Gun Guys (22 page)

Gun guys didn’t talk about this, because they didn’t want to set off a call to ban private transactions. Gun controllers didn’t talk about it, either, because banning private gun sales was politically—to say nothing of practically—impossible. So both sides were hollering themselves hoarse about the gun-show loophole.

By the time I pulled into the vast parking lot of Grand Island’s convention center, the loophole was a red herring the size of a blue whale. I paid my five dollars to enter and got a black ink stamp on my hand that said, in inch-high letters,
GUN
. So much for attending a Quaker meeting anytime soon.

At their best, gun shows are real
shows
—exhibitions of old, unusual, or idiosyncratic firearms collections. But so many firearms were being manufactured every year that the new ones—with their black plastic
furniture—were crowding out the old gems of lustrous steel and deep-grained wood. So I was delighted to find, just inside the front door, a middle-aged man with a genuinely strange gun on his back. It looked like some kind of futuristic carbine, but instead of a straight magazine protruding from the bottom it had a plastic cylinder the size of a Quaker Oats box laid across the top. The cylinder, the man explained, was designed to hold a hundred rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition, which was impressive, since most carbines held thirty shots at most. A weirdo gun—just the kind of thing I went to gun shows to see. This was promising. As he talked to me about the gun—its made-in-America space-age design—I studied his face. Up close, I could see that he wasn’t middle-aged. He probably wasn’t much older than thirty. Exhaustion had added twenty years to his face.

“Why are you selling it?” I asked.

“It’s this or the house,” he said with a weary laugh. I wished him luck.

The vast room was un-air-conditioned and stuffy, which might have explained why so few people milled about. I’d been expecting the collegial hubbub of like-minded enthusiasts gathered without their wives, but instead, a leaden, almost funereal silence lay over the room. The few shoppers were squarely positioned in the middle-aged, white, rural bulge of the gun-guy demographic, and hardly any of them seemed to be buying. “Sell anything?” I heard one vendor call to another.
“Nada.”
The carbine at the door looked like it would be the most interesting firearm here; the rest were mostly variations of the AR-15, J.C. Penney–grade shotguns, and modern semi-automatic pistols no more unusual than those you’d find in a pawnshop. And if I’d thought driving across the Plains would be a relief from gun-guy rage, I was in for a disappointment.

A hard-looking man with a table full of AR-15s was also selling envelopes containing two plastic yellow pellets. ’
BAMA BALLS
, said the card stapled to the envelope. “They’ll raise your taxes, take your guns, leave your border unprotected, and surrender two wars.” Beside them lay baseball caps emblazoned with
JOHN
3:16.

“What’s that passage say?” I asked.

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

I opened my mouth to point out the irony of quoting the gospel of Jesus while deriding policies that might assist the poor or turn swords to plowshares, but then I remembered I was in a room full of armed Nebraskans and let it go.

A heavyset couple ambled by holding hands, the man’s T-shirt showing a television set and the motto
MORE WATCHIN
’,
LESS TALKIN
’.

A skinny young man at a table full of AR-15s had on a T-shirt that said
INFIDEL
—a common fashion statement that year in gun-guy America.

“How’s business?” I asked him.

“Terrible,” he said. “I need Obama to say the word ‘gun’ one time on television. He doesn’t have to say anything else. Just ‘gun,’ to get people buying again.” He took a pull from a twenty-four-ounce Mountain Dew.

“This your full-time gig?” I said. “Got a gun store?”

“Nope. Work in a body shop. Can’t get the hours, though. Anymore, unless it’s hit so bad you can’t drive it, people don’t come in.”

Stuck to one of Infidel’s gun cases was a McCain-Palin sticker. I told him about the AR-loving kid at the Cherry Creek State Park Family Shooting Center who’d written in Palin for president. “He thought McCain would be no better than Obama on guns,” I said.

“Really? McCain? As bad as Obama?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Democracy, man.”

“What don’t you like about Obama?”

He gestured grandly across the table of rifles.

“Really?” I asked. “All he’s done is let us wear them in national parks”—for that had been the new president’s only action on gun policy, much to the frustration of his pro-control constituency.

“He’s just waiting,” said Infidel. “Trust me. Second term, that’s when he’ll make his move. They’re all the same.” That hung in the air for a second, until he realized how it sounded. “Democrats,” he added quickly.

I picked from a stack a fake trillion-dollar bill—“Federal Debt Note”—emblazoned with Obama’s smiling face. “I’ll take one of these.”

“Two dollars,” he said. “Thank you.”

I spotted an oasis of Old West guns amid the black plastic—single-action Colts and Winchester rifles—and made my way gratefully in that direction. As I drew close, the man behind the table was telling a friend, “All the federal government has the right to do, according to the Constitution, is secure the borders, make war, and control international trade, and the liberals are doing everything but!”

I veered away and nearly bumped into a haggard-looking man in a T-shirt that read
IF GUNS CAUSE CRIME, THEN SPOONS MAKE ROSIE O
’
DONNELL FAT
. And here was a whole table of bumper stickers and T-shirts:
I
’
LL KEEP MY FREEDOM, MY GUNS, AND MY MONEY. YOU CAN
KEEP THE CHANGE. OBAMA WANTS YOUR WALLET AND YOUR GUN. IF 10% IS ENOUGH FOR GOD, IT’S ENOUGH FOR THE IRS. WELCOME TO AMERICA, SPEAK ENGLISH OR GET THE HELL OUT. KEEP WORKING: MILLIONS ON WELFARE ARE DEPENDING ON YOU
.

Next to it was a table of Nazi memorabilia, and another piled high with cheaply printed books—on such topics as how to make silencers at home—and tracts:
Can You Survive? Guidelines for Resistance to Tyranny for You and Your Family
. The cover of that one depicted a blood-dripping Commie sickle slicing through a U.S. map—two decades after the Soviet Union disappeared.

I picked up
Modern Weapon Caching: A Down-to-Earth Approach to Beating the Government Gun Grab
, by Ragnar Benson, published by Paladin Press in, of all places, Boulder. “Today, many Americans realize the United States is in a race against firearms confiscation in which the lessons of the past will play a significant role,” he wrote. I thumbed ahead. “The media will fry gun owners if they get any chance at all.” I found diagrams showing how to pack guns into watertight PVC tubes before burying them. “If possible, bury chunks of steel in the vicinity of your cache—pieces of scrap, large bolts and nuts, whatever will confuse metal detectors.”

The young man behind the book table said, “If it’s time to start burying them, it’s time to start digging them up.”

“People really bury guns?” I said.

“People really
don’t
bury guns?” he said.

We looked at each other for a minute.

“Dude, if you don’t get it, you don’t get it,” he said.

“Don’t get
what?
”

He screwed up his face. A big man sitting on a rolling office chair at the next table rolled over to listen.

“Seriously,” I said. “Say I walk over there and buy myself an AR for nine hundred dollars. You want me to bury it in the ground?”

“I don’t want you to do anything, man.”

“But why would I bury it in the ground?”

“Why wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “So I could shoot it, maybe? So I could enjoy it?”

“You shoot your
other
one. The one they’re going to take away.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“Your duly elected government. Look, man, I don’t have time to explain it all to you.”

The man in the swivel chair was chuckling wryly, as though to tell me not to get started with this nutcase. But when I smiled at him, he stopped chuckling and his face darkened. It wasn’t the other guy he’d been laughing at.

“Where you from?” he growled.

“Colorado.”

“I don’t know how they do things in Colorado, but here, we take our 2A rights very seriously. If you don’t think the government’s coming for your guns, you need to reread your history.”

I always forgot this part of gun shows until I got inside. The T-shirts, the bumper stickers, the printed harangues, and the palpable bitterness had started showing up at about the same time as the plastic-handled guns—and at about the time of the Clinton-era assault-rifle ban. Gun guys had derived two lessons from the ban, the first being that Democrats were willing to restrict freedoms without having the slightest idea of the construction or function of the tool they sought to ban—the “shoulder thing that goes up.” Even worse, though, was that Democrats had shown themselves willing not just to place rules on the buying of guns but to ban an entire class of weapon. If you could make some guns illegal, went the thinking, it was but a short step to making all guns illegal.

The thing is, the assault-rifle ban had lasted only ten years and had already been gone for six. Aside from the anemic attempts at closing the meaningless gun-show loophole, the country hadn’t seen a serious run at gun control in years. Why weren’t these guys celebrating their victory over the forces of gun control instead of hunkering down in a defense crouch?

A University of Virginia sociologist named James Davison Hunter had published that spring a book called
To Change the World
, which argued that modern American Christianity was mired in the “language of loss, disappointment, anger, antipathy, resentment, and desire for conquest.” Reviewing it, the conservative
New York Times
columnist Ross Douthat wrote that because modern Christianity “mobilizes but doesn’t convert, alienates rather than seduces, and looks backward toward a lost past instead of forward to a vibrant future … [it] punches way below its weight.”

The gun-rights movement was equally mired in the language of loss, disappointment, anger, antipathy, resentment, and desire for conquest—and poorly serving its constituents. In its incessant whining about the gun grabbers and the liberals, in its obsessive nurturing of inchoate anger, and in its all-or-nothing worldview, the NRA and the rest of the organized
gun-rights movement was likewise punching below its weight. The tactical strategy was transparent enough; the specter of a renewed assault-rifle ban, like the myth of “out-of-control crime,” kept the contributions rolling in, and by never declaring victory, they could keep it going forever. The NRA could play endlessly to its limited constituency, but that constituency was aging rapidly. And it could swing a bully’s club when it needed to. But its white-hot combativeness and inflexibility put a scary face on the American gun guy, and this was hardly the way to win people over and expand the circle of firearms-tolerant Americans, which seemed to me a much more worthwhile exercise. As a gun guy, I kept waiting for the NRA—which understands guns and their use better than any other entity—to make itself an honest partner in the national effort to reduce further gun violence and gun accidents. Merely shouting “More guns for everybody!” didn’t qualify—to me anyway.

The NRA no doubt had its own interests in being naught but a perpetual-combat machine. The mystery was why ordinary gun guys—with plenty else to worry about in that recession-stressed summer—were so eager to go along.

R
ick Ector was born in northwest Detroit two months after the 1967 riots and six years before the first oil crisis began shifting the auto industry’s center of gravity to Japan—before free fall, in other words. The Ectors’ neighborhood of single-family homes between Seven Mile and the Southfield Freeway was calm and hardworking. The world appeared orderly to Rick—full of kind, steady neighbors, safe streets to play in, and teachers who cared. Detroit was balkanized according to auto manufacturer; the Ectors, a Chrysler family, attended Plymouth Congregational Church. Living in an orderly world, Rick was an orderly child; he got good grades in school, babysat three younger siblings, and cooked dinner for them on nights when his parents worked overtime.

Through her protective goggles at Chrysler’s Mack Avenue stamping plant, though, Rick’s mother could see the future. Neither Detroit nor the auto industry would stay safe for a black man with nothing but high school behind him. “Do
not
count on a factory job,” she’d say. “There won’t be any. You
will
go to college.” And as predicted, disorder descended. Rick’s father, tired of being harassed by Detroit’s edgy and racist police, gave up his autoworker job and joined the force. Now he came home at night with a revolver on his hip and an increasingly broody nature. Rick’s mom endured that until Rick was ten, then packed up the children and took them to live near relatives in Evansville, Indiana. A year of that—square
dancing in school instead of basketball!—was plenty for Rick; the family returned to Detroit shortly before his estranged father shot himself dead with his departmental revolver.

As Detroit’s young black men came to realize that the riots hadn’t helped, and the auto jobs were vanishing, their lives slid into what felt like a perpetual riot. Nighttime gunshots intruded on Rick’s once upright neighborhood. Holdups, shootings, murders: The buzz of violence became part of the backdrop. Rick steered clear of it all, invoking Martin Luther King’s doctrine of nonviolence and pressing his face ever more firmly into schoolbooks. First chance he got to vote, he chose Michael Dukakis. As a black man and the son of union autoworkers, Rick had two iron bonds to the Democratic Party. Without thinking about it too much, he agreed with the party and Detroit’s black leaders that the city had too many guns and should make them harder to get. Rick didn’t want a gun anyway. Guns were for other people—the kind who couldn’t wait for their rewards, weren’t willing to work for them, and couldn’t rise above their fears.