Gun Guys

by Dan Baum

  It was ignored.

  Not by JPFO’s faithful, of course. They loved it. But the media—even the conservative media—didn’t touch it. Aaron was floored. He produced, next, a series of comic books about a kindly white-haired man named Gran’pa Jack, which included such titles as Will “Gun Control” Make You Safer?, The United Nations Is Killing Your Freedoms!, Is America Becoming a Police State?, “Gun Control” Is Racist! and Do Gun Prohibitionists Have a Mental Problem? He also self-published a novel, The Mitzvah—about a Jew who awakens to the cause and arms himself—and commissioned an attorney friend to write Dial 911 and Die: The Shocking Truth About the Police Protection Myth.

  Then Aaron stumbled upon what he felt was the greatest imaginable smoking gun: a letter from Lewis C. Coffin, law librarian at the Library of Congress, to Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, on July 12, 1968. “Dear Senator Dodd: Your request of July 2, 1968, addressed to the Legislative Reference Service, for the translation of several German laws, has been referred to the Law Library for attention.” Dodd, who had been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War—and who had been pushing for gun control since President Kennedy’s assassination—had asked the Library of Congress to translate Hitler’s 1938 gun-control laws into English. Aaron couldn’t believe it. Four months after Dodd got his translation, Congress passed his Gun Control Act of 1968, the first big federal gun law. When Aaron got ahold of the Library of Congress’s translation and compared it with the American law, he was aghast at the similarities. Both assumed that gun ownership was a government-granted privilege. Both required people to prove they were “reliable” before buying a gun. Both prohibited certain classes of people from doing so. Both required store owners to keep gun-sale records; the Nazis had used those records to round up privately held guns. Dodd seemed to have lifted whole phrases of the Nazi law word for word.

  Zelman put together a book—“Gun Control”: Gateway to Tyranny—that opened with a photograph of Coffin’s letter to Dodd, so that nobody could question his linking of Nazi law to the Gun Control Act. On facing pages, he printed a translation of the Nazi law and the relevant text of the 1968 law so that readers could compare them. What could be clearer? America’s premier gun-control law was based on laws the Nazis had written to disarm the Jews before exterminating them. It was a solid-gold slam dunk.

  Nobody paid attention.

  Aaron sent it to Fox News. Nothing. He sent it to the Washington Times. Nothing. He sent it to Glenn Beck’s producers. “We’ll get back to you.” But they never did. Even the NRA ignored it. Aaron thought he understood: If the country acknowledged the Nazi roots of gun control, it would have to scrap it, and nobody wanted to do that. Even the supposed opponents of gun control, like the NRA, got too much out of it.

  “He’s making two points,” I told Margaret that evening at the campsite as we boiled our cabbage and rice. “The first is that the gun is a symbol of how society regards the individual. To trust everybody with something that lethal is to bestow the ultimate in respect.”

  “You think that respect is warranted?” she asked. “Those guys shooting the rocks at Green River?”

  “I think Aaron would say that they acted like children with their guns because society treats them like children when it comes to guns.”

  She looked at me over the top of her glasses.

  “He wants to elevate society, I think, by elevating respect for the individual. He’d probably say it’s a slow process, but that you start by summoning everybody to his most responsible adult self.”

  “How about you summon your most responsible adult self and go get some water,” Margaret said, extending a jug. I hoofed it to the communal tap and back.

  “His other point is that people are going to try to slaughter each other, and the way you prevent that is by …”

  “Making sure everybody has guns.”

  “Well, yes. Like the old mutually assured destruction.”

  “How about nobody has guns?” Margaret asked. “Then this group can come throw rocks and that group can throw rocks back, until everybody gets tired.”

  The rice was finished. We ate.

  How about nobody has guns? It sounded good. No guns, no gun accidents. No guns, no gun murders. Two problems, though. One was that the country was saturated with guns, and they almost never wore out. Were government to impose the ultimate gun controller’s victory—a total ban on the manufacture, import, and sale of firearms—we’d still have about 270 million guns floating around—for decades. What if everybody were ordered to turn them in? Many wouldn’t. Then what? A nationwide door-to-door warrantless search?

  And even if we could somehow rid ourselves of guns, how much good would that do? Russia had a murder rate four times that of the United States, with no legal private guns in circulation. I didn’t know how they were killing each other, but clearly the Russians’ breathtaking murder rate had little to do with their gun laws. Maybe ditto our higher-than-average murder rate.

  The ubiquity of firearms in America tripped me up whenever I thought about ways to “control” them. The cold truth was that, given the number of guns in America and their longevity, there was no surefire way to keep guns from falling into the wrong hands. We could throw up obstacles—registration, waiting periods, background checks at gun shows—but would they do any good? Or rather—and this was a better way to ask the question—would they do enough good to make it worth alienating and enraging the 40 percent of Americans who liked guns enough to own them? Someone intent on evil would, for the next hundred years, probably be able to find a gun. And as Timothy McVeigh demonstrated so convincingly with his van full of heating oil and fertilizer—a gun wasn’t necessary.

  Maybe Aaron was on to something by trying to change how we thought about who we were as citizens and people, instead of how we regulated inanimate pieces of metal.

  At our last breakfast at the Mineshaft, Aaron seemed discouraged. “We have a Jewish newspaper in Milwaukee, the Chronicle, that’s written negative articles about me,” he said. “The Jewish Federation doesn’t like me. The ADL doesn’t like me.” He took a joyless sip of water. “At the shul we belong to now, I make a point of not talking about what I do, because there are Holocaust survivors there who argue with me, and I’m tired of having the argument. ‘Guns wouldn’t have made a difference,’ they say.” He shrugged, looking pained. “They won’t talk to me anymore.”

  He set down his water glass and drove a long forefinger into the table, leaning across his untouched eggs. “But you know, in all the time we’ve been doing this, nobody’s ever said, ‘Oh, Zelman, you’re wrong, and here’s the proof.’ Time after time, the gun laws were there. The laws were enforced. And the genocides happened. Bodies don’t lie. And people who think it can’t happen here? Ask Japanese Americans, the American Indians, the African Americans. They’ll tell you it can happen here, because it already has.”*

  * * *

  * Aaron Zelman died on December 21, 2010.

  15. HOGZILLA

  One does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted.

  —José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting

  Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.

  —Luke 22:36

  When I called the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department in January of 2011 to ask about pig-hunting regulations, the lady who answered the phone said, “There aren’t any.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You need a hunting license; a five-day will cost you forty-eight dollars.”

  “What’s the season?”

  “Year-round.”

  “What’s the bag limit?”

  “Ain’t none. Shoot all you want.”

  “Males? Females?”

  “Take them all, big and small.”

  “Wait. Have I reached the Texas Department of Wildlife?”

&nb
sp; “Yes, sir.”

  “Any restrictions on what kind of gun I can use?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do I have to wear orange?”

  “It’s a good idea, but not required.”

  “Time of day?”

  “Jack them at night with a spotlight for all we care. As long as you shoot a lot of them. What you want to do is take and shoot the sow first. The piglets will stand around for a minute, and you can pick all of them off, too.”

  She directed me to an online pamphlet called “The Feral Hog in Texas.” It read less like a wildlife primer than a multicount indictment in a death penalty case. It established straight off that hogs had no business running wild in Texas in the first place. They’d descended from barnyard stock that first escaped from settlers’ pens three hundred years ago. The malevolent DNA of Russian boars, imported for hunting in the 1930s, had seasoned the stock, making them big, mean, and wily.

  The result: as many as a million and a half feral hogs rampaging through Texas, growing as big as sofas, tearing up farmland and creek bottoms with their root-rooting snouts. They gobbled up baby lambs and caused car wrecks. They carried pseudorabies, swine brucellosis, tuberculosis, bubonic plague, tularemia, hog cholera, foot-and-mouth disease, kidney worms, stomach worms, liver flukes, trichinosis, roundworms, whipworms, dog ticks, fleas, hog lice, and anthrax. Their tusks were “razor sharp,” the pamphlet said, and their gallop as fast as “lightning.” Lest some shred of sympathy stay my hand from indiscriminate slaughter, the pamphlet threw in the lurid detail that feral sows had been known to eat their own young. No spirit-worshiping, tobacco-rubbing sanctimony here. By the time I finished reading about Texas feral hogs, I was drooling on my shirt and growling, “Lemme at ’em.”

  Until the early seventies, a banner hung over Stonewall Street in Casey Gunnels’s hometown: WELCOME TO GREENVILLE. THE BLACKEST LAND, THE WHITEST PEOPLE.

  “That’s how it was,” he said as he steered his car through town on the way to his grandpa’s land. “I’m not sure if I remember seeing it with my own eyes, or if I just saw pictures and heard stories.” Casey, a twenty-four-year-old high school Spanish teacher, was broad-shouldered, with a substantial belly he’d acquired in college and hadn’t yet gotten around to losing. He had a round face, almond-shaped eyes, and spiky black hair. “People always ask me, ‘You Asian?’ I know there’s Indian or a Mexican back there somewhere,” he said. “That must be it.”

  Casey invited me down after we met through TexasHogHunter.com, and I figured that as we drove to his family’s hunting cabin, he’d teach me tricks for finding wild swine. Instead he wanted to talk about the Church of Christ, in which he’d been raised, and detail the rigors of a faith that took the Bible literally. No alcohol, no instrumental music in church, and no church suppers—for didn’t Paul ask in Corinthians 11:22, “What? have ye not houses to eat and drink in?”

  “We’ll have whiskey at the cabin, don’t worry,” he added with a quick laugh. “I believe the Bible forbids only drunkenness. It’s full of references to wine.”

  He lapsed into a pained silence—it was his opinion about alcohol that had set off a recent swivet at church, and I got the impression that one reason he’d brought me down was to process it with someone from outside—an agnostic East Coast Jew seemed to fit that bill. The civil war at church had touched off when he taught his interpretation of the alcohol question to a Sunday school class. The congregation, already divided over whether God used the terms “thee” and “thou” when addressing mere humans, had blown up over Casey’s apostasy. His parents, disgusted by the vitriol of the anti-Casey and pro-thee-and-thou factions, had decamped with half the congregation to another church, many miles away. Casey’s wife, Megan, though—whom he’d known from church since they were four years old—wanted to stay put with her parents. Sundays were excruciating. I told him the joke about the lone Jew stranded for years on an island, whose rescuers can’t understand why he’d built two synagogues. “That’s the one I go to,” he tells them. “And that’s the one I don’t go to.” Casey laughed and laughed. “That may be the first Jewish joke I’ve ever understood,” he said, wiping his eyes.

  As Casey piloted the truck through the rolling East Texas country between Greenville and Cooper, he tried to play the redneck he figured I’d expected. He told me stories about dipping snuff, driving big trucks, and shooting guns, but his heart wasn’t in it. The cantankerous intellectual in him kept rearing its head. The master’s thesis on which he was working posited that football was ruining high school education in Texas, a topic that was likely to get him tarred and feathered. At a gas stop, he took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeve to reveal a big tattoo: NOT ALL WHO WANDER ARE LOST, from Lord of the Rings. And he kept bringing up Dante’s Inferno, which he’d first discovered in ninth grade and devoured. “Being a hell-bound sinner is a big concept in the Church of Christ,” he said.

  Casey was a living, breathing exception to the rule laid out in the Industry Reference Guide: an enthusiastic young shooter unlikely to lose his firearms ardor. He’d fallen for guns when visiting his Uncle Charles in Amarillo as a little boy. He would disappear for hours into the attic, where he pored over fragrant and tattered back copies of the American Rifleman, Shooting Times, and Guns & Ammo. Even before he could read, he loved sitting cross-legged on the floor in his short pants, leafing through 1950s ads for Marlin rifles and Colt revolvers. Everything about the shooting world appealed to Casey long before his dad let him hold a gun. Firearms were for serious, virtuous, and technically competent adults of the type Casey wanted to be—like his dad. The men who smiled at him from the pages were rugged and wholesome. The accounts of hunting and target matches were stirring and cinematic. And the guns themselves, rendered in crisp black-and-white photos, were complex, elegant, and manly.

  Dad kept a loaded five-shot .38 Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special in the house. He showed little Casey where it was—on top of the bottom pair of blue jeans on Dad’s closet shelf—and while Casey was forbidden to touch it on his own, he had only to tell Dad he wanted to look at it and Dad would stop what he was doing, unload it, and place it in Casey’s small hands. If Casey wanted to shoot it, Dad would take him out behind the barn and let him knock cans off a fence. There was no fear attached to the gun, and no taboo. It was a piece of equipment, like the cream separator or the baler, and Dad was happy to have Casey know how to work it. He drew the line, though, at letting Casey join Grandpa in the ramshackle trailer he kept as a poor man’s hunting cabin. It wasn’t the guns that bothered him; it was the thought of Casey’s young lungs cooped up in that little trailer with the thick miasma of cigarette smoke that followed Grandpa everywhere.

  “Grandpa drove a truck for Safeway his whole life, and saved a little bit out of every paycheck to buy land. He had parcels all over,” Casey said as he turned off the highway onto a long dirt road. When, at age eleven, Casey was finally allowed to join his grandpa on a deer hunt, it was like being baptized all over again. They stalked the woods as the sun rose and returned to the trailer for a big breakfast of bacon, eggs, biscuits, sausage gravy, and coffee, which they ate standing outside under a cottonwood. It was Casey’s earliest lesson in what it meant to be a man in Texas: to lean your rifle against a tree at dawn and, in reverent silence, sop gravy from a tin plate with other men.

  Casey received a Remington 870 shotgun for his twelfth birthday, then bought with his own money a sporterized 1891 Argentine army Mauser that he used to kill his first white-tailed deer the following year. He waited until ninth grade, though, to buy his first handgun: a stainless-steel Smith & Wesson 686 .357 Magnum revolver. He was too young to buy it himself, but Dad was willing to do the paperwork and buy the gun with Casey’s savings—a violation of the “Don’t Lie for the Other Guy” rule, but hell, this was Texas, and Casey was a responsible boy. Dad imposed no rules on Casey when he handed him the revolver. He didn’t order him to lock it up or shoot it only under adult supervision. A man’s guns
were his own business, Dad believed, and caring for them safely was part of what it meant to be an adult in a free country. One day, a kid announced in class that he’d captured a wild hog, and the class decided to barbecue it. Casey brought his .357 to school in his backpack the next day to dispatch the pig, and though it was only a year after the Columbine High School massacre, in Colorado, it didn’t occur to anybody to draw a connection. This was Greenville, Texas, after all—a million miles from places where teenagers misbehaved with guns.

  Casey said he saw no contradiction between his love of guns and his love of Jesus. Portraying Jesus as a skinny little pussy was a lie, he felt; a first-century carpenter would have been a big, strong man accustomed to felling trees with an ax, splitting them with a hammer and wedge, and sawing them into boards by hand. Jesus understood the uses of violence; he’d chased the money changers from the temple with a whip, after all, and, according to the Gospel of Luke, he’d told his apostles to prepare to defend themselves. “He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.” Turning the other cheek, Casey was convinced, didn’t mean letting people beat you up; it meant moving into a defense posture.

  The cabin stood in a clearing at the end of a muddy driveway—one room, with a sheet-metal roof and, inside, unfinished plywood walls. Casey lent me a lever-action .44 Magnum carbine that his grandpa had given him. It was no longer than my arm; it had a shockingly big bore; and its cartridges were as plump as baby carrots. He shouldered a scoped AR-15. “I’m trying this out,” he said with a sheepish shrug. “I’m still not sure about these things.”

  As we stepped outside, Casey inhaled deeply. “Smell them?” he asked, waggling his fingers in front of his nose. “Nothing else smells like that.” I smelled nothing.