Gun Guys (3 page)

The AR was excellent at what it was designed for: killing people at medium range on the battlefield, which was not something the average retail gun buyer needed to do. Yet more and more rack space in gun stores
seemed to be given over to AR-15s, and at this range on this day, they had taken over completely.

At the bench next to mine, a cherubic young man with a round, close-cropped head and plump fingers held an all-black rifle that looked ready for SEAL Team Six. Everything that was wood on my rifle was plastic on his. Instead of a horizontal stock, the gun had a vertical foregrip, as on a tommy gun. A rubber-encased telescopic scope the size of a salami lay along the top. Wired-up cylinders of some kind encrusted the barrel. The young man slapped in a banana-shaped magazine and, peering through the scope, fired four slow shots at a bull’s-eye a hundred yards off. Then he touched a button on the side of the gun, and the foregrip split into a bipod, which he rested on the bench to continue his deliberate firing. The man’s sweet, plump-cheeked baby face contrasted so thoroughly with the rifle’s flamboyant lethality that I almost laughed aloud. Instead, when he paused to reload, I broke gun-range protocol and invaded his space. “Will you forgive an ignorant question?” I asked. “I mean, look at the old iron I shoot. What do you use that gun for?”

“This!” he said with a laugh. “Shooting!”

“You’re, uh, not thinking you’re going to
need
it or anything …”

He laughed. “Oh, no. I know what you mean. No. None of that. I just like it. And it’s a little piece of history, what our boys are using in the Gee Wot.”

“In the
what
?”

He laughed again. “The GWOT. The Global War on Terror. It’s what they call the whole thing—Iraq, Afghanistan, all the shit we don’t hear about everyplace else. You ever shot one of these?”

“No.”

“Then come on!” He laid the rifle on the bench and gestured me over. I hesitated. Shooting another man’s gun was like dancing with his wife. Some guys got offended if you asked, yet here he was offering it up unbidden.

“Here’s the deal,” he said excitedly, licking his lips like a five-year-old showing off his favorite toy truck. “The bullet’s only sixty-four grains, but it goes superfast.” He held up a cartridge much smaller and pointier than mine—a beer bottle, say, to my wine bottles. The sixty-four-grain—four-gram—bullet looked like the tip of a ballpoint pen. The kid ran his finger along the black plastic buttstock of the rifle. “In here’s a big-ass spring. It takes up most of the recoil. And feel how light.” I picked it up. It felt like a BB gun, especially after the Krag. “You starting to get the
attraction? Now look through that.” I put my eye to the scope, and the target trembled on the tip of my nose. “That’s an ACOG,” he said. “It costs more than the rifle, to tell you the truth. It’s what every guy in Iraq and Afghanistan who can afford one is using.”

I lifted my face from the scope. “They have to buy it?”

“Not the rifle. The Army gives them a stripped-down rifle with iron sights. But everybody uses optics. Some get them issued to them, but most bring them with them, or have their parents send them over.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that the military allowed soldiers to modify their rifles. Talk about a captive market: What mother wouldn’t sell a kidney to send her son a twelve-hundred-dollar rifle scope that might keep him alive?

“Not like I’ve been over there or anything,” the young man was saying. “I see them on TV. Look at the guns next time you’re watching the news. Everybody uses optics. Go ahead. Fire a few.”

My trigger hand gripped what felt like a pistol, while my left hand clutched the vertical foregrip. I suppose it was more ergonomic than the Krag. To grip the Krag, I had to tilt both hands. On this genetically modified organism of a gun, both fists stood straight up, as though I were boxing. It fit nicely into my shoulder, too, and my eye fell naturally into position behind the scope. I put the crosshairs on the chest of the silhouette target and squeezed.

There was a light bump against my shoulder and an odd sensation of the rifle’s insides sliding around as the floating parts compressed the big spring and soaked up the recoil. My own rifle punched me like a prizefighter, and to fire a second shot, I had to throw a heavy bolt lever up and back, forward and down. With this gun, I barely brushed the trigger, as gently as flicking crumbs off a tablecloth.
Bam!
And a third flick—
Bam!

I shot four times more, as fast as I could move my finger—
Bambambambam
—feeling little more kick than I would from a garden hose. An AR-15 is semi-automatic, meaning it fires one shot for every touch of the trigger, while the M16—and other true “assault rifles”—can fire continuously, like a machine gun. The distinction seemed pretty meaningless, though—this AR could rock and roll faster than I could properly aim.

“How many shots do I have?”

“The magazine holds thirty, but, uh, ammo’s kinda expensive.”

Understood. This roly-poly, diffident youth was the perfect gentleman: I could dance with his wife, but I couldn’t use his wallet to buy her jewelry.

One of the devices clamped to the barrel was a powerful flashlight whose on/off switch lay precisely where my left thumb met the foregrip. It nudged on and off as gently as the trigger. I asked about the other cylinder.

“Look through the scope,” the kid said. “Now press that button with your left index finger.” I hadn’t noticed the other button. When I pressed it, a red dot appeared a hundred yards away, on the chest of the silhouette target. “Laser,” he said. “Pretty cool, right? Wherever that light is, that’s where your bullet will go. The laser, the ACOG; I got this one set up like they had them in
Transformers
.”

I could see through the scope that my first three shots—the ones I’d taken a second to aim—had landed in a group about an inch and a half across on the silhouette’s shoulder—a bit high and to the right, but good shooting, considering I’d never fired an AR.

The young man was beaming like a soccer dad as I handed it back. “It’s something, ain’t it?”

I had to admit that it was. It was effortless, like shooting a ray gun. If ARs made everybody as good a shot as the kid’s made me, it was easy to see why they were popular. Imagine a guitar that made you play like Eric Clapton.

“I have to ask, though. What’s a rifle like that cost?”

He looked sheepish. “Altogether, I probably have in it about …” He trailed off in a mumble.

“Excuse me?”

“Thirty-five hundred dollars, more or less.” He uttered a short laugh, as though he’d been Heimliched.

“May I ask what you do for work?”

“I work for a company that manages home-owner agreements.”

“Must pay well.”

He shrugged, and his gaze flitted about, looking for someplace to fall. “Well, I usually only get about eight hours a week.”

“How do you live on that?”

He paused, looking at his shoes. “I live with my parents,” he said quietly.

“You …” And I stopped myself, tamping down the urge to go all Hugh Beaumont on him, to preach the idiocy of throwing money at a pricey toy when he couldn’t afford an apartment. The kid was another man’s son; to me, he was a shooting mentor.

I thanked him and punished myself for a while shooting my antique, which, after the AR-15, felt as awkward as a piece of furniture. I pressed cartridges one by one into the five-shot magazine while the men
around me slapped in magazine after magazine and popped off shots—
Bambambambambambambam
—showering the cement floor with tinkling brass casings. At my next birthday, I would turn half the age of my rifle. Working its bolt made me feel old, but not as old as when I realized that an AR-15 was, to a twentysomething, “a piece of history”—a history stretching all the way back to the advent of the GWOT, on September 11, 2001, or perhaps even to the dim prehistoric reaches of the Vietnam War.

The kid was right about one thing. I’d become familiar with the AR-15—without even knowing it—from watching the news on Afghanistan and Iraq. On TV and in the paper, the AR’s military version was ubiquitous, gripped in the hands of every soldier and Marine, in a million dolled-up configurations. Whatever else the Gee Wot was achieving, it was producing a high-budget, twenty-four-hour advertisement for the AR-15.

Which, as I thought about it, seemed pretty weird. The M16 was not a hot consumer item during the Vietnam War, nor was the M1 Garand during the Second World War. The Vietnam-era draft didn’t inspire dabbling; young men didn’t know when they’d be handed one of those black rifles for real. And World War II wasn’t televised. It turned out that combining a volunteer army with twenty-four-hour cable-news war coverage was, inadvertently, a potent strategy for marketing firearms.

The kid was loading up the trunk of his teal Chevy Cavalier as I left the range. On the bumper, a McCain-Palin sticker had been pruned, the McCain half scissored off. I invited him to lunch, and he suggested I follow him to a nearby Burger King.

As we waited in line, I asked about his bumper sticker. “I wrote in Palin. I’m not sure why I didn’t trust McCain.”

“Obama?”

He snorted. “I have a conscience.”

It was a strange and depressing lunch. I had to keep reminding myself that he was less than half my age. He was twenty-four—I call him “the kid” because of his full pink cheeks and because he asked me not to use his name—but he talked like a washed-up man of seventy, looking back wistfully on a life of screwups, cop-outs, and missed opportunities.

His boyhood dream of becoming a pilot, for example, was already doused. He had gotten into home-computer flight simulators and, at fifteen
years old, successfully “piloted” a real-time—six-hour—flight from Anchorage to Seattle that required him to monitor fuel consumption, avoid bad weather, and cope with unexpected mechanical problems. He’d joined Air Force Junior ROTC in high school and enjoyed wearing the uniform every Tuesday. September 11, 2001, was a Tuesday. But instead of sharing with his JROTC buddies a surge of pride in the uniform and martial fury, he became so weepy and trembly that he had to ask the school to call his mother. He spent the rest of the day in bed.

The Air Force isn’t the thing anyway, his cousin Jimmy told him. They didn’t have enough pilot slots.
Let’s go Army and fly Black Hawks!
The Army, embroiled in two wars, would have been happy to have them—not as pilots, because they weren’t college grads, but as the true hot dogs on a combat chopper: crew chiefs. They could have stood in back, manned the door gun, and managed everything going on behind the cockpit. The Army would have given a rank for every year of JROTC, so the kid could have gone in as an E-3. Hell, yes, Jimmy had said, it’ll be awesome. And Jimmy had signed up, shipped out, and done three tours downrange.

“I chickened out,” the kid told me listlessly, pawing damp fries from their waxed-paper bag. “Makes me feel I missed out.”

I wanted to take him in my lap, chuck him under the chin, and tell him to buck up. “It’s not for everyone,” I said. “Are you still interested in flying?” His voice went flat as he told of enrolling at a commuter college in Denver to study aviation. Each semester had cost two thousand dollars in tuition and twice that again for flying lessons. His grades weren’t good enough to win him scholarships, so after three semesters he’d found himself five thousand dollars in debt, with no clear prospect of digging out. He’d said the hell with it and dropped out. And there went his dream of becoming a pilot.

“So now what?”

“I worked at a Burger King for a while, and as a contractor for Dell, until that ran out. I’m taking courses at the community college. In IT. You know.” The kid balled up his sandwich wrapping and licked a tomato seed off his ring finger. The conversation was spiraling toward dark matter. To wrench us up, I asked about the AR.

“Well,” he said, sitting up straight again, animated. “Honestly, I really got into firearms because of computer games. I play the
Battlefield
series. You know that one?
Counter Strike
really got me into it.” He talked for a long time about the shooter games he liked—
Battlefield 1942, Armed Assault II
, and
Call of Duty 4
. Each was a point-of-view Internet fight
game, in which the player was not merely controlling a digital proxy but was
there
. Human players operated every other soldier on the screen, he explained; that was the miracle of it. He was playing against real people, all over the world, each seeing the battlefield from a different perspective. Kids’ gun fantasy had morphed from Mattel Shootin’ Shell cap guns to
Call of Duty
, but otherwise this kid was a lot like my childhood self.

It was
Call of Duty 4
that got him interested in the AR-15. As he accumulated points, he earned the right to use and modify progressively deadlier weapons. Descriptions of ACOGs, lasers, and other gadgets appeared on the screen for him to choose. The descriptions were ads, really, extolling the virtues of brand-name devices.

Video games may have explained why the AR-15 was the hope of a firearms industry worried about its aging customer base. My nephew, for example, who had lived his entire life within a few blocks of his Greenwich Village birthplace and had less experience with guns than almost anybody, knew AR-15 terminology—ACOGs, Magpuls, etc.—better than I did because he played video games. He didn’t transfer his virtual enthusiasm to a real AR-15 the way the kid in Denver did, but in one of its endless gun-market surveys, the National Shooting Sports Foundation found that lots of young people apparently had. While gun guys overall showed up in the gun-industry surveys as mostly over forty, rural, middling educated, and white, the people who shot AR-15s tended to be younger, more urban, better educated, and more racially diverse. In other words, they looked more like where America was going than where it had been.

The NSSF found that not only were AR shooters younger and more diverse, they also took their guns out to the range and shot them more often than owners of other guns did. They’d made the AR-15’s .223 cartridge the biggest-selling caliber of rifle ammunition. AR shooters could be counted on to buy, with real dollars, in real life, the endless stream of parts and accessories that they earned playing
Call of Duty 4
in cyberspace. And AR shooters did the thing the industry most depended on: They
evangelized the pleasures of shooting
, just as the kid had done when he held out his rifle for me to try.