Gun Guys

by Dan Baum

  In the absence of certainty about the framers’ intent, gun guys had invented a pantheon of ersatz framers and, like ventriloquists, made them say the damnedest things. Get this widely disseminated howler, allegedly from Benjamin Franklin: “Democracy has been defined as two wolves and a sheep discussing plans for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.” The quote appeared nowhere in Franklin’s writing, and the word lunch wasn’t in popular usage until 1820, thirty years after Franklin’s death. Gun guys often quoted John Adams as saying, “Arms in the hands of the citizens may be used at individual discretion for the defense of the country, the overthrow of tyranny or private self-defense,” when what he said was the exact opposite: that privately held guns “demolish every constitution, and lay the laws prostrate, so that liberty can be enjoyed by no man.” Poor Thomas Jefferson probably had more guns stuffed into his long-dead mouth than anybody. I particularly liked one, found on any number of posters and T-shirts at gun shows, attributing to Jefferson the paranoid use of the sinister gun-guy “they”: “The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it.” Total hooey.

  The slurry of invented quotes concealed the obvious. The framers couldn’t foresee the AK-47 any more than they could foresee women and African Americans in the voting booth. They couldn’t imagine how the widespread ownership of rapid-fire rifles might affect cities that contain four times as many people as lived in the entire United States at the time they were writing. Since we had no way of knowing exactly what the framers wanted the Second Amendment to mean, the wretched paragraph did naught but make rational discussion of gun policy impossible.

  Certainly if we were looking for reasons that gun guys clung zealously to their firearms, we could take off the list their expressed fealty to the Second Amendment. Not that they didn’t like the Second Amendment; they did. But despite their protestations, none had guns in his life primarily to fulfill a perceived duty to protect and defend it. Many of the same guys who could go on ad nauseam that the Second Amendment must not be infringed supported public-school prayer in defiance of the First Amendment’s prohibition against establishing a state religion; objected to closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay—a city-size violation of the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth amendments—and were willing, in the name of the war on terror, to submit to all manner of physical and electronic Fourth Amendment intrusions. It wasn’t so much the Constitution or its authors that gun guys loved; it was guns. Which was okay with me. I loved them, too. But as my gun-guy walkabout was winding down, I was growing tired of the breast-beating about James Madison.

  Still: Could I really spend eighteen months trying to figure out gun guys without visiting the temple of the Second Amendment—NRA headquarters? I’d certainly hoped so. I read the NRA’s magazine every month. I knew what the organization had to say. The thought of being trapped in a D.C. cubicle with a functionary and listening to the NRA’s endlessly repeated talking points made me want to take a nap.

  Back in the spring, after carrying a gun for a couple of months, I’d published an article in Harper’s Magazine about the experience. A lot of strangers wrote to me, many of them working through their own conflicted feelings. My favorite e-mail, from a frank woman in Seattle, illustrated the deep well from which feelings about guns spring—much deeper than the level of statistics, studies, or other people’s experiences. “I disagree with everything you wrote,” she wrote. “But I can’t tell you why.”

  A couple of weeks after the article appeared, my phone rang, and a man introduced himself as Sean Thornton of the National Rifle Association. I braced for a blast of vitriol. My Harper’s piece had argued that, as scary as widespread concealed carry sounded, the data demonstrated that the NRA was right to say that it was not a threat to public safety. But I’d criticized the NRA-approved classes I’d taken, and in my experience, political gun guys like those at the NRA brooked no disagreement on anything. Waver a millimeter from the party line and they flew into a foaming rage. So when this fellow Thornton introduced himself, I was sorry I’d picked up the phone. “I was pretty disappointed to read your piece,” he said mildly. “NRA-sanctioned classes should be a lot better than that. Can I ask you a few questions?” It turned out Sean wasn’t one of the NRA’s ideological enforcers. He was from the political wing’s forgotten stepsister, the Education & Training Division.

  “At any time, did you see live ammunition in the room?” he asked.

  “Yes.” I mentioned the instructor who hadn’t known that her .38 was loaded.

  “Were you trained in how to keep an attacker from taking away your gun?”

  “No.”

  “Were you counseled in the extreme emotions of regret and remorse you’re likely to feel even after a justified shooting?”

  “No.”

  He apologized for the lousy classes and offered to help me find a better one. Imagine! The NRA was talking about safety and training. It was like a phone call from 1954.

  As I flew home from Las Vegas, I had one of those lightbulb-over-the-head moments: I could visit the NRA I liked and not the NRA I didn’t like. I could visit Sean Thornton.

  The NRA used to house itself on Second Street in downtown Washington, but in 1994, having outgrown those offices, it commissioned a gigantic modernist building in deepest Fairfax, Virginia, more than a mile from the nearest Metro. I arrived late and perspiring, my laptop heavy as an anvil. It was like visiting Microsoft or General Motors: two steel-and-glass towers with underground parking and a vast outdoor lot. Carved in stone above the door were the words THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED—the Second Amendment conveniently shorn of its troublesome militia preamble. Like Scrooge seeing Marley’s face where the door knocker should have been, I pictured a different motto carved above the door of the nation’s “premier gun-safety organization”: SAFETY RULE ONE—TREAT ALL GUNS AS THOUGH THEY ARE LOADED.

  The NRA may have been sufficiently tone deaf to build a twenty-first-century headquarters in a place reachable only by car, but it was smart enough to make its first greeter an African American woman, the demographic least represented among shooters. She sat behind a reception desk as high and imposing as a judge’s bench. I handed up my name and took a seat in the lobby, scanning back copies of the American Rifleman. On the coffee table sat something I hadn’t seen in an office in years: an ashtray.

  “We’re an organization devoted to personal freedom,” Sean Thornton said with a shrug when he showed up a few minutes later. He was a short, semi-bald, worried-looking man in his thirties, wearing a fashionably clipped beard and a royal-blue shirt with a royal-blue tie. Towering over him, hulking and impassive, with a thin beard and shop glasses, was his colleague Andy Lander. Together, they looked like George and Lenny from Of Mice and Men. Neither smiled as they shook my hand; the initial vibe was like a Korean prisoner exchange at the 38th parallel.

  To break the ice, Sean suggested we tour the NRA National Firearms Museum. “One of the world’s best,” he said. As we walked, I asked if they didn’t feel like poor country cousins to the Institute for Legislative Action—the NRA’s thunderous political wing. “No. No, I don’t,” Sean said, frowning thoughtfully. “Just to let you know, I’m not the typical NRA guy. I’m married to a black woman. I voted for Barack Obama. But when it comes to the Second Amendment, I guess I’m a purist. I’m not saying that you’re not. But I believe it’s a right.”

  “We oversee about 75,000 instructors worldwide,” Andy said. “We do everything from policing them to developing new curriculum.”

  “And how many of you are there?”

  “In training and education?” Sean asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Five guys.”

  “And how many in the ILA?”

  “Oh, hundreds.” He shrugged and smiled.

  The museum took up most of the building’s first floor. At the threshold, a case held what looked like a rusty pipe lashed to a rotting fence pos
t—a Spanish hand cannon, perhaps the first firearm ever brought to North America. Beside it hung a matchlock from the Mayflower. For a gun-guy history buff, these were like fragments of the True Cross. And it only got better from there.

  We looked at nineteenth-century double-barreled rifles and a wildly impractical but utterly beautiful double-barreled bolt-action rifle. We saw an air rifle with which Lewis and Clark killed an elk—after fifteen hundred priming strokes. The guns of the Old West were a lot cruder than the reproductions used in cowboy movies. We looked at a flintlock designed to keep its powder dry in the rain. “Its inventor demonstrated it on Boston Common during a storm,” Andy said, looming over me at the case. “He fired it three times, and before he could get off a fourth shot, he was hit by lightning and killed.”

  “You see?” I said. “Guns are dangerous and must be banned!” Sean and Andy looked at me like Mount Rushmore; wrong joke for the NRA, even its Education & Training guys.

  “So why do we like these things so much?” I asked, moving along to a case full of First World War guns. Sean and Andy frowned in thought; gun guys never could resist the question.

  “A gun that went to San Francisco in the Gold Rush, you can pull out of the case and fire today,” Sean said. “We do it here all the time. The guns you see in this room get fired.” He pointed to a Broomhandle Mauser—one of the first practical semi-automatic pistols. “They’re better designed than clocks. They had to be, because people’s lives depended on them.”

  Andy said, “For me it’s really an emotional thing. My grandfather carried a Thompson submachine gun on D-Day. He had a couple of guys coming at him, and if he hadn’t had a Thompson, he wouldn’t be here. So my dad wouldn’t be here. So I wouldn’t be here. The first time I saw my father cry was when I put a Thompson in his hands and had him shoot full auto. I can take that gun and see my genealogy in it.”

  I was getting impatient. Had I really trekked halfway across Fairfax to hear the same bromides I’d heard everyplace else? Here I was in the temple of the firearm, where people had been thinking seriously about guns for years. And this was all they had? “Yeah, yeah, I get it,” I said roughly. “History. Craftsmanship. Family lore and blah-de-blah. I’ve heard it all before. But let’s face it: We’re not talking about old kitchen tools or cameras here. These things are about death.”

  It was an inside pitch, a little dirty, and I expected Sean to whiff, denying that the attraction to firearms had anything to do with killing. Instead he calmly stepped back and put it over the right-field wall.

  “Absolutely,” he said, touching my chest with the tip of an index finger. “These are about death! That’s a huge part of the attraction. They’re about mastering death. Mastering the fear of it. You’re not just in awe of death. You’re accepting responsibility for taking death in your hands, something that a lot of people don’t even want to think about.”

  “Yup,” Andy said, nodding. “Yup.”

  “When people think of America, they think of the cowboy and his Peacemaker,” Sean said. “But you can find an equivalent in every culture: the knights of Europe, the samurai warrior. That respect, that awe that every culture has for the warrior, for the man who will take it upon himself to be a master of death—that’s a lot of what goes into the love of firearms. It’s romantic. We love the science, the art, and the beauty. But there’s also that macabre element. There’s also the death.”

  Well, that was a surprise: The most honest and uncomfortable answer about firearms attraction I’d yet received, and inside the walls of the NRA. Sean wasn’t apologizing. He wasn’t saying, “Yeah, it’s too bad that our enjoyment of shooting sports and our admiration for the mechanical elegance of these devices is bound up with men slaughtering one another.” He was saying that the grisly business that lay behind firearms was part of their attraction, that a dark streak ran through humankind, and that we who liked guns should be proud of confronting it.

  Despite Marcey Parker’s protestation, then, guns were not merely to gun guys what golf clubs were to golfers or sauté pans to cooks. They were also what fast cars were to race drivers or parachutes to sky divers: a means of approaching and staring down death, of walking the edge of the abyss dividing this world from the next. Gun guys got a little contact high from the grim reaper. They stood apart from those who misunderstood or disliked firearms and said, essentially, I am master of this death-dealing device, and you are not. I am prepared for and capable of surviving the kind of situation you can’t even bring yourself to think about. No apology necessary.

  We were by now standing in front of a case of guns used in movies, a mini-monument to Americans’ conflicted love affair with violent death: John Wayne’s Winchester, Dirty Harry’s .44 Magnum, a Humphrey Bogart .32 Colt, a Smith & Wesson 639 from Reservoir Dogs. The cowboy, the cop, the spy, the gangster … We loved this stuff.

  “You want to talk about fascination with death?” Sean said. “Come look at this.” A silver-plated and elaborately engraved Colt Detective Special nestled in a black, coffin-shaped box with a tiny mirror, a glass vial of water, six odd-looking bullets, and what appeared to be a mahogany chop-stick. “Vampire gun,” Sean said. “See the death’s heads carved into the bullets? They’re silver. You’ve also got a vial of holy water, a mirror—so you’re sure you’re shooting at Nosferatu—and a wooden stake in case the fight goes hand to hand.”

  The set was so gorgeously and expensively crafted that I couldn’t tell whether it was meant as a joke.

  “You’re right about one thing,” Sean said, gazing down at the coffin-shaped box. “This is some complicated shit.”

  Those who wanted guns more tightly controlled had, since the 1970s, placed blame for America’s loose gun laws on “the might of the gun lobby” and politicians whom The New York Times never tired of accusing of knuckling under to the NRA. It was more comforting, I suppose, to imagine the enemy as a goliath who played dirty than to face the reality: that gun laws were loose because that was the way most Americans wanted them.

  Although the NRA had never been bigger or richer than it was in 2010, it was, for all its bluster, a middling player by Washington standards. Its membership of four million was no bigger than that of the National Wildlife Federation. It fielded no former congressmen or administration officials as lobbyists. It didn’t even give out much money. NRA contributions to congressional candidates were about half that of the pipe-fitters’ union—and when was the last time politicians cowered before the pipe fitters?

  Most members of Congress didn’t need NRA money or pressure to toe the pro-gun line. They, and their constituents, were already on board. Gallup had been asking people about stricter gun control for decades; in twenty years, support had fallen by a third, to less than 50 percent.

  Of course, polling on gun control was distorted by how strongly those who answered the questions felt about the issue. Unlike the rest of the population, gun guys thought about their guns—and about efforts to take them away—every day. If 90 percent of victory was showing up, NRA members were going to win the gun-control fight every time.

  But even if the numbers were imprecise, the trend was clearly toward less and less public support for gun control. The big drop in crime probably explained a lot of that. NRA propaganda might have helped, too. But there was also this uncomfortable reality: It was almost impossible to prove that the measures we thought of as “gun control” saved any lives. The American Journal of Preventive Medicine took a swing at it in 2005, examining dozens of studies of gun-control effectiveness. In many cases, the researchers found flaws with the studies themselves. But the Journal was prepared to be declarative about a few gun-control measures. Gun registration, for example, rarely helped police solve crimes, because people so rarely committed a crime with the guns they’d registered. It was stolen guns, or guns in underground circulation so long that any registry would have missed them, that did the killing. Canada’s national long-gun registry ate up more than sixty million dollars a year and yield
ed so few practical results that in October 2011 the Parliament voted to scrap it. Gun licensing, banning classifications of weapons (assault rifles, Saturday night specials, etc.), waiting periods, one-gun-a-month laws, and paperwork requirements all yielded similarly ambiguous results at best. Usually they had no effect at all. Yes, gun crime fell after passage of the Brady Law … but it was already falling before. New York City had tough gun laws and, as the second decade of the twenty-first century began, remarkably low crime. But Chicago had even tougher gun laws, and lots of violent crime. Gun crime was almost nonexistent in Vermont, which had some of the loosest gun laws anywhere, and relatively high in California, with some of the strictest. While it was easy to argue that California and Chicago needed tougher gun laws than Vermont because they had more crime, arguing it that way reversed causality—that the crime rate spawned the laws, not the other way around. That high levels of violence continued despite the tough laws only weakened further the “guns cause crime” argument.

  It’s possible that Chicago and California would have been even more violent had their laws been looser, and that gun crime wouldn’t have fallen as fast had the Brady Law never passed. But it was impossible to know—and therefore easy to sow doubt about the gun-control exercise.

  The most useful way to think about gun laws was as an analogue to marijuana laws. Both let citizens and policymakers feel like they were “doing something.” Both were ineffective at achieving their stated goals. Laws like the assault-rifle ban responded not to a real public safety threat but an imaginary one, which reminded me of drug prohibitionists excoriating marijuana not as a hazard unto itself but as a “gateway drug.” Blaming guns for crime was as dishonest an exercise in avoidance as saying that teenagers were alienated because they smoked pot—not because they were overstressed by competition, underfunded and unimaginative schools, and the divorces of their overworked parents. How much more convenient was it to ignore the totality of the lives lived by young black urban men—the group most likely to die by gunfire—and focus instead on taking away their guns?