Gun Guys

by Dan Baum

  “Scary into them?”

  “No, no. It was always just ‘Come on, boy, come shoot this gun.’” He laughed. “I guess I didn’t catch the bug.”

  “Where you from?”

  “ ’Cross the river.” Meaning: Kentucky.

  “You don’t hunt?”

  “Oh, yeah, but I bow hunt.”

  “Really.”

  “There’s a lot more to it. You got to get closer. A rifle, it’s, you see a deer and bang—game over. With a bow, you got to stalk, and get right up on them.”

  “How’d you get into it?”

  “I gun hunted with my dad, but when I started hunting with friends, they all bow hunted. And I got into Western Extreme. You watch that?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “On the Outdoor Channel. Check it out.” His wife shooed the girls into the tent, and a television came on. For the first time, I noticed a wire running from an RV hookup box across the grass and into their tent. We said good night, and Mark joined his family for an episode of 10 Things I Hate About You.

  Cincinnati was home to so many Germans by 1861 that it raised entirely German-speaking regiments for the Union Army. By all accounts, they did Ohio proud, their guttural battle cry and efficient ferocity raising hell among the rebels from the first bayonet charge of the war. Those who survived came home to organize, in 1866, the first Cincinnati Schützenfest.

  Their schützen rifles could never have been confused with weapons; they looked more like a cross between a firearm and a cello. Great swooping curls of polished wood surrounded an extra-long octagonal barrel. A hooked lever operated a massive falling-block breech. An elaborate rear sight rose high from the tang like a railroad signal. And they fired a tiny bullet. They were entirely for target sport, as different from Army muskets as ballet dancers were from coal miners.

  By the time I got to Cincinnati, an organization called the Catholic Kolping Society was hosting the Schützenfest. Kolping societies started in nineteenth-century Germany as networks of hostels where Catholic journeymen working far from home could find a clean bed, good food, and the spiritual guidance of a priest. The Cincinnati Kolping had grown far beyond that, into a youth-sports and civic booster club with a vast complex of meeting halls and athletic fields carved from the forest. Schützenfest was the Kolping’s annual bash.

  Margaret and I were traveling with Dahon bicycles folded into the trunk of the Camry, and as we pedaled to the Kolping Center, we could hear the festival from ten minutes out, especially the tubas. Families with toddlers and strollers streamed toward the entrance to pay their three dollars. Up close, Schützenfest looked and smelled a lot like a state fair, the hot, damp air heavy with meat smoke, sugar, and perspiration. It was obvious, though, that this fair was German, because instead of funnel cakes and corn dogs, the booths along the midway offered Limburger-and-onion sandwiches, grilled mettwursts, and goetta, a mild patty sausage of pork, beef, pinhead oats, and bay leaf, said to be available only within fifty miles of Cincinnati. It came on rye bread, and when I asked for mustard, the big-armed lady behind the counter cried, “Wha-a-a-at?” and handed me a squeeze bottle of Log Cabin syrup. It was good, like breakfast, but while I was sure it was authentic, I wasn’t sure it would keep me from venturing farther than fifty miles from Cincinnati. The Limburger-and-onion sandwich, though, was inspired. Margaret asked for a bite, and I practically had to wrestle her to the ground to get it back.

  There must have been six or seven thousand people milling about, maybe a third of them wearing traditional German attire. The women were ornamental in ballooning dirndl skirts, push-up bodices, and aprons, with their hair in Heidi braids. The men wore lederhosen—and the vaguely sinister, self-satisfied air I associated with them. Most also wore green felt Tyrolean hats covered with ornamental cloisonné pins and floppy gamsbarts, the goat beard that blooms skyward like a huge shaving brush. Trudging around like that on a steamy day must have been rough. No wonder everybody was drinking so much beer.

  A dirndled fräulein, breasts thrust to the top of her bodice like cream in a cannoli, shoved beneath our noses a fragrant stack of hot pretzels, impaled on a wooden dowel. They were crunchy without, chewy within, and delicious. Margaret wouldn’t think of ordering beer mid-morning but was happy to drink half of mine. A man staggered by in a T-shirt that read THE LIVER IS EVIL AND MUST BE PUNISHED.

  A jagdhorn band, in full deutsche regalia, raised their curved hunting horns to their lips and played a stirring and lugubrious call from the Alps. Then an oompah band set up, so perfectly outfitted that it looked like a tin windup version of itself. It played a medley of German tunes, including one that was oddly familiar. I stopped to listen, and they circled back to it: the theme from Hogan’s Heroes. A Schwaben Schuhplattler troupe danced its way onto the floor in front of the band, rhythmically stamping and slapping their shoes until one young man turned the color of Pepto-Bismol and tottered as if he was going to collapse of heatstroke. It was altogether about as full-throated an ethnic festival as I’d attended, more German, say, than New York’s Feast of San Gennaro is Italian or Denver’s Cinco de Mayo is Mexican. These people were into it. The muggy heat, though, made it feel like a festival of German colonists in the Amazon.

  At the far end of the big, woods-shaded patio was a metal pole, on the top of which a carved wooden eagle spread two-foot wings. He was a beauty—holding a scepter and an apple in his claws, glowering downward, every feather on his outstretched wings vivid in the dappled sunlight. He wore a radiant crown and was obviously the product of many hours of painstaking work. We were here to watch men shoot him to pieces.

  The rifles lay on a table—no longer the gorgeous schützen rifles of yore but ordinary Remington bolt-action single-shot .22s. Paul Weinkamp, youthful in a Tyrolean hat with gamsbart, was filling plastic drinking cups with cartridges, and I asked how many shots he thought it would take to shoot the eagle apart.

  “About three thousand,” he said. “But it depends on the wood. Last year, the guy who carved it used poplar, and it kind of shredded instead of shattered. By the end, there was a big brush up there.”

  The rite of mauling a bird of prey, as Paul told it, commemorated the long-ago heroism of a hunter who, with a single shot, saved a baby from being carried off in an eagle’s talons. It was a mystery to me why this story, whose protagonist and date nobody could remember, should have inspired an annual festival throughout the German-speaking world. This wasn’t shooting to commemorate the hunting of food for the table, or shooting to commemorate warfare. It was shooting to commemorate defense against wildlife—an odd type of shooting around which to build an annual festival. My guess was that men liked shooting things apart with guns, and needed some pleasant folklore to win their wives’ approval. That the story involved saving a baby was the giveaway.

  A drumroll interrupted us, and we all stood for “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Deutschlandlied”—the German national anthem, which is “Deutschland Über Alles” without the Nazi-tinged words of the original first verse. Then Paul loudly introduced three florid, smiling Kolping officers, who stepped up for the honor of the first shots. Wearing Tyrolean hats and clutching steins of beer the size of paper-towel rolls, they looked like burghers from a George Grosz painting. Each set his stein on a shelf beside his cups of cartridges, brought the little rifle to his shoulder, pointed high in the forest, and began firing.

  Wood chips came flying off the eagle with a racket impressive for such small guns, like firecrackers at a Chinese New Year parade. Nobody wore hearing protectors or, for that matter, shooting glasses. But the eagle was a good ways off, and the splinters drifted harmlessly to the forest floor. When the officers finished, the eagle showed little damage.

  This was going to take a while.

  A long line of men, members of the men-only schützenverein, or shooting club, had been waiting, and now they cycled through the firing line, three abreast. A great shout went up as the last piece of crown tumbled through the p
oplar leaves. As we understood it, those who shot off the last piece of crown, the last piece of scepter, the left wing, and the right wing would each get a prize. But he who knocked the last shard of wood off the pole would be crowned king of Kolping for the whole year—a dubious honor, as we would come to learn.

  We found a place at a long table in the deep shade with two sweaty brothers named Tom and John, who wore T-shirts that read LIVING WITH A GERMAN BUILDS CHARACTER! and I GOT SCHÜTZENFACED AT SCHÜTZENFEST. They were eager to explain to out-of-towners that just because Cincinnati looked dull and unsophisticated didn’t mean locals didn’t know how to rock out—within reason. “It’s like that book, The Millionaire Next Door. People here live below their means. But they party! The beer consumption, the sausage consumption—it’s off the charts. People here know how to party, but they don’t get out of hand!”

  “Look! You got kids here! Families! But we don’t get out of hand!”

  “Hitler, you know, didn’t want to fight in the west,” Tom said suddenly. “All he wanted was lebensraum for the German people.”

  Margaret and I stared at him for a long moment. Where did that come from?

  Maybe it was the heat, or the beer, or the racket of the guns. Margaret suddenly stood, cocked her head toward me, and casually said to them, “Dan here? Jewish.” Then, to me: “Gotta pee.” And off she walked.

  The brothers flew into a panic. “I’ve got a Jewish friend! Great guy!” “They say the DA of Cincinnati is Jewish! Great guy!”

  A shout went up; someone had shot off the last piece of the scepter. A hearty man in full deutsche garb plunked himself down next to me and thrust out his hand. “Mike Rademacher,” he said, with Babbitt-like vigor. He had a Vandyke that was starting to whiten and brown eyes that sparkled behind heavy glasses. His hat was so coated with cloisonné pins, and sported a gamsbart so enormous, that it was a miracle he could hold his head upright.

  “That’s one hell of a hat,” I said.

  He laughed, sweat pouring down his face. “In my family, ethnic was uncool. We kids would ask where our family was from, and my grandfather would say, ‘That depends who won the last war.’ I grew up with no Germanness.”

  “So how did you discover your inner kraut?”

  “I married Kathy, whose grandfather was chief genealogist for the Mayflower Society! They could trace their family back to the year 800. For them, family history was everything. I looked at all that and said, ‘Our kids aren’t going to know anything of my side.’ So I started connecting with my German past.” He took a long pull of beer and wiped his beard with the back of his hand. “Kathy and I got invited to a polka dance at Kolping in 1988 and started attending functions. We learned to drink Jägermeister, and we got acquainted with senior members. They’d say, ‘You’re a Rademacher and you don’t speak the language? What’s the matter with you?’ ”

  Mike was a member of the schützenverein and had already taken his mandatory shots at the eagle. The last thing he wanted, he said, was to win the contest and become king. “It’ll cost you about twenty thousand dollars, if you do it right. You throw a lot of parties. My wife says I can shoot for king once we’ve made our younger daughter’s last tuition payment. But then someone will want to get married, and I’ll have to put it off again.” He took a sip of beer. “It’s okay. I can go to my grave without being king. It would be a long year.”

  “So why shoot at all?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a social thing. Want to see the shooting room?”

  Of course. He took Margaret and me inside to a long room that looked more like a stretched classroom than a rifle range, with wood-paneled walls lined with books and framed certificates. At one end was a sloping steel wall over a sand pit: the bullet trap. At the other end was a wooden countertop. “Practice opens at six, and we start shooting at seven-thirty after everybody’s had a few beers,” Mike said. “Men only in here. You and your five-man team shoot once. You put your belly to the table and you shoot standing. You get all the time you want to shoot eight shots, of which the top six count.”

  “You’re drinking beer while you’re shooting,” Margaret said.

  “No beer in this room; when you’re not shooting you’re out in the fellowship halls with the wives. You want to shoot early so you’re not drunk.” Shooting nights were once a month.

  Mike didn’t even like guns, he said. Just about the only ones he’d ever shot were the club’s .22s. “I have no tradition of seeing people go shooting. I like hiking. I like the outdoors. But buying a gun and shooting is a serious choice. You have to be shown how. I never thought it was attractive or necessary. In a life of limited choices, am I going to shoot guns?”

  “Yet this you like.”

  He spread his hands. “It’s like Fred and Barney at the Water Buffalo Lodge. I like the shooting, but mostly it’s a social thing. We drink beer. We smoke cigars. We talk. And we shoot. It’s helped connect me with my German heritage. And there are some great moments. One shooting night in June 1994, the fiftieth anniversary of D-day, a friend was telling the story of his father, a merchant marine who was bringing men to shore, how scary it was knowing every German up on the cliff was aiming at him. So he’s telling this, and from down the bar an old-timer calls”—here Mike put on a heavy German accent—“ ‘Yeah? Vell vat do you think it vas like to look out and see all those fucking ships?’ ”

  Mike laughed. “Everybody went silent, and we went back to our beers.”

  Getting back to the beers seemed to be the point of the schützenverein, not the shooting. Three-gun had been real competition. Here, the rifles were really just bigger, noisier barroom darts—fun things to play with while drinking beer and telling stories with the fellas. It wasn’t exactly shuffleboard, though. Because it involved guns, it divided the men from the women. We’d evolved enough as a society to understand that if the gunplay was about skill and scoring points, we couldn’t very well exclude the women any more than we could exclude blacks or the disabled. But if it was all about Fred and Barney at the Water Buffalo Lodge, then the rifles of schützen could be the equivalent of the needles at a sewing circle or the eyeliner at an Iona Cosmetics party—tools for giving a single sex cover for enjoying its own good company. For all the lederhosen and cloisonné hat pins, the fact that schützen gave Mike Rademacher “a chance to connect” with his German heritage seemed incidental to the pleasure of hanging with the fellas.

  We walked out into the social hall—a vaulted room with exposed beams in faux Bavarian-castle style, draped with the colorful flags of the German states. At big round tables, families were bravely hunched over plates of steaming sauerbraten and spaetzle. If I’d tried to eat such winter food on a stifling day like this, I’d have seized up like a tube of caulk.

  When we reached the garden, everybody who had been lounging at the tables was standing, crowded at the rail, watching eagerly. Next to me, a teetering young man wore a beer-sloshed T-shirt silk-screened with a picture of Jesus over the words IF YOU DON’T SIN, I DIED IN VAIN. All that remained of the eagle was a tiny matchstick. Instead of three men firing at once, the shooters were taking turns, one bullet at a time. Pop! Pop! Pop! A roar went up as a toothpick fluttered earthward: Long live the king! We moved in a solid wave—hundreds of us—toward the beer kegs, where the king was hosting free beer for everybody, the start of his twenty-thousand-dollar year.

  13. HE UPPED, I UPPED

  Affluent Americans care not one whit what happens to their trashier neighbors, and it is hypocritical, at best, to suggest that we are improving their lives by depriving them of their guns.

  —Robert Sherrill, The Saturday Night Special, 1973

  For a guy who didn’t look the part and had to depend on camouflage, I’d been having pretty good luck getting people to talk about their gun lives. People like sharing their hobbies, and that proved true even of conservative gun guys who knew my politics. Many shared a belief that liberals and the media were institutionally hostile to guns and gun peop
le. Most of them were delighted finally to be approached.

  But not all.

  That book I’d found at the Grand Island gun show, about caching guns, made me want to learn more about why people would take an expensive firearm and bury it. On AR15.com, I found a forum devoted to burying guns in preparation for what participants called TEOTWAWKI—the end of the world as we know it—an acronym that, pronounced as a word, sounded like an upstate New York summer camp. The guys on the forum discussed TEOTWAWKI and SHTF—shit hits the fan—coming in the form of bird flu, the circuit-killing electromagnetic pulse of an ionospheric North Korean nuke, the eruption of the Yellowstone caldera, an asteroid strike, peak oil, nuclear war, and starvation brought about by climate change. None of which were beyond the realm of possibility. What puzzled me was why guns topped the list of things one might need at such a time. I’d been through the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and had never felt the need for a gun. Despite the purple press reports about marauding predators and babies being raped in the Superdome, people at the height of the disaster were a lot more focused on helping one another than on preying on one another. (Yes, I saw looting. But as Rebecca Solnit aptly writes in A Paradise Built in Hell, about the way disaster brings people together instead of turning them into savages, “Who cares if electronics are moving around without benefit of purchase when children’s corpses are floating in filthy water and stranded grandmothers are dying of heat and dehydration?”) It turned out that just about the only wanton killing during the Katrina disaster was done by the New Orleans Police Department.

  That, of course, was the other possibility cited by the “Arfcom army” on AR15.com: that government, in the form of the police, the Army, or the black-helicopter forces of tyranny, would become the people’s enemy and start rounding up all the guns. As with the teachers of my concealed-carry class, the gun guys on Arfcom made it hard to delineate between preparing for disaster to strike and praying for disaster to strike. After all, if you’ve gone to the expense and trouble to buy and bury guns and ammunition and then you never need them, you’ve wasted a lot of time and treasure.