by Dan Baum
Jeremy and Marcey glanced at each other; ask a guy at an ATV track to ride his rig and you might get your face torn off.
Pete led them to a bench and introduced them around. “Welcome!” “Glad you’re here!” On the bench lay several black AR-15s. Jeremy noticed that every time Pete touched one, the first thing he did was open the chamber to make sure it wasn’t loaded. Even if he’d touched it only seconds before, he ran through the same routine. As a guy who made his living serving safety-minded coal miners, Jeremy was impressed.
Pete gave him a quick rundown of how the rifle worked and said he could start on the one-hundred-yard range. “How about you?” he asked Marcey.
“No! I mean, thank you, but not this time. I think I’ll just watch.”
Pete led Jeremy through the stages, adjusting his position with little nudges and teaching him to breathe properly. The more Marcey watched, sniffing the burned cordite, her ears a-crackle with the gunfire, the sorrier she was that she’d passed up a chance to shoot.
“I think I’m going to get me one of these,” Jeremy told her when he was done, placing the warm AR-15 in her hands. She sighted down the barrel. “And you know what I want for Christmas,” she said.
They each bought a bare-bones AR-15 and started shooting the monthly match at Tri-County. Pretty soon, they were driving to regional matches in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Indiana and finding everywhere the same inclusive, tender community of sport shooters. Something about the open, thoughtful people and the clean, disciplined geometry of shooting got under their skin.
They bought more guns, which meant a bigger safe, and store-bought ammunition started getting expensive. So Jeremy set himself up with two $2,500 cartridge-loading machines, and after working out the mathematics of bullet weight and powder grain, he’d sit down after supper and crank out six hundred specially formulated rounds an hour, for a few pennies apiece. Given the cost of factory-made ammunition and how much practicing Jeremy liked to do, he’d make back his investment quickly. But more than that, the techno-geek in him loved having that much more control over his shooting. Craving more range time, he hired a bulldozer to level a swath of forest behind their house—his own hundredyard range, with no range fees and no wait times. He and Marcey realized one day that it had been months since they’d taken the motorcycle, the ATVs, the boat, the dirt-track car, or the Shelby Cobra from the garage.
They were sitting around one afternoon, drinking sweet tea at a match in southern Indiana, when a wiry guy in his twenties started talking about “running and gunning.” He was passionate about shooting on the move, instead of standing still or lying down.
“Look here,” he said, pulling some gun cases from the back of his truck. Inside were the weirdest guns Jeremy and Marcey had ever seen. One was obviously an AR-15, but it was anodized red, not black. Its magazine well was flared like the bell of a trumpet; Jeremy could see instantly that the shape would make it faster to reload. The pistol, too, had a flared magazine well. Its grip was unnaturally large, and its slide was extra long, perforated with a row of round, space-age cutouts; riding along the top was some kind of weird electronic optic. As for the pump-action shotgun, its stock was a bright, flashy white instead of dull black, and on the underside, a big blue scoop, like a shark’s fin, was supposed to guide shells into the magazine faster. It was like getting a glimpse of Buck Rogers’s arsenal.
Jeremy and Marcey looked at each other and smiled.
I’d arranged to meet up with them again at the third annual Blue Ridge Mountain 3-Gun Championship, in Bowling Green. The weather was hot and steamy as I made my way down U.S. 31W from Louisville through the tourist-brochure scenery of central Kentucky—storybook farms, lush meadows, gamboling horses, and thick stands of hardwood forest. On the radio, Miranda Lambert sang her hit “Gunpowder and Lead,” about an abused woman loading her shotgun, lighting a cigarette, and waiting for her man to come home so she could “show him what a little girl’s made of.” Gun country-rock: perfect background music.
The Park Mammoth Resort had once been the region’s premier golf destination, before Interstate 24 siphoned traffic away, and from the parking lot it still looked grand. A towering stone arch framed the front door of the hotel, and perfectly manicured swaths of lawn were visible beyond a line of oaks. Inside, though, the hotel’s decline was evident in the worn carpet, peeling paint, and dim lighting. A couple of young brothers had recently bought the resort with an eye toward renovating; they were transforming it into Rockcastle, the first destination shooting resort in the United States. The Blue Ridge Mountain 3-Gun was their kickoff.
In the lobby, big men wearing Lycra jerseys emblazoned with corporate logos—Bushnell, DPMS, MGM Targets, Adams Arms—laughed and called to one another in a giddy, wifeless way, delighted to be coming together again. The Blue Ridge championship was one of many on a circuit they traveled all year long. On a roster tacked to the wall, the shooters had been divided into squads, each beginning on a different stage. An eager young man in a beige Park Mammoth golf shirt and cap put in my hands a map of the twenty stages, along with a rule book. If I hurried, he said, I could get to Stage 4 before Jeremy and Marcey’s squad started shooting.
The directions carried me up a dirt road into the woods. As a shooting resort, Rockcastle had a ways to go; the road was a rutted ribbon of mud. I parked and took a look at the license plates on the other cars and pickups. They’d come from as far away as Michigan and Ontario—a thousand miles or more—to run and gun. To my great relief, the bumpers were mostly devoid of political bumper stickers—no KEEP HONKING, I’M RELOADING, no McCain-Palin, not even any NRA stickers. Might I have discovered an Elysium, a gathering of apolitical gun guys? The only potentially political sticker was plastered on two of the trucks: GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS. ESPECIALLY OUR SNIPERS.
Marcey and Jeremy were among the thirty-odd people milling around the start of Stage 4. Jeremy had his starship-trooper look going, wearing slick Wiley X glasses and a gray-and-white jersey bearing the logo of Benelli shotguns; he’d arranged to get guns at a discount in exchange for wearing the logo, which made him a semi-pro. Benelli’s reputation depended, in part, on how well he shot today, and he looked nervous. He didn’t notice when I waved to him. He was in a kind of trance, walking the stage with his hands up in shooting position, twitching his trigger finger and whispering “pah, pah,” as he planned each step, each swivel, looking for the most efficient combination of twists and footsteps.
Marcey, in a blue windbreaker over a hot pink polo shirt, looked fabulous. She gave me a big, relaxed hug; she was shooting entirely for her own amusement. “I am geetered out with excitement,” she said. “This is a huge match for Jeremy.” Around her waist, a thick Cordura belt held a long stainless-steel space-ranger pistol—not in a holster but mounted on a kind of quick-release rack that made it faster to draw. The pistol was big and ungainly, nothing anyone would carry for self-defense. You wouldn’t want to stand in front of it, but by Greg Hepp’s definition, you couldn’t really call it a weapon. The belt also held an organ-pipe array of shotgun shells and two plastic pouches for pistol magazines, stuffed with shiny brass cartridges.
“I’m so happy Jeremy’s switched over to the Benelli,” she said in the same breathless veranda drawl other Southern women use to discuss their drapes. “In his last match, he was having jams, and I said, ‘That thing is a boat anchor, honey; you need to get rid of it.’ ”
“What are you shooting?” I asked her.
“Look over there in the rack. You can tell mine.” She walked me over, and it was like approaching an Army gun rack while high on LSD. All the rifles were recognizably AR-15s, but each was wildly distorted by swooping grips, stocks, and free-float tubes and decked out in colors the Lord never intended weapons to be—yellow, teal, scarlet. Marcey’s was actually one of the plainest—all black but for the telltale feminine swirl of makeup on the stock. I got down close. It smelled like a girl’s gun.
The range officer called us to orde
r and explained the stage in the faux-military manner often adopted around guns, presumably on the assumption that unless one used a tone stern enough to make men’s testicles retract, they’d devolve into twelve-year-old boys. “Shooters will start out with pistol and shotgun fully loaded, chambers empty! Shotgun leaning against this here stump and pistol holstered!” And so on. The rifle was to be positioned downrange, to be picked up after all the pistol and shotgun targets were hit. Shotgun, pistol, rifle: the holy trinity of three-gun.
Jeremy went first. After an intricate ceremony of loading and safing his guns, holstering the pistol, and leaning the shotgun just so, he stood, rotated his shoulders and neck like a boxer in the ring, and nodded at the range officer. Another man raised his arm toward the back of Jeremy’s head; for a second it looked as if he was going to execute him. But it was a timer he held, not a pistol. The timer beeped, and Jeremy snapped into motion.
He snatched the shotgun from the stump and blasted left and right. Blam! Blam! The targets, clay pigeons held in wire frames, shattered satisfyingly. Marcey and I walked along behind him as he advanced down the clearing, wasting not a millimeter of motion. He swiveled on his hips as he walked, left blam! right blam! left blam! right blam! He hit every target, but really, I thought, shotguns are made for hitting running or flying things, not stationary targets twenty-five feet away, so how hard was it? The second I asked myself the question, Jeremy answered it: The shotgun part of the contest was less about shooting than gun handling—specifically, how fast a competitor could reload. After eight shots, Jeremy’s left hand zipped between his belt and the belly of the gun faster than I could follow it; it looked as if the gun was sucking up shells. Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! He finished with the shotgun targets, plunged the hot gun muzzle-down into the blue barrel, and unhooked the pistol from his belt in one fluid motion. Both arms straight out, pivoting left and right, he nailed every steel target with a satisfying plink! as his legs carried him forward, smooth and precise as an icon in a video game. “If you miss one, that’s a penalty,” Marcey said in my ear. “If you forget to shoot at one completely, that’s a bigger one.”
Jeremy plinked the last of twenty-one pistol targets, cleared his pistol, set it in a wooden box, and swung the rifle from where it lay up into shooting position. Another reason for mixing in the shotgun, I realized: His hands had to shed the muscle memory of the other long gun and adapt instantly to this one. Jeremy crisply put a bullet through each of the rifle targets—stylized squared-off silhouettes, made of brown cardboard and spread through the tall grass like a platoon of robots waiting in ambush. He ejected his magazine, wrenched open the rifle’s action, and yelled, “Clear!”—a three-gun rock star.
Soldier of Fortune, the magazine for mercenaries and mercenary wannabes, is said to have held the first formal three-gun competition in the 1980s. To shooters who’d been taught to stand as still as possible and concentrate on a single target, running and gunning was a revelation. By the time I was watching it, the sport had branched formally into three-gun, subgun, and two different categories of practical pistol shooting (involving such arcane conventions as whether, in reloading, an empty magazine had to be returned to a pocket or could be dropped). There were also the historical categories of Cowboy Action Shooting—basically three-gun played with period guns and Western costume—and Zoot Shooting, which called for participants to dress in spats and fedoras or flapper dresses and wield the 1920s-vintage Colts, sawed-offs, and tommy guns that John Dillinger might have used. I’d tried a little practical pistol shooting in Boulder—with my first concealed-carry range officer, the anesthesiologist. We did things like open a door with one hand and shoot with the other while passing through, snatching up a gun from a desk and shooting while seated, and scooting from station to station while felling steel targets and reloading on the run. It was a lot of fun—so much so, in fact, that I found it pretty hard to go back to standing still in a lane, popping off at a single target.
Running and gunning was a marksmanship sport, no doubt about that. But there was no denying that it was also practice for joining the military, a SWAT team, or an end-of-the-world gang with Mel Gibson. “What’s this all about, really?” I asked Marcey and Jeremy the next morning at breakfast in the lodge. “Is it a sport, or are you practicing to kill people?”
“We don’t have any thoughts of killing,” Marcey said, digging to the bottom of a plate piled with eggs, grits, and country ham. “It’s a sport, like tennis or golf. That’s why we call them ‘guns.’ We don’t call them ‘weapons.’ ”
I was pretty sure that the U.S. Army shooting team competing against Marcey and Jeremy, in their matching yellow Go Army jerseys, saw their guns as weapons. Ditto the many cops and deputy sheriffs who attended—some at their departments’ expense—to polish combat-shooting skills.
“What we do out on the course would get you killed in a gunfight,” Jeremy said, concentrating on his iPhone, on which he seemed to be doing calculations.
“What do you mean?”
He looked up. “We’re not doing any of the things you do in a gunfight. We’re not assessing threats and engaging them in order. We’re not finding cover. We’re not shouting commands.”
“Or running away,” said a voice on my other side, “which is the best thing you can do in a gunfight.” I turned, and a stocky man with a craggy, copper-colored face put out a hand like a catcher’s mitt, introducing himself as Clark Kennedy. “Any time you’re practicing speed and accuracy, it’s going to help you if something real happens,” he said. “But hell, out here we’re dropping mags! You don’t do that in a gunfight in the military, because ammunition isn’t issued in magazines! You’re going to need those puppies.” He leaned across me and asked Jeremy, “What you coming up with?”
Still poking at his iPhone, Jeremy said, “I think I’m going to hold two feet high and two feet left.”
He was figuring out how to make the longest shot of the day—a 560-yarder coming up at Stage 3—using an app called Ballistic: Field Tactical Edition ($19.99). He rotated the phone so I could see what he was doing. “I put in the characteristics of my ammo, plus wind speed, wind direction, wind angle, relative humidity, our altitude here, and upwind velocity. What this is telling me is to hold two feet high and two feet left.”
“You really think you’re going to hit a target at 560 yards?” I asked. Jeremy and Clark both laughed.
“That ain’t far. Clark and I shoot sniper matches out to two thousand yards.”
“You guys are snipers?”
“No. We shoot sniper matches. Super long-range.”
“Two thousand yards is more than a mile,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” Clark said, his smile crinkling up his face like an Indian chief’s. Jeremy gestured at his iPhone.
“Shooting that far, you also got to punch in spin drift and Coriolis.”
“Which are?”
“If your bullet spins clockwise, spin drift will carry it off to the right some. At 2,200 yards, spin drift can take you off three feet at target. Coriolis is the rotation of the earth.”
“Get out of here.”
“Real long shots, you got to figure it in, because by the time your bullet reaches the target, the earth will have moved some.”
They told me the story of Corporal Craig Harrison, a British sniper who in November 2010 killed two Taliban fighters with two consecutive shots at a mile and a half. Clark said, “He was using the Accuracy International L115A3 in .338 Lapua”—a high-tech rifle that looks like a deck gun from a Klingon battle cruiser. “He did all his calculations and aimed six feet high and two feet to the left.”
“The bullet took two and a half seconds to arrive,” Jeremy said. “In that much time, the earth moved enough to affect the shot. If he hadn’t figured in Coriolis, he’d have missed.”
“So what’s with all this sniper business?” I asked, remembering those GOD BLESS OUR SNIPERS bumper stickers. “Pretty hard to say your sport isn’t about killin
g if you’re going to call them ‘sniper matches.’ ”
“It’s just a name,” Clark said. He sat back in his chair and peered down his nose at me. “But what you got against snipers?”
“Well, it’s one thing to face an enemy in battle and another to hide and pick people off at safe distance.” I was old enough to remember Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Whitman, and Life magazine’s chilling photo renderings of what they saw through their telescopic sights.
“Which would you rather?” Clark asked. “Put a missile into a building and kill a bunch of kids along with your bad guy? Or send in a sniper to shoot one bullet? A sniper gets the guy that needs killing and doesn’t touch anybody else. If you don’t like collateral damage, you got to love your snipers.”
My mind drifted to the second of those two Taliban fighters. What must he have been thinking when his friend slumped over—and two seconds later, when the sound of the shot arrived? Or was he dead by the time the sound of the first shot arrived? “It must be terrifying,” I said, “to have a bullet come out of nowhere.”
“That’s the whole idea,” Clark said. “One sniper shot can wreck the morale of a whole company—of a whole division. You want the enemy scared, not knowing where it’s safe to stand, not knowing when the next bullet’s coming in.”
“Imagine, though,” I said, “looking through the scope and seeing the face of the man you’re going to kill.”
“That’s not the worst thing,” Clark said. “The worst thing is lying in your own shit for five days waiting for the shot.”
Jeremy and Marcey shot five stages that day. Some required only two guns—pistol and shotgun, say, or rifle and pistol—and some all three. One diabolical stage called on shooters to hunt down and blast shotgun targets hiding in tall brush, then hit a rifle target rotating on a big wheel; another had them move through and around an old cinder-block building while shooting pistol targets, like cops in a hostage situation. Most of the shooters were men, but several squads had at least one woman, including a skinny sixteen-year-old girl being coached by her dad. She was awesome—lithe, quick, and coolheaded; not a girl to mess with. Her dad, a big, solid guy who asked me not to interview or identify her, said he couldn’t think of a better way than three-gun to get a girl through her teenage years. “You got to take and put so much discipline into this, you can’t be thinking of getting into trouble,” he said. “She’s got friends drinking, and messing around, and she’s not into any of that. After school and weekends, she’s on the range with me, with her mind focused.”