Gun Guys

by Dan Baum

  I wasn’t so sure.

  As I crossed the bridge over the Ohio River, the radio reported that thirty-seven-year-old Robert Reza had that morning followed his girlfriend to work in Albuquerque and shot her dead. He’d then turned his pistol on five others, killing one before killing himself. He’d had two drunk-driving convictions, and the police had several times paid domestic-violence calls on the home that he and his girlfriend shared with their twin five-year-old sons. None of that, however, had shown up in the records that New Mexico’s instant background check could access. Reza had been able, five weeks earlier, to buy the pistol at an Albuquerque gun store called Precision Arms. Riven down the middle by the opposing cultures within me, I could easily derive both lessons: We must control access to guns more strictly, and, conversely, we must make it easier for the law-abiding to carry guns so that people like those Reza killed aren’t defenseless. I could argue it eloquently both ways, and did, aloud and alone in the car, to alleviate the boredom of the drive.

  As I reached Louisville under a charcoal sky, I found tucked into a small strip mall a gun store called Tilford’s. Gun guys liked my old Colt so I dug it from the trunk and stuck it in my waistband before stepping inside to find a tiny, immaculate shop without much inventory, no animal heads on the wall, no endearing clutter. It felt more like an electronics-parts store than a gun shop. I noticed aloud that Tilford’s had no AR-15s.

  “Handguns,” said the young man behind the counter. “Eighty percent is handguns, and it always has been. Now, though, what people want are the little ones, for concealed carry.”

  I could see at a glance that this was not the kind of store that would have baskets of old holsters, but my tactic for establishing my bona fides was to ask about holsters for my old Colt. I pulled open my jacket and swiveled so he could see it. “Got anything to fit this?”

  His face lit up. “Nice! My dad had one of those.”

  “Okay if I draw to unload?” I asked.

  “Sure!”

  I took the gun from my waistband, dumped out the cartridges, and handed the revolver to him the proper way, butt first, with the cylinder open.

  “Sweet,” he said with a big smile, pointing it at the floor and clicking the trigger. “Old school.”

  “That’s me.” I reloaded and reholstered.

  And then I made my mistake.

  “Heard about the killing in Albuquerque?” I asked.

  His smile vanished. His shoulders bunched up. He leaned both arms on the counter and released two big clouds of steam from his ears. “And they’ll use that to argue for gun control, when we both know that if anyone else there had had a gun, it might have turned out different.”

  “Well, it seems a shame that the background check …”

  “Oh, that’s bullshit, man,” he said, waving a hand at me and scowling. Suddenly I was no longer a new pal with a cool gun; I was some jerk making excuses for the gun grabbers. I groaned. Once again, I’d forgotten that a lot of gun guys are like the Taliban: Either you agree with them about absolutely everything or you’re Satan. “Anytime there’s a shooting, there’s this blame-the-gun thing. This immediate jump, when there’s a shooting at Virginia Tech or some school, it’s immediately, ‘Why do we let people have these guns?’ rather than, ‘Why didn’t we see a problem with this person earlier, and get him proper medication?’ ”

  The bell above the door tinkled, thank goodness, and two men entered—the younger one was thin and pale, with lank hair parted in the middle. He was wearing glasses, trousers many sizes too big, and an eerily blank expression. Around his neck hung a big plastic card identifying him as an employee of United Parcel Service. The older man was stocky, in jeans, work boots, a worn Carhartt jacket, and an air of impatient anger that, for once, had nothing to do with politics.

  “His first gun,” the older man said contemptuously. “Today’s his twenty-first birthday, and this is what he wants.” The pale young man floated up to the counter and silently extended a bony finger—like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come pointing at Scrooge’s grave. What he seemed to indicate was a Taurus Judge, an unusual revolver that fired shotgun shells and was the hot product that summer in the gun press and on the blogosphere. Built around a comically elongated cylinder that could hold five shells of .410 gauge, it had a barrel only three inches long but its frame and cylinder looked as though they had been put in a vise and stretched. It was essentially a five-shot, handheld, sawed-off shotgun—at close range, devastating.

  “I think it’s too much for a first gun,” the older man said. “I’d start him off on a .22. But it’s his money, and this is what he wants.”

  I tried to engage the young man in conversation—“How does the shot spread from a barrel that short?”—but he stood mute, staring into the case as though lost in a world of his own. The man in the Carhartt jacket—his father, I presumed—answered for him.

  “He don’t know. He don’t know nothin’. He just knows what he wants.” The clerk removed the revolver from the case and held it out, unsure to whom he should hand it. The son stood like a mannequin; the dad sighed, took the gun, opened it to make sure it was empty, and handed it to him. The son held it briefly and, without examining it, handed it to the clerk. He didn’t open the cylinder, cock the hammer, or pull the trigger. It was spooky; I’d never seen a man handed a pistol who didn’t manipulate it somehow.

  “Happy birthday,” the dad said sourly.

  “How old is he?” the clerk said.

  “Twenty-one. Twenty-one.”

  “Well, then you got to take him to Trixie’s, get him his first couch dance and a beer.”

  The birthday boy didn’t smile.

  “How will you celebrate?” I asked. He gave no indication he’d heard.

  “He’ll go shoot his gun,” the dad said. “He’s going to find out it costs a dollar-some every damned shot.”

  They were filling out the 4473 when I left the store.

  If I had been that gun-store owner, would I have sold that kid that gun? The law not only allowed gun dealers to deny purchases to suspicious characters—it demanded that they do so. The National Shooting Sports Foundation was pushing a program that summer called “Don’t Lie for the Other Guy,” meaning, if you have a clean record, don’t buy a gun for a friend who wouldn’t pass the background check. Doing so carried a ten-year federal sentence. The NSSF was circulating to gun dealers a DVD showing what a dealer should do if he suspected that a customer was attempting what it called a “straw purchase.” In the DVD, a couple enters a gun store, and, egged on by the man, the woman asks to buy a .22 rifle. As he’s filling out the 4473, the dealer casually asks the woman what kind of shooting she plans to do. “Uh, hunting,” she says.

  “Oh?” says the dealer pleasantly. “What kind?”

  “Uh, deer.” In no state is a .22 a legal rifle for hunting deer. At that point, the dealer puts down his pen and politely tells the woman that he believes she is buying the rifle for someone else and that he refuses to make the sale. It’s a powerful moment to watch, further complicated by the fact that the couple is African American. The unspoken implication is that the dealer, who is white, risks being accused of racism. Yet he is standing up for the principle that, background check or no, a dealer’s intuition is the first line of defense against people getting guns who shouldn’t.

  Assuming the pale, silent young man at Tilford’s passed his computerized background check, did he seem just too unstable to be trusted with a gun? Maybe the kid was just quiet. Quiet people have constitutional rights, too. I was glad I didn’t have to make that judgment. Business didn’t look terrific at Tilford’s. Not only would it be hard to turn down a $350 sale, but the owner also would risk getting a reputation as a difficult guy with whom to do business.

  My phone rang as I swung back onto Dixie Highway. The editor of a magazine called The Oxford American was on the line, with a kind of good-news/bad-news joke. Yes, he’d love to commission an article I’d recently pitched him.
But the pay was what would have been standard in about 1993. And no, he couldn’t help with expenses. I sighed aloud at the reminder that the hard times evident everywhere I traveled weren’t just on the other side of the windshield. I accepted the assignment—work was work—but two decades into my freelance career, I felt like I was back at the beginning.

  Before I could slip too far into a funk, another open gun store reared up alongside Dixie Highway, and this one, Biff’s Gun World, looked like a gem. It was a big, rambling building, with all kinds of interesting junk on the porch—farm implements, a scarecrow, petroleum lanterns, old road signs. Inside, there was barely room to move. Aisles had been carved amid mountains of stuff—holsters, beer steins, ammo boxes, figurines, ancient copies of gun magazines … Hundreds of long guns lined two walls, and the glass counters held so many old handguns that they’d had to pile them on top of one another. The walls were a multilayered collage of framed hunting photos, gun posters, handwritten gun ads, and police department shoulder patches. I could have spent days wandering Biff’s.

  Eventually, I piled on the counter about two dozen copies of the American Rifleman, from 1960 to the mid-1980s. Biff himself waited on me.

  He was a short, broad man with a big chest, a strong, flat belly, and curly white hair. He smiled when he saw the old magazines, and we spent a pleasant few minutes thumbing through them, marveling at the low prices in the gun ads. When I mentioned that so many gun stores seemed to have closed, I was intending to compliment him on his business acumen. But once again, I’d blundered. It was like kicking open a blast-furnace door; I practically had to grip the counter to stay upright under the force of his harangue.

  “It’s the paperwork!” he shouted. “You got to fill out the 4473 and keep it twenty years. And then after twenty years, they want you to keep it some more! Then they say, we recovered a gun at an armed robbery and we want to look at your paperwork, see if you sold the gun and who you sold it to! You think that’s fun?”

  “ ‘They’ who?”

  “The ATF! Who do you think? They come in here, six of them, and they don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. They only give you about a week’s notice before an inspection. They’re not local guys. They’re federal guys. One of them was from California.”

  Though delivered rather more forcefully than necessary, Biff’s point wasn’t unreasonable. ATF was both a gunned-up law enforcement agency, equipped with automatic weapons and bulletproof vests for taking down gunrunners, and the regulatory agency that oversaw the nation’s legitimate gun dealers. (F is where all the action is; its A and T functions are largely moribund.) Biff wasn’t the first gun dealer I’d heard complain that the ATF treated him like a crook. In his view, the agency’s double mission was like giving homicide detectives secondary jobs as high school teachers; pretty soon they’d start seeing a killer in every teenager.

  “They don’t want us having guns!” Biff said, a vein throbbing on his neck. “Every year they make everything a little harder, a little more expensive. They’re hoping people give up, say ‘The hell with it!’ ”

  “Whoa,” I said, holding up my hands. “I come in peace.”

  He kept talking over me, as though in the grip of a spell he couldn’t shake. “Why do liberals hate guns?” he yelled. “They don’t believe in personal responsibility, that’s why, and think the government should take care of everything!” He thrust his face across the counter like a barking dog, backing me into a tower of old computer speakers that shifted precariously. “Liberals think everybody can be perfected, everybody is good!” he shouted, straining to get his red face close to mine. “I disagree! I think there’s evil in this world!”

  To my relief, the door opened; another minute and Biff would have been vaulting the counter. I’m not sure I’d have sold Biff a gun, let alone let him get a dealer’s license. A sallow young man with a tattooed neck approached, holding a fishing rod and preceded, at eleven-thirty in the morning, by a caustic cloud of alcohol fumes. “Will you give me something for this?” he said. “Ten dollars? My boss laid me off and I ain’t got money for gas or cigarettes. I’ll take anything.”

  Biff, still shuddering with fury, glanced at the rod, a little kid’s Zebco that sold at Walmart for about eight dollars, and muttered, “It’s worth nothing. I’ll give you five dollars.”

  “I’ll take it.” Biff handed over a fiver and flung the rod into a pile of about thirty similar junk rods, a miniature monument to hard times in Kentucky—and to Biff’s well-concealed soft heart.

  The kid said he was a harbor dredger and used to working marinas as far off as the Chesapeake Bay. Now, though, there was no work. “It’s our goddamn president,” he drawled. “Somebody ought to shoot that guy. But then we’d get number two, and he’s worse. And number three and number four.”

  “Don’t you listen to the radio?” Biff said. “Everything’s great!” He reached for a stack of cards on the cluttered counter and threw one contemptuously at each of us. I retrieved it from the floor. It said, “Psalm 2010”:

  Obama is the shepherd I did not want

  He leadeth me beside the still factories.

  He restoreth my faith in the Republican party

  He guideth me in the path of unemployment for his party’s sake.

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the bread line,

  I shall fear no hunger, for his bailouts are with me.

  He has anointed my income with taxes,

  My expenses runneth over.

  Surely, poverty and hard living will follow me all the days of my life,

  And I will live in a mortgaged home forever.

  I am glad I am an American.

  I am glad that I am free.

  But I wish I was a dog …

  And Obama was a tree.

  That was it; I was done. Biff’s tirade, coming on the heels of the scolding I’d gotten at Tilford’s, had worn me out. I felt drained as I started the car and drove off. While I usually kept my eyes roving the roadside for gun stores, I found myself staring straight ahead. The last thing I wanted was another gun store. Another blast of gun-guy rage would have folded me up like a beach chair.

  And I had another eight thousand miles of this to go.

  What exactly was the complaint? As I picked my way down Dixie Highway, past the discount tire outlets and the Jiffy Lubes, I tried to remember all the gripes—from the Family Shooting Center through Arizona and the Grand Island gun show to Biff. Factually, none of them made sense. Gun laws were getting looser everywhere, public support for gun control was dropping, and even the dreaded Barack Obama had done his part to make life a little easier by allowing concealed guns in national parks.

  But that didn’t alter the gun-guy narrative any more than the huge drop in violent crime did. Gun guys were going out of their way to see the glass not as half empty but as shattered on the floor beneath their bare feet. Yes, certain media outlets were rather knee-jerk anti-gun—though certainly not Fox News. And if one considered American television—figuring in the cop, spy, and war dramas and reality TV shows like Pawn Stars, Top Shot, and Sons of Guns—the overall portrayal of firearms in the media was overwhelmingly positive. It was true that gun guys had to share the planet with people who supported stricter gun laws. But they were beating them just about every time. A certain slice of gun-guy America appeared to be suffering some kind of mass, self-inflicted anhedonia, choosing, despite all the evidence, to play the role of victim. Christ almighty, I thought, isn’t the Great Recession enough of a drag without needlessly manufacturing additional bummers?

  Maybe all the boarded-up gun stores were a clue.

  Packed in my car was a thick booklet called the Industry Reference Guide, published annually by the National Shooting Sports Foundation. It was glossy, colorful, and in 162 pages deconstructed the firearms business from every conceivable angle. It tracked the number of hunting licenses for the past twenty years and the average money that each hunter spent. It charted trends in g
unmaking by type of gun, caliber, and manufacturer; and import/export by source and destination. It mined excise tax data. It teased apart participation in the shooting sports by age, sex, income bracket, state, and region. It included polling about the public’s attitudes toward guns and gun laws. All of it looked, at first glance, like good news for the gun industry.

  Handgun, rifle, and shotgun sales had about doubled in a decade. The number of federal background checks grew every month. The average hunter was spending more every season. The public’s appetite for gun control was weakening.

  And yet … those shuttered gun stores I’d found all over America were not mere anecdotes. The number of licensed gun dealers had fallen by about half in twenty years. Walmart appeared to have been as toxic to mom-and-pop gun stores as it was to locally owned clothing stores, shoe stores, and hardware stores. But Walmart didn’t entirely explain the disappearance of gun stores, because, except in Alaska, Walmart didn’t sell handguns. Online shopping wasn’t putting gun stores out of business, either. A shooter could buy a gun online—on the auction site GunBroker.com, say—but unless the gun was very old and/or the buyer had a special federal license, the gun had to be shipped to a gun store, where the buyer had to go through the same background check as anybody else—and the store collected a fee. Besides, gun prices tended to be high online; physical gun stores always seemed to have a price advantage.

  No, the reason gun stores were closing was this: While more and more guns were being sold every year, they were going to the same shrinking group of aging white men. The NSSF’s Industry Reference Guide showed that participation in every shooting sport except archery was down over the past decade; some—like skeet, trap, and rifle target shooting—by double-digit percentages. Despite a big industry push to get more women shooting, their participation had hardly budged since 2002. The average age of “avid” hunters was almost forty-four, and, as the guide put it, “the increase in gross dollar value … is coming out of the wallets of virtually the same amount of hunters.” The average age of participants in all the shooting sports (except air-gun shooting) had gone up by as much as 5 percent just since 2002.