Gun Guys (28 page)

Marcey slipped her arm through mine and asked, in a warm, big-sister way, if I had any questions. When I looked into her smiling eyes, I realized why she seemed so familiar. The hair, the rimless rectangular glasses, the smile … she was a dead ringer for Sarah Palin.

“That’s not altogether accidental,” she said in a deep, conspiratorial drawl, touching my forearm playfully. “I have an insurance agency out in rural Kentucky, so lookin’ like Sarah Palin is not a bad thing.”

As Jeremy shot, Marcey introduced me to Ed Varner, father of the sport of subgun. Varner was fit and tanned, wearing a red golf shirt with a submachine gun silk-screened on the breast and the kind of stylish mirrored sunglasses that impart an animatronic starship-trooper look that a certain type of guy enjoys. “We started it twenty-five years ago because we worried that the government might ask, ‘Why do you need submachine guns?’ ” he said. “It might not be enough to tell the government that we collect them or like to shoot them. We thought it was important to be able to say, ‘Well, we compete with subguns.’ ”

If the path to legitimacy in America ran through competition, I could imagine the next frontier: Claymore mines, perhaps, or hand grenade matches, with divisions for unassisted hurling and for rocket-propelled launchers.

There was a lot to subgunning, Varner insisted. Running a course with a loaded submachine gun required a nervous system that could sustain a surgeon’s touch on the trigger during a whole-body bear hug of a bucking dynamo. And then there were the nonshooting skills: How fast could you swap magazines? How fast could you clear a jam? How well had you maintained your firearm and selected—or made—ammunition for it? Most of all, subgun called for a cool head. In a split-second lapse in concentration, you could kill several spectators and the poor son of a bitch holding the timer.

I nodded politely, but what I was thinking was,
Sure. If what you want is a test of physical agility, marksmanship, small-motor control, and judgment, there are plenty of ways to find that without a submachine gun
. If the four-thousand-to-forty-thousand-dollar price tag wasn’t discouraging enough,
there was the bureaucratic hassle of acquiring one, the precautions needed to store and transport it, and the ordeal of getting the ATF’s permission every time you wanted to take it across state lines. Want to test your physical agility and small-motor control? Try Ping-Pong.

I didn’t say that, of course. It was clear that competition was only part of it. Like Robert and the machine-gun enthusiasts in Arizona, the Knob Creek competition was about love of the gun. It was about getting together with other enthusiasts to look over one another’s firearms, discuss their history, debate how they worked best, see where their technology was going, and have fun using them.
That
I totally understood. If becoming expert in the safe and accurate handling of firearms set a person apart, doing so with a submachine gun made a man—or a woman—a gun-guy Jedi. And ever since popping that stick of dynamite at the Wikieup shoot, I’d been carrying the deliciously guilty secret that few inanimate objects are sexier or more fun to play with than a hot tommy gun.

Marcey and Jeremy were soul mates and lovers, but most of all they were
playmates
. From their first date, they’d liked big, noisy, gasoline-powered fun, the kind that messed up Marcey’s hair and stained their clothes—ear-shattering dirt-track meets, a gigantic Honda touring motorcycle, ATVs, a big Checkmate water-skiing boat, and a vintage Shelby Cobra that could blow the doors off anything on the road. Between Marcey’s insurance agency and the mining-equipment company Jeremy had started with his dad, money was never a problem, and because the doctors had told them that children weren’t in their future, neither was time. Weekends were played at top, four-barrel volume—bombing around Kentucky’s winding back roads, steering chopped-up cars around a dirt track, or roaring through the woods. In the first seven years of their marriage, guns were just about the one noisy toy that didn’t figure into their fun. Jeremy would hunt deer and bobcat in the fall, but then he’d lock away his rifles and not think about them again.

In 2006, he was at the bank discussing a loan for his business when Cliff, his banker, got up from the desk and closed the office door with a mischievous smile. “Look at this here,” Cliff said. From the closet, he took an AR-15 and put it in Jeremy’s hands.

For a gearhead like Jeremy, the AR-15 was a bar of candy. He loved the way the thing snapped apart and fit together; he admired the small
number of moving parts and its limitless fungibility. “Come by the gun club Saturday,” Cliff said. “We got a match.”

Jeremy and Marcey hadn’t known there was a gun club up there at the end of Barnhill Road. As they pulled in, the place looked more like a genteel horse farm than the roar-and-fume venues where they usually played. Vast, grassy ranges stretched in every direction, with neat, sun-shaded shooting platforms at the head of each. Men—and a few women—were stretched out on the platforms, aiming rifles downrange. Others stood laughing and talking, holding rifles in cases. But for the occasional snap of a gunshot, it was quiet enough to hear birds singing.

Holding hands, Marcey and Jeremy made their way around the periphery of the action, unsure of the protocols. The folks they were used to at ATV parks and dirt tracks could be a pretty rough bunch—macho, swaggering, harshly competitive, and frequently inebriated. Who knew what gun people were like?

“Hey!” A fit older man in a tight golf shirt and ball cap smiled broadly, hand outstretched. “Glad to have you.” He introduced himself as Pete and explained the different stages of the match—one hundred, two hundred, and three hundred yards, shot prone, kneeling, sitting, and standing. “Like to join in?”

“I don’t have a rifle.”

Pete laughed. “One thing we’re not short of here is rifles. You can use one of mine.”

Jeremy and Marcey glanced at each other; ask a guy at an ATV track to ride his rig and you might get your face torn off.

Pete led them to a bench and introduced them around. “Welcome!” “Glad you’re here!” On the bench lay several black AR-15s. Jeremy noticed that every time Pete touched one, the first thing he did was open the chamber to make sure it wasn’t loaded. Even if he’d touched it only seconds before, he ran through the same routine. As a guy who made his living serving safety-minded coal miners, Jeremy was impressed.

Pete gave him a quick rundown of how the rifle worked and said he could start on the one-hundred-yard range. “How about you?” he asked Marcey.

“No! I mean, thank you, but not this time. I think I’ll just watch.”

Pete led Jeremy through the stages, adjusting his position with little nudges and teaching him to breathe properly. The more Marcey watched, sniffing the burned cordite, her ears a-crackle with the gunfire, the sorrier she was that she’d passed up a chance to shoot.

“I think I’m going to get me one of these,” Jeremy told her when he was done, placing the warm AR-15 in her hands. She sighted down the barrel. “And you
know
what
I
want for Christmas,” she said.

They each bought a bare-bones AR-15 and started shooting the monthly match at Tri-County. Pretty soon, they were driving to regional matches in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Indiana and finding everywhere the same inclusive, tender community of sport shooters. Something about the open, thoughtful people and the clean, disciplined geometry of shooting got under their skin.

They bought more guns, which meant a bigger safe, and store-bought ammunition started getting expensive. So Jeremy set himself up with two $2,500 cartridge-loading machines, and after working out the mathematics of bullet weight and powder grain, he’d sit down after supper and crank out six hundred specially formulated rounds an hour, for a few pennies apiece. Given the cost of factory-made ammunition and how much practicing Jeremy liked to do, he’d make back his investment quickly. But more than that, the techno-geek in him loved having that much more control over his shooting. Craving more range time, he hired a bulldozer to level a swath of forest behind their house—his own hundredyard range, with no range fees and no wait times. He and Marcey realized one day that it had been months since they’d taken the motorcycle, the ATVs, the boat, the dirt-track car, or the Shelby Cobra from the garage.

They were sitting around one afternoon, drinking sweet tea at a match in southern Indiana, when a wiry guy in his twenties started talking about “running and gunning.” He was passionate about shooting on the move, instead of standing still or lying down.

“Look here,” he said, pulling some gun cases from the back of his truck. Inside were the weirdest guns Jeremy and Marcey had ever seen. One was obviously an AR-15, but it was anodized red, not black. Its magazine well was flared like the bell of a trumpet; Jeremy could see instantly that the shape would make it faster to reload. The pistol, too, had a flared magazine well. Its grip was unnaturally large, and its slide was extra long, perforated with a row of round, space-age cutouts; riding along the top was some kind of weird electronic optic. As for the pump-action shotgun, its stock was a bright, flashy white instead of dull black, and on the underside, a big blue scoop, like a shark’s fin, was supposed to guide shells into the magazine faster. It was like getting a glimpse of Buck Rogers’s arsenal.

Jeremy and Marcey looked at each other and smiled.

I’d arranged to meet up with them again at the third annual Blue Ridge Mountain 3-Gun Championship, in Bowling Green. The weather was hot and steamy as I made my way down U.S. 31W from Louisville through the tourist-brochure scenery of central Kentucky—storybook farms, lush meadows, gamboling horses, and thick stands of hardwood forest. On the radio, Miranda Lambert sang her hit “Gunpowder and Lead,” about an abused woman loading her shotgun, lighting a cigarette, and waiting for her man to come home so she could “show him what a little girl’s made of.” Gun country-rock: perfect background music.

The Park Mammoth Resort had once been the region’s premier golf destination, before Interstate 24 siphoned traffic away, and from the parking lot it still looked grand. A towering stone arch framed the front door of the hotel, and perfectly manicured swaths of lawn were visible beyond a line of oaks. Inside, though, the hotel’s decline was evident in the worn carpet, peeling paint, and dim lighting. A couple of young brothers had recently bought the resort with an eye toward renovating; they were transforming it into Rockcastle, the first destination shooting resort in the United States. The Blue Ridge Mountain 3-Gun was their kickoff.

In the lobby, big men wearing Lycra jerseys emblazoned with corporate logos—Bushnell, DPMS, MGM Targets, Adams Arms—laughed and called to one another in a giddy, wifeless way, delighted to be coming together again. The Blue Ridge championship was one of many on a circuit they traveled all year long. On a roster tacked to the wall, the shooters had been divided into squads, each beginning on a different stage. An eager young man in a beige Park Mammoth golf shirt and cap put in my hands a map of the twenty stages, along with a rule book. If I hurried, he said, I could get to Stage 4 before Jeremy and Marcey’s squad started shooting.

The directions carried me up a dirt road into the woods. As a shooting resort, Rockcastle had a ways to go; the road was a rutted ribbon of mud. I parked and took a look at the license plates on the other cars and pickups. They’d come from as far away as Michigan and Ontario—a thousand miles or more—to run and gun. To my great relief, the bumpers were mostly devoid of political bumper stickers—no
KEEP HONKING, I
’
M RELOADING
, no McCain-Palin, not even any NRA stickers. Might I have discovered an Elysium, a gathering of apolitical gun guys? The only
potentially political sticker was plastered on two of the trucks:
GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS. ESPECIALLY OUR SNIPERS
.

Marcey and Jeremy were among the thirty-odd people milling around the start of Stage 4. Jeremy had his starship-trooper look going, wearing slick Wiley X glasses and a gray-and-white jersey bearing the logo of Benelli shotguns; he’d arranged to get guns at a discount in exchange for wearing the logo, which made him a semi-pro. Benelli’s reputation depended, in part, on how well he shot today, and he looked nervous. He didn’t notice when I waved to him. He was in a kind of trance, walking the stage with his hands up in shooting position, twitching his trigger finger and whispering
“pah, pah,”
as he planned each step, each swivel, looking for the most efficient combination of twists and footsteps.

Marcey, in a blue windbreaker over a hot pink polo shirt, looked fabulous. She gave me a big, relaxed hug; she was shooting entirely for her own amusement. “I am geetered out with excitement,” she said. “This is a huge match for Jeremy.” Around her waist, a thick Cordura belt held a long stainless-steel space-ranger pistol—not in a holster but mounted on a kind of quick-release rack that made it faster to draw. The pistol was big and ungainly, nothing anyone would carry for self-defense. You wouldn’t want to stand in front of it, but by Greg Hepp’s definition, you couldn’t really call it a weapon. The belt also held an organ-pipe array of shotgun shells and two plastic pouches for pistol magazines, stuffed with shiny brass cartridges.