Gun Guys

by Dan Baum

  Responsibility. If gun owners knew they would be criminally liable for crimes committed with guns stolen from their houses, they’d gradually get more serious about locking them up. Adam Lanza might have been using guns his mother had left unsecured. Quick-access safes make guns available to their owners in emergencies, so there’s no excuse for not requiring gun owners, through criminal penalties, to obey Rule Five: Maintain control of your firearm. We’re obviously not doing a good enough job of it on our own. If gun-rights extremists want to mount an argument against keeping guns safely stowed, let them. (They’ll answer to Jeff Cooper someday.) The rest of us should not mind criminal consequences for those who leave guns lying around where children, troubled teenagers, and thieves can find them.

  Training. Some gun guys object to stiffer training requirements for concealed carry. Some don’t think a permit should be required at all; they believe in “constitutional carry,” which is the law in Arizona, Vermont, and Alaska. But take it from someone who’s done it: Packing without good training is a bad idea, both practically and politically. Every gun guy urges every other gun guy to get properly trained before carrying, so why not mandate it? Training is not an infringement of Second Amendment rights; it’s an enhancement of Second Amendment rights—a well-trained armed citizen is more effective in a crisis. The NRA offered to train a cadre of armed volunteers for schools, so why does it object to more stringent training requirements for everybody who carries? The non-gun public fears concealed carry. Gun owners should be leaders in making the practice safer, more effective, and easier for our neighbors to accept.

  Background checks. Closing the gun-show loophole—requiring background checks at gun shows—is a no-brainer. It is no great burden on anybody, and it would give us one less thing to fight about. I live in a state that has closed the loophole, and I have bought plenty of guns at shows with little inconvenience. My gun rights are intact.

  But what of the 40 percent of gun sales that buyers and sellers arrange privately, outside of gun shows? President Obama and a large segment of the population want to subject such sales to background checks. Forcing every buyer and seller to drive to a gun store and pay for a background check, though, wouldn’t work; many people wouldn’t bother, and there’s a cost to passing laws that lots of people won’t obey. In rural areas and in metropolitan areas with few gun stores, driving to a store would be a genuine burden. So why not put the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check online, where everybody can access it? We could require private sellers to keep a paper copy of the approval for a set number of years, the way gun stores do, so that if the gun turns up at a crime scene, they can demonstrate that the sale was legal. (And woe unto he who can’t produce the paper.) As with the current background-check system, the FBI computer would keep no record of the check, preventing the creation of a de facto gun-registration database.

  Yes, it would be a bother to background-check every sale and hold on to a piece of paper for a decade or so, but inconvenience is not infringement. It would comfort the non-gun-owning public to know that all sales are background-checked, and, frankly, it should comfort gun guys as well. It won’t stop truly hard-core criminals from trading guns, but if everybody’s firearms were locked up and none were leaking out of the law-abiding community through unchecked private sales, the pool of criminal guns would shrink over time.

  None of these ideas is perfect. I’m open to suggestions. In fact, I insist upon them. American gun culture will have to be creative, compassionate, and thoughtful if it wants to respond to a demographic calamity and attract young people back to the shooting sports. When gun guys speak with the caustic, affronted voice of the NRA, we turn people off, and turn them against us. After the transformative horror of Sandy Hook, growling from the sidelines will no longer cut it. If gun culture is to survive, gun guys will have to get in the game. If we want to hold on to our guns, we’ll have to be part of the solution, helping to instruct Americans how to live safely alongside 300 million firearms.

  Lacking a national church, Americans have few ways of expressing our public morality except by saying, “There oughta be a law.” Even good laws, though, have their limits. Guns make acts of criminal lunacy more deadly, but as a nation we haven’t even started trying to figure out why ours is so much more violent than other countries, why we seem to produce more than our share of alienated, homicidal crazies. A year of arguing about which features make guns more deadly, and how many rounds in a magazine is too many, isn’t likely to get us much closer to figuring ourselves out. The New York Times mocked President Obama, six days after Sandy Hook, for criticizing a “culture that all too often glorifies guns and violence” and saying that action should begin “inside the home and inside our hearts.” But he was right. Something in the American character seems to make us more violent, and it’s not good enough to say, “That’s just the way we are.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks are due, I suppose, to Hank Hilliard and Chucky Blau, for setting the gun hook deep inside me when I was in kindergarten. Though it must be said that I’m not altogether sure whether, if I saw either of them again, I’d shake his hand or punch him in the nose.

  Certainly the following have my unalloyed gratitude, for sharing their gun lives with me so generously: Craig Menteer, Laura Millin, Rick Ector, Robert the machine-gun collector, Howard Davis, Tom Beitling, John Beitling, Charlie Zix, Helen Zix, Jeffrey Baum, David Needham, Tom Daniel, Bernie Herpin, Tom Fashinell, David Stegman, Charlie Anderson, Erin Jerant, Marcey Parker, Jeremy Parker, Marty the First Edition Saloon bartender, Paul Weinkamp, Parry Sarto, Biff, Andy Pottgeier, Rick Freeman, Mike Rademacher, Robin Bryant, Mark Mann, Dale Albert, Steven Simons, Andrew Lisko, Walter Neumann, Scott Hawkins, Dale Kaspar, Kathy Poling, Paul Paradis, Dale Worth, Tom Taggert, Frank DeSomma, Richard Linke, Manfred Schnetzer, Peter Moskos, Tim White, Mike Hanson, Eric Simon, Roger Sprava, Garen Wintemute, Richard Sanders, Tony Wendling, Aaron Zelman, Ed Hope, Julie Moser, Tom Rompel, Tommy Rompel, Charlie Rollins, Mark Kelem, Gideon Goldenholz, Krista at AA Guns, Tony Walker, Vanessa Walker, Terri Proud, Greg Hepp, John Titsworth, Joe Sirochman, Anna Hackett, Robert Smith, Jeff Crank, Syd Stembridge, Larry Zanhoff, Karl Weschta, John Feinblatt, Chris Harris, Debra Hellwig, Mike Papac, Janet Bewley, Justin Raber, Jack Hawley, Arkadi Gerney, Bill Stojack, Bob Zelinski, Jerry Hunnicut, David Fencl, Nick Dranias, Clark Kennedy, Hope Parrish, Dustin Lohof, Oliver Mazurkiwiecz, Andy Blaschik, Sean Thornton, Andy Lander, Bill Newell, Peter Benoit, Casey Gunnels, Gwendolyn Patton, Maggie Leber, Dennis Henigan, and the many gun guys of both sexes who told me their gun stories whether I wanted them to or not.

  In addition to those I met in person, I am indebted to many whose wisdom on firearms reached me from arm’s length, either through phone calls or written correspondence. They include: Becca Knox, Teja van Wicklen, Dan Churchman, Cory McDonald, Tom Bowers, Andrew Betts, Ashley Peacock, Bill Brassard, Brian Malte, Mark Damian Duda, Justin Harvel, Dan Hixson, Jeffrey Folloder, Jack Jackson, Marilyn Marbrook, Ken Baker, Michael Schuyler, Shannon Whitler, Siddhartha Sharma, Brandon Campbell, Todd Pegg, Eric Wold, Neil McMillan, Howard Snyder, Gail Hayes, David Hemenway, Eugene Volokh, Robert Farago, Gary Kleck, Jack Dolan, James D. Wright, Kim Johnson, Jason Huss, Jay Corzine, Ryan Roberts, Jens Ludwig, Massad Ayoob, Roy Hill, Bruce Hall-man, Stephanie Skaff, Alan Korwin, Ken Kolosh, Ted Novin, Philp J. Cook, Robert P. Hartwig, Rosanna Ander, Eric Washburn, Howard Nemerov, Abigail Kohn, Steve Shapiro, Frank Askin, Ladd Everett, Sam Friedman, Benjamin Blair, Klaus Eckman, Juha Hartikka, Ted Martin Vick, Yih-Chau Chang, Will Kiersky, “Old Bear,” Chris Hamilton, Dan Parker, David Southall, James Finley, John Wagonseil, Peter Jackson, Joe Bageant, Tom Smith, Harry Lu, Kristen Rand, Ginger Couden, Ben Piper, Nadine Strossen, Tom Diaz, Mike Stollenwerk, David “Mudcat” Saunders, and John Howard.

  Most of my friends and relatives hate guns—or at least say they do. Though many of them shuddered visibly when I told them about this project, all of them were supportive. Thank y
ou, all.

  Get a group of writers together, and in addition to low pay and kill fees, they’ll complain about their agents. I must fall silent in such conversations, because I have been superbly served by the Wylie Agency—in particular Sarah Chalfant, Jeffrey Posternak, Matthew Bloomgarden, Andrew Wylie, Adam Eaglin, Scott Moyer, James Pullen, Caroline Smith, and Edward Orloff. They are tireless advocates; they return phone calls; they find me work. I couldn’t ask for better and they have my boundless gratitude.

  The other thing writers whine about is the quality of the editing they receive, and I have little to add to those bitch sessions, either. Andrew Miller at Knopf knows and cares less about guns than just about anybody I’ve ever met, but his open-mindedness and curiosity were vast, and his unfamiliarity pushed me to explain things more fully than I might have otherwise. He prodded me constantly to go deeper, reach harder, and take more chances. I was lucky to work with him. Similarly, the copyediting of Will Palmer was superb. Gratitude as well to Luke Mitchell, who commissioned and edited the story about carrying a gun that I wrote in 2010 for Harper’s. Like Andrew, Luke urged me to swing for the bleachers.

  For twenty-five years, Margaret has been administering a steady, gentle, loving ass-kicking to my writing. She is the best editor anywhere. Nobody knows better than Margaret how to home in on the meaning of a passage and then express it in as few elegant words as possible. This time, Margaret had a dog in the fight, because while she tolerates my gun thing, and even participates gamely in hunting, she really hates guns and everything they represent. So she was particularly useful in both the research and the writing of this book. If I could make gun guys sympathetic to Margaret, and the gun-guy point of view comprehensible to her, I knew I was over a hurdle. Margaret made that hurdle very high indeed, and I thank her for it. She makes this writing life lots of fun, and takes good care of me. Thank you, too, to our daughter, Rosa, a stalwart supporter of all we do, who performed the best service a child can to her freelance-writer parents: She won a four-year full scholarship to a great college.

  NOTES

  The studies and data cited here are obviously not the entirety of the wisdom on the subject of guns and crime. They are the ones I encountered and found useful. Do other studies exist that show different results or make different points? Certainly. I include this disclaimer because in my experience, everybody who cites this study ends up being chastised for not considering that study.

  PROLOGUE: BIG BANG

  The NRA sends members two magazines every month: American Rifleman, which carries a political editorial but is mostly about guns and shooting, and America’s 1st Freedom, which is entirely about gun politics. The line on page 9 about sipping tea and nibbling biscuits appeared in the January 2010 issue of America’s 1st Freedom.

  CHAPTER ONE: BARBIE FOR MEN

  The reasons people bought guns that are cited on page 12 are from Gun Ownership and Use in America, a Gallup survey published on November 22, 2005. Two-thirds of gun owners cited crime as the reason they keep guns, almost identical to target shooting. Fifty-eight percent said they kept guns for hunting.

  Anybody who hasn’t played Call of Duty 4 or any of the other shooter games should give it a try. It is harder than it looks. Whether it acculturates young people to killing was a source of perpetual debate. I did, though, have the opportunity in 2004 to ask a Fort Benning infantry trainer, Captain Tim Dunnigan, if young men who played shooter video games were quicker on the trigger, better shots, or got over moral qualms about killing more easily. “The effect of video games is huge,” Dunnigan said. “The young man today is physically bankrupt! He is soft. He is useless. We have to do a tremendous amount of work with him just to get him to where he can do ten push-ups. Young men today don’t go outside. They don’t move. They sit on the couch and play XBox. That’s the effect. Whatever hand-eye skill is involved does nothing to condition the young man to help him here.”

  The National Shooting Sports Foundation is the firearms industry trade group. While it opposed most new restrictive gun laws, it focused more on the business of guns instead of the politics. In 2010, it published a report called Modern Sporting Rifle (MSR): Comprehensive Consumer Report that examined the market for the AR-15, and the people who used it, from many angles. It was the surveys done for this report that turned up the news that the AR-15 was for shooters who were younger, more urban, and more multicultural than the norm. That AR-15 owners shoot more often than owners of other guns comes from a press release issued by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, “Modern Sporting Rifle Owners Are Most Active Shooters Says NSSF/Responsive Management Survey,” April 19, 2010.

  Gun Store Finder has since disappeared from Apple’s App Store.

  CHAPTER TWO: CONDITION YELLOW

  The gun wearing in Starbucks described on this page was reported by the Associated Press in “At Starbucks, Gun Owners Push Right to Bear Arms,” on February 28, 2010. People wearing openly holstered guns, and at least one man with a slung rifle, showed up at an event including President Obama in Phoenix on August 17, 2010, according to Bloomberg.com and other news sources.

  The Firesign Theatre joke is from Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, released in 1970.

  The woeful state of crime in Florida and the rest of the United States at the time Florida instituted shall-issue is detailed in the Uniform Crime Report of 1987, available from the FBI on its website. The UCRs held a special place in the gun debate, because they were the one set of numbers that nobody ever seemed to question. A lot of studies had been done on crime, violence, and the role of guns in the United States, but most of it was problematic when it came to forming public policy. Many were flawed, or the right data weren’t being gathered, as the American Journal of Preventive Medicine discovered in 2005 when it examined them (“Firearms Laws and the Reduction of Violence: A Systematic Review,” by Robert A. Hahn, et al., AJPM vol. 28 (2005): 40. Worse, though, was that people were rarely convinced by studies that didn’t reinforce their own beliefs. Instead they impeached the research—this question was asked the wrong way, that question wasn’t asked, etc.

  The UCRs weren’t without their own problems. They counted on police chiefs to report crimes to the FBI, and one chief’s boys-will-be-boys might be another’s aggravated assault. Moreover, the FBI’s tabulation of statistics wasn’t always perfectly useful. It didn’t break out assault rifles in its homicide statistics, for example. And, as pointed out by James Alan Fox and Mark L. Swatt of Northeastern University, in their paper “The Recent Surge in Homicides Involving Young Black Males and Guns: Time to Reinvest in Prevention and Crime Control,” published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, homogenized national statistics don’t always give the full picture. “It is not that the FBI figures tell an inaccurate story about crime trends in America. Rather, they obscure the divergent tale of two communities—one prosperous and safe, the other poor and crime-ridden.” Still, while I’d had people criticize almost every study out there, I’d hardly heard anybody challenge the reliability of the UCRs, especially when it came to tracking trends.

  That statistics and studies were hopeless in moving the gun debate was well argued by Donald Braman and Dan M. Kahan in their Emory Law Journal article “Overcoming the Fear of Guns, the Fear of Gun Control, and the Fear of Cultural Politics: Constructing a Better Gun Debate,” vol. 55, no. 4 of 2006. “The gun debate appears to hinge on a narrow factual question: whether more guns make society less safe or more.… But so long as statistics continue to fund the parties’ arguments, the gun debate, we believe, will remain bankrupt.… For one segment of American society, guns symbolize honor, human mastery over nature, and individual self-sufficiency.… For another segment of American society, however, guns connote something else: the perpetuation of illicit social hierarchies, the elevation of force over reason, and the expression of collective indifference to the well-being of strangers.”

  America continues this fruitless argument, they write, because it’s easier th
an the alternative. “Many politicians and policy analysts no doubt realize that the gun debate is really about culture, not consequences. But precisely to avoid committing the law to picking sides in the struggle between the egalitarian and solidaristic proponents of control, on the one hand, and the hierarchic and individualistic opponents of it, on the other, they prefer the seemingly neutral idiom of econometrics.”

  A lot of the political energy in favor of shall-issue laws derived from examples of egregious favoritism. The California Senate, for example, voted in June 2011 to exempt its members from the near impossibility of obtaining a carry permit in California, according to “One Law for Us, Another for You,” an editorial that ran on June 6, 2011, in The Washington Times. And on February 18, 2011, The New York Times published an article, “The Rich, the Famous, the Armed,” that detailed how such wealthy and well-connected people as Roger Ailes, Morgan Stanley chair John J. Mack, and talk-show host Sean Hannity—none of whom even lived in the city—had been able to obtain concealed-carry permits in New York.

  That thirty-seven states had gone shall-issue comes from USACarry.com, which has interactive maps showing where one’s carry permit is valid. The laws change constantly; it’s worth checking.

  For a quick look at what the Justice Department believed happened to homicide in the United States from 1975 to 2005, see Homicide Trends in the U.S., Age, Gender, and Race Trends, published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics on January 17, 2011. More complete data on the drop in crime comes from the Uniform Crime Reports. For a quick glance at the trend over time, see Table 1 of “Crime in the United States: 2010,” which shows both the numbers and rates of violent crime overall and also breaks it down by murder, rape, robbery, property crime, burglary, motor vehicle theft, and larceny-theft. The rate of violent crime per 100,000 people fell from 758.2 in 1991 to 403.6 in 2010. The murder rate fell from 9.8 to 4.8, rape from 42.3 to 27.5, robbery from 272.7 to 119.1, and aggravated assault from 433.4 to 252.3.