was hard to tell that the rifle was a fake.
But it was the next room—the rubber-gun room—that most blew my mind. If the real revolvers, semi-automatics, and machine guns had numbered in the hundreds, these hung from the wall by the thousands. A single protruding dowel dangled perhaps two dozen identical pistols by their trigger guards, and there must have been five hundred such dowels between the floor and the fourteen-foot ceiling. On the floor by my feet sat an M60 machine gun that looked for all the world like the real thing. I picked it up; it was spongy and weighed hardly anything. The shiny surfaces, I saw, had been painted on.
“So you have a scene where soldiers are running through the jungle, they flop down and start shooting,” Larry said. “When they’re running, when they’re flopping down, this will be the gun. Only when they start shooting will we swap in a blank-firing gun.”
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 w
asn’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.
8. BRING IT ON, GOD DAMN IT!
Be nice to white men. One of the besetting sins of many in the progressive and liberal movements is that they have made white men the enemy. In fact, no ethnic group in history gave up so much power so quickly and so peacefully.
—Sam Smith, editor of Progressive Review, in his Post Empire Survival Guide
Boulder 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 a
nd 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: