Gun Guys

by Dan Baum

  The table that really spelled doom, though, was the one that broke down gun purchasers by age. Two-thirds of handgun buyers were forty-five or older. For shotguns, the numbers were only slightly less dire; ditto for rifles, probably because of the AR-15. As the NSSF put it in another of its reports, “Data suggest that the future of hunting and shooting sports is precarious.” To say the least.

  Gun guys had a hard time accepting this. Whenever anybody mentioned online the statistical evidence that demographics were slowly whittling down gun culture, gun bloggers reacted furiously, talking about how crowded their local ranges seemed to be. At the same time, though, the standard gun-blogger shorthand for the typical shooter was “OFWG”: old fat white guy. The longer I studied the Industry Reference Guide, the more it looked like the chart of a terminally ill patient.

  I e-mailed Jim Curcuruto, director of research analysis for the NSSF, to be sure I was reading his numbers right. Perhaps he would tell me that older shooters had always done most of the buying, that cash-strapped young people were perpetually mediocre customers, and that they always started buying guns when they got older. Maybe nothing was new; maybe the industry would be just fine. To be sure, I asked him for parallel data from, say, ten, twenty, and thirty years ago—to demonstrate that what I was seeing was not the beginning of the end.

  “We don’t worry too much about the future,” he wrote back, in a cheerfully brittle e-mail. “We’re focused on the present. We don’t want to predict anything.” Don’t want to predict anything? I had in my hand a 162-page effort to predict all kinds of things. Yet Curcuruto would have me believe that the one set of numbers the foundation didn’t have was the historical evidence that the shooting sports and the industry that depended on them were withering away.

  Maybe so. I could certainly understand the foundation not wanting those numbers. The Industry Reference Guide made it pretty clear: If the 2010 trends continued, the idea of bickering over gun policy was likely to look, in a few decades, as archaic as fighting over women’s suffrage or temperance. After decades of bitter skirmishes over gun rights and gun control, it was looking as though the issue would be settled by nothing more urgent than fashion. Surely some folks would continue hunting and shooting, but by and large, young people wanted to be urban and digital, and guns were the opposite. For the consumers of tomorrow, guns were so yesterday.‡

  So perhaps at least part of the rage I was encountering everyplace I traveled was born of panic. The gun-rights movement, and gun culture in general, seemed to be making a flamboyant and belligerent show of themselves in precisely the way that a flower grows intensely fragrant just before it dies.

  But that didn’t explain everything, because what was also coming through again and again was that gun guys felt insulted. They had something they liked to do—own and shoot guns—and because of it they suffered, they believed, a continuous assault on their hobby, their lifestyle, and their dignity. The endless parade of nitpicky laws seemed to do naught but express disapproval of gun culture. And every time somebody went crazy with a gun, the mainstream reaction was always “We have to do something about guns,” which the gun guys heard as “We’ve got to do something about gun guys.” At precisely the moment they were sensing their numbers shrinking, gun guys were experiencing what they perceived as a nonstop attack on their very worth as human beings.

  But how to tease apart everything that might have been making them feel that way? Many of the partially educated, rural, middle-aged guys in the bulge of the gun-guy demographic hadn’t seen a real wage increase since 1978. And then there were the guys like the laid-off harbor dredger breakfasting on booze and the haggard young man at the gun show selling his futuristic carbine so he could hold on to his house. Job security: gone. Employer-provided health care: gone. Pensions: gone. House: underwater. They’d had their livers pecked out while women, immigrants, blacks, and gays all seemed to have become groovier, sexier, and more dynamic players in American culture than they were. If the ashen aftermath of the financial meltdown was making everybody feel like a loser, those guys must have felt like the bottom of the bottom.

  The list of reasons to be angry was too long to get one’s mind around. The cloud of indignities had no name. We had no vocabulary to describe it. There was no way to put one’s hands on it, examine its contours, pick apart its elements. Even to examine it closely felt embarrassingly like making excuses for one’s own sorry lot. And to the extent that I was different from them, it was only by a matter of a few degrees. If Infidel and Biff weren’t where they’d hoped to be at this stage of life, well, neither was I.

  It started to rain as the commercial strip petered out and turned to open country south of Louisville. I turned on my wipers, smearing days of smashed insects across the glass. I shifted in my seat and felt the solid bulk of the Colt against my kidney. It felt good. It reminded me that I wasn’t merely an aging freelancer at a time of publishing-industry collapse; I was a member of the sheepdog cadre—vigilant, clear-eyed, sober, and true. I had the skill, courage, and maturity to manipulate a device of boundless lethality and keep its power safely contained. I didn’t need to kill anybody for my gun to give me stature; the exact opposite was true. What bolstered my self-esteem was my ability to live alongside a firearm, day in and day out, without ever harming anybody. The gun made me useful, relevant, special. If that’s what the pale young man at Tilford’s had been after in asking his father to buy him that fat shotgun revolver, who could blame him?

  Guns give us an identity. They make us supermen. A gun guy sees it this way: If you want to limit my contact with guns, you must be saying that you don’t trust me with them. You, who may never have shot a gun and know nothing about what it means to handle and operate one, are presuming to make judgments about my ability to do so. You want to diminish me as a man, a citizen, a sovereign entity—and I’ve already endured quite enough of that, thank you.

  * * *

  * I repeat them here because, really, they can’t be repeated enough. The wording changes depending on who is teaching them, but the essence is the same. 1. Treat all guns as though they are loaded. 2. Never let the muzzle cross anything you’re not willing to destroy and pay for. 3. Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target and you’re ready to fire. 4. Be sure of your target and what is behind it. 5. Maintain control of your firearm.

  † Gun guys like to quote Sigmund Freud as saying, “A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity,” although he never wrote that and there’s no evidence he said it. Freud thought weapons seen in dreams represented the penis, but was otherwise silent on their psychological significance.

  ‡ Cars, too. The number of nineteen-year-olds who’d bothered to get a driver’s license fell by about a third, to below half, between 1998 and 2008, and those who had drove 12 percent fewer miles, according to the Federal Highway Administration. Almost half the drivers between eighteen and twenty-four said they’d choose Internet access over owning a car. “They think of a car as a giant bummer,” a marketer named Ross Martin told The New York Times.

  11. SPIN DRIFT

  All women do have a different sense of sexuality, or sense of fun, or sense of like what’s sexy or cool or tough.

  —Angelina Jolie, on Twitter, July 28, 2010

  The first time I saw Marcey Parker, she was happily firing a submachine gun through a window. This was a year before my gun-guy walkabout, and the window was in a freestanding plywood wall that stood by itself in the middle of a field of grass, like a set in a cowboy movie. Marcey hunched over her gun like a pro, sighting down the barrel, rattling off four-shot bursts, her brown ponytail bouncing from the recoil. After tearing up a row of steel targets with several loud rat-a-tat-tats, she ran to the next window, dropping the magazine from her gun with a clatter and jamming in a new magazine from a pouch on her belt. Behind her ran a man in an orange safety vest, holding at arm’s length a small box that I took to be a pocket camera. After shooting thr
ough all four windows, Marcey dropped the magazine, jerked the bolt open, and yelled, “Clear!”

  The man in the orange vest looked at the box in his hand, which turned out to be a timer that could hear shooting begin and end, and called out her minutes and seconds. A small crowd, watching the subgun match from behind a rope at the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot, applauded politely.

  Marcey laid her hot gun on the shooter’s table with stylish, casual flair, removed her hearing protectors, and shook her long brunet hair free of a rubber band. It was hard not to stare. She was forty-six but looked to be in her thirties, with high cheekbones, large, wide-set eyes, and a strong, rounded figure—a total babe. She was as carefully made up here on the gun range as she’d have been at a cotillion—rouged, powdered, her lips painted deep rust with a hairline brown outline. She fluffed out her hair with painted fingertips, removed her shooting glasses, and replaced them with rectangular rimless ones. When she did that, and irradiated me with a wide smile, she looked strikingly familiar.

  “How you doin’? You need anything? We got cold water and drinks in the truck,” she said, as though I was the one who had just run a sun-blasted course firing three hundred rounds of nine-millimeter.

  “What exactly is it you’re doing out there?” I asked.

  “What you got out there is a bunch of steel plates you got to knock down,” she said.

  “It’s a machine gun,” I said. “How hard is that?”

  “Well, one of those plates is red, and if you hit that one, you get a penalty. What it is, is a balancing act. You shoot a long burst, that’s quick—but you risk hittin’ the red one. Shoot short bursts, you’re more exact, but slower. See?”

  Marcey’s husband, Jeremy, walked up, cradling a Sterling submachine gun, and kissed her lightly on the lips. He had a craggy face with hooded eyes and a mouth that fell naturally into a soft smile. In my memory, she’s bigger than he is, but I know that isn’t true. He is wiry and compact and has a quieter, less flamboyant personality, so he seemed to take up less space.

  I asked to hold the Sterling and, after ascertaining that it was unloaded, Jeremy placed it in my hands. The Sterling was the British-made successor to the Sten gun, little more than a metal tube with a big spring inside, like a beefy shock absorber. It had a folding metal stock and, projecting from the side, a long, curved magazine—a simple $7,500 device that probably cost less than a hundred dollars to manufacture.

  “Did you hear me going dink-dink-dink-dink?” Marcey asked him. “I was hittin’ ’em, but they weren’t fallin’ over!”

  “A lot of us didn’t bring hot enough loads today,” Jeremy explained. He’d made all the ammunition with which he and Marcey were competing, assembling bullet, powder, brass casing, and primer into finished cartridges on a workbench in the garage at home. He gave me the calculations that went into finding the perfect combination of controllability and oomph for each cartridge, taking ten leisurely minutes to spool it out for the non-nerd, so long that I started thinking the sport was more about math than marksmanship. “Those Marcey were shooting were power factor 150, which is bullet weight times velocity divided by a thousand. I didn’t want to load her up too hot, because she was using a borrowed gun and hot loads are hard on the lower receiver.” The range officer called his name, and Jeremy took the Sterling from me, adjusting his hearing protectors as he approached the firing line.

  Marcey slipped her arm through mine and asked, in a warm, big-sister way, if I had any questions. When I looked into her smiling eyes, I realized why she seemed so familiar. The hair, the rimless rectangular glasses, the smile … she was a dead ringer for Sarah Palin.

  “That’s not altogether accidental,” she said in a deep, conspiratorial drawl, touching my forearm playfully. “I have an insurance agency out in rural Kentucky, so lookin’ like Sarah Palin is not a bad thing.”

  As Jeremy shot, Marcey introduced me to Ed Varner, father of the sport of subgun. Varner was fit and tanned, wearing a red golf shirt with a submachine gun silk-screened on the breast and the kind of stylish mirrored sunglasses that impart an animatronic starship-trooper look that a certain type of guy enjoys. “We started it twenty-five years ago because we worried that the government might ask, ‘Why do you need submachine guns?’ ” he said. “It might not be enough to tell the government that we collect them or like to shoot them. We thought it was important to be able to say, ‘Well, we compete with subguns.’ ”

  If the path to legitimacy in America ran through competition, I could imagine the next frontier: Claymore mines, perhaps, or hand grenade matches, with divisions for unassisted hurling and for rocket-propelled launchers.

  There was a lot to subgunning, Varner insisted. Running a course with a loaded submachine gun required a nervous system that could sustain a surgeon’s touch on the trigger during a whole-body bear hug of a bucking dynamo. And then there were the nonshooting skills: How fast could you swap magazines? How fast could you clear a jam? How well had you maintained your firearm and selected—or made—ammunition for it? Most of all, subgun called for a cool head. In a split-second lapse in concentration, you could kill several spectators and the poor son of a bitch holding the timer.

  I nodded politely, but what I was thinking was, Sure. If what you want is a test of physical agility, marksmanship, small-motor control, and judgment, there are plenty of ways to find that without a submachine gun. If the four-thousand-to-forty-thousand-dollar price tag wasn’t discouraging enough, there was the bureaucratic hassle of acquiring one, the precautions needed to store and transport it, and the ordeal of getting the ATF’s permission every time you wanted to take it across state lines. Want to test your physical agility and small-motor control? Try Ping-Pong.

  I didn’t say that, of course. It was clear that competition was only part of it. Like Robert and the machine-gun enthusiasts in Arizona, the Knob Creek competition was about love of the gun. It was about getting together with other enthusiasts to look over one another’s firearms, discuss their history, debate how they worked best, see where their technology was going, and have fun using them. That I totally understood. If becoming expert in the safe and accurate handling of firearms set a person apart, doing so with a submachine gun made a man—or a woman—a gun-guy Jedi. And ever since popping that stick of dynamite at the Wikieup shoot, I’d been carrying the deliciously guilty secret that few inanimate objects are sexier or more fun to play with than a hot tommy gun.

  Marcey and Jeremy were soul mates and lovers, but most of all they were playmates. From their first date, they’d liked big, noisy, gasoline-powered fun, the kind that messed up Marcey’s hair and stained their clothes—ear-shattering dirt-track meets, a gigantic Honda touring motorcycle, ATVs, a big Checkmate water-skiing boat, and a vintage Shelby Cobra that could blow the doors off anything on the road. Between Marcey’s insurance agency and the mining-equipment company Jeremy had started with his dad, money was never a problem, and because the doctors had told them that children weren’t in their future, neither was time. Weekends were played at top, four-barrel volume—bombing around Kentucky’s winding back roads, steering chopped-up cars around a dirt track, or roaring through the woods. In the first seven years of their marriage, guns were just about the one noisy toy that didn’t figure into their fun. Jeremy would hunt deer and bobcat in the fall, but then he’d lock away his rifles and not think about them again.

  In 2006, he was at the bank discussing a loan for his business when Cliff, his banker, got up from the desk and closed the office door with a mischievous smile. “Look at this here,” Cliff said. From the closet, he took an AR-15 and put it in Jeremy’s hands.

  For a gearhead like Jeremy, the AR-15 was a bar of candy. He loved the way the thing snapped apart and fit together; he admired the small number of moving parts and its limitless fungibility. “Come by the gun club Saturday,” Cliff said. “We got a match.”

  Jeremy and Marcey hadn’t known there was a gun club up there at the end of Barnhill Road. As they p
ulled in, the place looked more like a genteel horse farm than the roar-and-fume venues where they usually played. Vast, grassy ranges stretched in every direction, with neat, sun-shaded shooting platforms at the head of each. Men—and a few women—were stretched out on the platforms, aiming rifles downrange. Others stood laughing and talking, holding rifles in cases. But for the occasional snap of a gunshot, it was quiet enough to hear birds singing.

  Holding hands, Marcey and Jeremy made their way around the periphery of the action, unsure of the protocols. The folks they were used to at ATV parks and dirt tracks could be a pretty rough bunch—macho, swaggering, harshly competitive, and frequently inebriated. Who knew what gun people were like?

  “Hey!” A fit older man in a tight golf shirt and ball cap smiled broadly, hand outstretched. “Glad to have you.” He introduced himself as Pete and explained the different stages of the match—one hundred, two hundred, and three hundred yards, shot prone, kneeling, sitting, and standing. “Like to join in?”

  “I don’t have a rifle.”

  Pete laughed. “One thing we’re not short of here is rifles. You can use one of mine.”