The gun thing is an affection for firearms. Lots of people -- even some of us who have the gun thing -- find it a little odd. Why, of all the cool mechanical devices upon which we might have fixated -- musical instruments, old clocks, cameras, and so on -- did we pick guns? Since 2009, I’ve been traveling around the US interviewing gun guys, who turn out to be a lot more complicated and subtle and thoughtful than they are usually portrayed. Most of the time, I’ve been wearing the gun pictured to the right. My book, Gun Guys: A Road Trip, will be out in spring 2013.

The NRA Speaks on "Stand Your Ground"

Sat, 5 May 2012 09:33:06 -0600

More than two months after George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, the NRA finally mentioned the incident, and the “Stand Your Ground” law that kept Zimmerman from being arrested for many weeks. Following is its statement, with some explanation in italics.
“The National Rifle Association always has and always will advocate the passage and preservation of self-defense laws. The alternative leaves the innocent in danger.
No argument there. Of course, “self-defense laws” aren’t the issue. Every state’s laws allows for self-defense. The issue is whether a state imposes a duty to retreat before resorting to lethal force.
The vast majority of states do not impose a "duty to retreat"
Wrong. Only twenty-four states have “Stand Your Ground” laws.
and most Americans support laws that clarify that Common Law, common-sense right.
Wrong again. In the aftermath of the shooting, most polls found Americans opposed to Stand Your Ground laws.
It empowers lawful people to defend themselves, and deters would-be murderers, rapists and robbers.
True that.
It’s a natural right. No law "gives" it or can take it away. It's yours.
Gun-rights activists go back and forth on this. One minute, carrying a gun and defending oneself is a Second Amendment right enshrined by the framers, and the next it’s a “natural” right beyond the laws of men. When it comes to Stand Your Ground laws, it’s not a natural right. It’s a state-given right, given in a minority of states.
It works. And its only alternative
As I noted in an earlier post, I’ve taken four courses on how to defend myself with the gun I carry, and all of my NRA-trained, NRA-approved instructors were unanimous that the best alternative when attacked while wearing one’s gun is to run away. The gun, they said -- over and over again -- is to be drawn only when retreat is impossible and being killed or seriously injured by an attacker is imminent. If there is any way to get away, they said, do so. So the NRA’s contention that Stand Your Ground “works” and is “the only alternative” directly contradicts the instructors it trains and certifies. The trainers are right. This statement is political puffery.
the idea that distant, disinterested third parties can dictate after the fact that "you must retreat" – will never be accepted by the American people.
Wrong, as noted above. But this gets at the heart of the NRA philosophy -- that “distant, disinterested third parties” are presuming to make life-or-death decisions for law-abiding Americans. The pity about the NRA’s dishonest belligerence is that there is a grain of logic there, a philosophical argument that, were everybody to lower his voice, might make for a good discussion about the sovereignty of the citizen in a big, complicated, polyglot society. Often, it’s not the NRA’s position on guns I find so depressing, but it’s hostility to allowing rational debate. On the other hand, the other side isn’t much better....
For these reasons, the National Rifle Association will work to protect self-defense laws on the books and advocate for their passage in those states that do not fully respect this fundamental right.
Memo to the other 26 states: Side with those who actually train people to handle guns, not with the blowhards in NRA’s Fairfax, Virginia, office tower. Self-defense laws already allow for the use of deadly force in unavoidable situations. Don’t indemnify people who ignore gun trainers’ advice to retreat if at all possible. Save self-defense for when it’s truly necessary.

Stand your ground

Fri, 4 May 2012 08:44:04 -0600

In the past eighteen months I’ve taken four classes in how to use a handgun to defend myself. All of my instructors were high priests of gun rights and gun culture. All thought that more people should carry concealed weapons. And all of them taught us the opposite of Stand Your Ground: that the best thing to do, when wearing a gun and confronted by a thug, is to retreat. Run away. Withdraw. “The only way to win a gunfight,” they told us over and over, “is not to be there when it happens.” The legal, financial, emotional, and moral nightmare that follows even a justified self-defense shooting is to be avoided if at all possible.

But even though my gun instructors taught us not to stand our ground, a lot of them -- and many of the gun guys I met on my travels around the country -- had a soft spot for Stand Your Ground laws. That is, while they thought that retreating from a fight if possible was a good idea, they didn’t want to be ordered by the state to do so.

It’s a fine nuance in an age that isn’t kind to nuance. But it reflects the way guns stand in for a powerful way of thinking about the individual and his place in society. To many gun guys, especially those who carry, a citizen is responsible primarily for himself and his family. He knows that while the police can keep society safer in general, in the particular moment that a thug lunges with a knife, the cops almost certainly won’t be there. Besides, they ask, if it isn’t worth it to a man to defend his own life, why should he expect a $31,000-a-year policeman to do it for him?

Even more important, such gun guys also wonder why it should be a matter of public policy that good people retreat from bad ones. Why, they ask, should law-abiding people, going about their business in public places they are legally allowed to circulate, be forced to cede the streets to the worst among us? Why would a just society want such an outcome?

There are a lot of good reasons to repeal the Stand Your Ground laws. Personally, I think they do more harm than good, and I stand with my gun instructors that retreating from a fight is always better than shooting it out. But those who dismiss Stand-Your-Ground adherents as racist paranoids or yee-haw vigilante gun slingers don’t have it right. There’s a logic to Stand Your Ground. Reasonable people can disagree. As usual, though, the reasonable people aren’t the ones making all the noise.

#10 Fatwa

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 15:55:56 -0600

I’d dropped this blog long ago to work on my book about the attraction of firearms. After driving 15,000 miles around the United States talking to gun guys at ranges, shops, shows, and in their homes and garages, I’ve been writing and the manuscript is almost done. But I need now to reach out the community of gun enthusiasts who aren’t filled with rage and hatred, and who are, I remain convinced, the vast majority.
Last week, I published a piece on Kindle Singles about the AR-15 rifle. Here’s the link: http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Gone-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B005NCKCGM
In it, I discuss how popular the gun is, how much fun it is to shoot and accessorize, and how it is one very bright spot in the gun business. I also make the argument that banning them as “assault rifles” is dumb and counterproductive.
I also point out -- using figures from the gun industry’s own trade group -- that the AR-15 bucks a trend that the industry finds worrisome: young people are demonstrably less interested in shooting that older people, and that while more and more guns are being sold, they’re being sold to the same shrinking group of aging white males. The industry calls its own future “precarious.”
In short, a piece pretty sympathetic to the gun-guy point of view. What has been amazing is the vitriol unloaded on the piece by that segment of the gun-guy community that hangs out on the Internet. The comments on the Amazon site are bad; the ones on www.ar15.com are really ugly (making fun of my family, etc.) Clearly few of those making the comments have read the piece; it makes all their own arguments about the politics of these guns. So from where comes all the hatred?
I do have a history with ar15.com. Last year, I went on their asking question, asked them the wrong way, and got flamed for days and days. I cop to being a liberal Democrat and always have. I always figured a liberal Democrat gun guy would be a useful thing to the gun-rights community.
Are these guys so eat up with anti-Obama hatred that they can’t bear to hear an Obama supporter make their own arguments?
Are they so eager to believe the worst that they’ll publish the nasty insults (albeit anonymously) about someone they’ve never met and whose writing they haven’t read?
It’s as though anybody who doesn’t agree with them on absolutely everything is their sworn enemy. And if that’s the case what *don’t* they like about the Taliban? Where is this country going if you can’t get away with agreeing with people?
It’s a puzzler. If anybody can help me figure it out, I’d be grateful.
 

#9 Will obama blow it?

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 11:19:57 -0700

That’s me and my family at the Democratic Convention in 2008, watching Barack Obama accept the nomination. We’re big Obama fans.
But I find myself cringing when I read all the calls from the left for Obama to come out strongly for gun control in tonight’s State of the Union address tonight.
There are two trends that should give hope to those who profess to care about gun violence, and who call the loudest for gun control. The first is the stunning drop in violent crime over the past twenty years. Murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery...all of them are about half as common now as they were in 1990, even though gun ownership has gone way up and gun laws have become much looser. The second is the rapid aging of the gun-buying population.
Young people don’t like guns. Statistic provided by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association of the firearms industry, shows that the percentage of guns bought by twentysomethings is in single digits. It’s middle-aged guys and older who do most of the gun buying. Young people want to be urban and digital, and guns are neither.
I’ve been driving around the country interviewing gun guys for my book about Americans and their firearms. (I’ve done about 12,000 miles so far.) I have an app on my iPod Touch called Gun Shop Finder, but about half the gun stores I’ve tracked down were boarded up by the time I got there. And of the ones I found, most were giving over half their floor space to archery. Fewer young people hunt every year, and the ones who do want to do it with a bow. It takes more skill, it’s more “extreme,” there’s no bothersome paperwork involved in buying a bow, and most of all, bowhunting looks better on television than gun hunting, so is all the various hunting and outdoor networks show. Hunting with a gun is what their fathers did.
It doesn’t seem true this week, in the wake of Tucson, but guns are, in a sense, going out of fashion. The gun problem, to the extent there is one, is going away. Those at the Brady Center, and the Legal Community Against Violence, and the other gun-control organizations, should be celebrating our national success at reducing the harm that guns cause in society. Instead, they’re wringing their hands and calling for more useless “solutions” to a problem that is solving itself on its own.
In the three previous posts on this site, I argue that aside from being bad policy, gun control is politically toxic for Democrats. It’s hard to demonstrate that any gun-control law has ever saved a life, but easy to show that by identifying itself as the party of gun control, the Democratic Party has sacrificed a generation of voters who have every other reason to be natural Democrats. As I prepare to listen to President Obama tonight, I am haunted by something a Michigan gun-store owner said to be last summer. “Business is terrible,” he said. “I just need Obama to say, ‘gun’ one time. He doesn’t have to say anything else; just ‘gun.’”
Here’s hoping he doesn’t.

#8 What do we want to do?

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 08:22:26 -0700

I keep coming back to this question, when my compatriots on the left talk about passing new gun laws -- banning big magazines etc. -- after Tucson: Why do you want to do this?
It was clear to us of the smart set that Congress's wild overreaction after Len Bias died was stupid and destructive (passing the laws that penalized crack more heavily than powder.) We understood instantly that Congress was not only pandering, but yielding to a pre-existing impulse toward demonizing blacks and making their lives harder. Similarly, we understood immediately that by pushing the Patriot Act after 9/11, the Republicans were seizing the moment to impose the kind of fascistic police-state laws that it was in Dick Cheney’s nature to want to pass. And, for a counter example, when the bombs went off in London, we pointed to the British and said, "Look at what fine people they are. They suffer a blow and suck it up; they don't torque their laws and society out of shape in a panicked attempt to feel like they're 'doing something.'"
Remember the University of Wisconsin political theorist Murray Edelman; government doesn't solve problems, it seeks or manufactures problems to justify "solutions" it already wants to impose. Large-capacity magazines have been freely available for years, and the number of times someone has committed a massacre with them can be counted on one hand. The desire to ban them now is not in response to a problem. There is none to solve. So what else is it?
Look at it another way, if we're going to start talking of banning things. Ban advocates say, "nobody needs a 33-round magazine." I'd argue that in a free society, one doesn't have to prove need if one wants something; the burden of proof is on he who wants to ban. Moreover, in terms of which is more destructive -- which has caused more harm, and more limited human potention -- is the 33-round magazine worse than the 6,000 square-foot house? I'd argue no. Not even close. The 6,000-foot house consumes tremendous resources to build, heat, and cool, and forces us to lay out communities so they can only be navigated by car. They’ve done incalculable damage to the planet and our way of life. But we're not talking about banning 6,000 square foot houses.
Rachel Maddow dismisses the Second Amendment with a sneer, saying that a strict reading of it would allow individuals to own nuclear weapons. There is indeed a large wing of the gun community that believes that the Second Amendment precisely protects military weapons. The Brown Bess musket was the premier infantry weapon at the time 2A was written, so today's premier infantry weapon -- the assault rifle -- should be the gun most protected by the Constitution and the last to be banned. It's about their definition of "the militia" -- the collective community of armed citizens. The weapon of an individual citizen is the rifle, not a complex system that requires many people to operate. So nobody's asking for an F-16 or a nuclear weapon. From the point of view of the 2A absolutists, those are not militia weapons. There is no constituency for those. So to say that people shouldn't have 33-round magazines because the next step is people having nuclear weapons is the worst kind of straw-man demagoguery.
I would argue that we on the left have a real opportunity here, both to do our side good and the nation some good as well. And that is to calm the fuck down. I've already argued at length how reaching for the smelling salts every time someone does something bad with a gun is bad for our side; it drives the other guys deeper into their protective crouch, and makes those who live on a Fox News diet that much easier to stampede. But beyond the partisan politics, rushing into passing restrictive laws because one bad thing happened is just dumb, and beneath or dignity. We knew it after Len Bias and after 9/11, and we should know it now.
What do we liberals want to do? Do we want to reduce gun violence in America? If so, perhaps we should just keep doing what we're doing, because I don't know that there's been another twenty-year period in American history that violent crime has dropped as much or as fast as it has in the past twenty. Or is it that we want to get rid of the guns? If the latter, I come back to the question, why? These past twenty years were when gun laws got much looser and gun ownership went way up.
I think we on the left should be leaders in doing what we so admired in the British -- we should say, steady on, people. This was a terrible event. But overall, things are fine. And we don't need to make enormous, destructive changes just because one bad things happened.
Instead, we on the left are revealing our pre-existing impulse to "get rid of guns." I understand why we don't like them; they reinforce everything we stand against -- war, force, cowboy individualism and so on. I think it's fine to argue against war, force and cowboy individualism. But I don't think it's right, or smart politics, to use restrictive law to make those points, any more than it's right or smart to use marijuana laws to reinforce the Protestant work ethic.

#7 Large-Capacity Magazines

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:05:13 -0700

As we talk about a new ban on large-capacity magazines, let’s consider the history. Back during the 1994-2004 “assault weapons ban,” Congress never banned large-capacity magazines. It banned their manufacture and import. If you had one, you were as free as can be to use it and even sell it. Between the time Congress passed the law and the day the law went into effect -- and even during the debate over it -- manufacturers cranked them out by the gazillion to get them grandfathered in. It's entirely possible that the "ban" put more large-capacity magazines on the street than would have been there without the ban.
We could increase the penalties for using a high-capacity magazine in a crime, I suppose, but if someone is out to commit murder, a law like that isn't going to dissuade him.
Look at the crime stats for the ten years of the so-called "assault rifle ban" and you find no change in the percentage of killings or assaults committed with rifles v. handguns. That's the practical problem: a new "ban" wouldn't do anything to reduce violence or save lives.
What you would create is a gigantic political problem that the Democrats don't need right now. High-capacity magazines aren't just for mass-murderers. "Practical shooting" is a pretty big sport -- people running through a kind of course shooting at targets against the clock. They use big magazines to save time. Well, that's a small constituency, you could say. But another attempt to ban these things will be well covered by the gun press and the gun bloggers, and all gun guys are going to feel dissed and abused, whether they engage in practical shooting or not.
If such a ban would actually do some good -- i.e. save some lives -- we could argue about whether it's worth taking some heat from the gun guys over it. But politics is a cost-benefit analysis: What are you going to get vs. what you're going to lose. In this case, Progressives have a tremendous amount to lose, and almost nothing to gain.
What the talk of a new large-magazine ban sounds like to the gun people is the liberals desperately looking for a way to use this disaster to trim back gun rights a little. It reinforces the toxic narrative that the Democrats are the enemy of regular guys.
Again, we aren't going to gain anything by such a new law. But we're sure going to lose a lot.

#6 REP. GIFFORDS

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The shooting of Rep. Giffords is, at least in part, a gun story, so allow me to weigh in. The New York Times, a paper I really like, had two things to say about it that were, however, unhelpful. This, from the 10 January editorial:

(Arizona’s) gun laws are among the most lenient, allowing even a disturbed man like Mr. Loughner to buy a pistol and carry it concealed without a special permit. That was before the Tucson rampage. Now, having seen first hand the horror of political violence, Arizona should lead the nation in quieting the voices of intolerance, demanding an end to the temptations of bloodshed, and imposing sensible controls on its instruments.
It’s time to take a deep breath and ask what "sensible controls" one could devise that could have prevented this. Loughner bought the pistol legally, having gone through the federal background check. (Arizona law was irrelevant when he bought it.) And if he hadn't passed the background check in a gun store, he could have bought a gun from a private citizen out of the newspaper's classifieds.
Yes, his carrying concealed to the Safeway was legal under Arizona's new law, but if it hadn't been, would he have been dissuaded? He headed off to commit murder; he was already far over the line where a concealed-carry law would have made any difference to him.

We could talk about banning private-party sales of guns, I suppose -- not that it would have made a difference in this case. But in a country with 350 million privately owned guns, people who want guns are going to get them.

A helpful way to think of gun laws is as analogous to marijuana laws. They make us feel like we're "doing something," but they are equally ineffective at doing what they purport to do. In the case of gun laws, though, what we're also doing is so alienating the 40 percent of Americans who own guns that progress on things like health care, women's rights, immigration reform, workers' rights, and climate change becomes nearly impossible. (I can't tell you how many working-stiff gun guys I've met while researching my book -- people whose wages haven't risen since 1978 and should be with us -- who won't even listen to Democrats because they're convinced Democrats want to take away their guns. Misguided? Maybe. But that's democracy for you.)

Gail Collins, I columnist I generally respect, had this to say:
Loughner came to Giffords’s sweet gathering with a semiautomatic weapon that he was able to buy legally because the law restricting their sale expired in 2004 and Congress did not have the guts to face up to the National Rifle Association and extend it. If Loughner had gone to the Safeway carrying a regular pistol, the kind most Americans think of when they think of the right to bear arms, Giffords would probably still have been shot and we would still be having that conversation about whether it was a sane idea to put her Congressional district in the cross hairs of a rifle on the Internet.
The gun Loughner used was a regular pistol. There was no law restricting its sale in 2004. It is a semi-automatic pistol, but the law to which Collins refers was a law against assault rifles. Okay, okay, you say. I'm picking nits. But here's the point: Presuming to forbid or control things you don't understand is a pretty good definition of elitism, and if Democrats suffer from anything, it's a public perception that they're elitists trying to force their own solutions on the masses who don't know any better. Confusing and conflating “regular pistols” with military-style rifles reinforces that sense of blithe cluelessness to anybody who’s ever been to a gun store or shooting range. Moreover, to the extent Collins pushes Democrats to push harder for gun-control laws that will make them feel better, but not really save any lives, she makes it harder for the Democrats' agenda -- to which I am deeply committed -- to gain traction. She also will shift attention from the real villains here: our inattention to the mentally ill around us, and the toxic rhetoric (“Second Amendment solutions,” etc.) we’ve been hearing from the Right.

Much has been made during the past 72 hours about Arizona’s lax gun laws, particularly the one that lets any adult who can legally own a gun carry it concealed. It turns out, there was an armed citizen at the shooting. Geraldo Rivera interviewed a man named Joe Zamudio who was at the scene with a concealed handgun. He told Rivera on camera that he ran toward the sound of the shots but didn’t shoot because others already had the Loughner tackled and, “I wasn’t going to cause any more collateral damage or scare anybody any further than they needed to be scared.” In other words, he ran toward the danger to help, but made a very fast, very sober, and very correct decision about what to do with his gun. He’s only 24, but unlike Loughner, not crazy. And neither are most of the people who legally carry guns. As many as six million Americans have gotten concealed-carry permits in the 24 years that they’ve been easy to get, and fewer than 300 have done bad things with their guns.

I’m not one for using statistics, because everybody can read into them what he wants to see. This one, though, seems pretty hard to get around: In the past twenty years, gun ownership has gone way up and gun laws have become far looser, yet violent crime as fallen by more than a third. (The gun people are convinced there's a causal relationship; I think the crime drop has more to do with changing demographics and smarter policing. But certainly, more guns and looser gun laws didn't cause crime to rise.) Not to pick unduly on The New York Times, but its editorial of 11 January, referring to “the visceral evidence that [gun rights] groups have made the country a far more dangerous place,” is beneath the dignity of a great newspaper. What, pray, is visceral evidence, and how does it trump actual evidence that the country is a far less dangerous place? Ditto Bob Herbert, who seems to have phoned in his column of the same day -- “A Flood Tide of Murder,” from 1989. If we were serious about reducing killings, he writes, “we’d have to radically restrict the availability of guns” among other things. Well, we have reduced killings by a great deal, somehow by doing the exact opposite. Again, one doesn’t have make a causal argument, but to say that “no amount of killing has prompted any remedial action” is simply a calumny. Lots of remedial action has been taken, and it’s worked. It just hasn’t involved radically restricting the availability of guns.

The more statistics and studies I read, the more I think that if we did away with almost everything we think of as "gun control" -- registration, assault-rifle bans, one-gun-a-month laws, etc. -- the price of fish wouldn't change by a farthing. People would still do bad things with guns, but to no greater extent. (And maybe less. There's evidence for that, too.) Most of all, we'd have taken from the Right a gigantic cudgel with which they whip the masses into a frenzy and beat us senseless. The Times -- and The Washington Post, with its error-ridden swing at the Pulitzer a few weeks ago, “The Hidden Life of Guns” -- should know better.

#5 THE OTHER SECOND-AMENDMENT RIGHT

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 11:50:39 -0600

The Second Amendment has long been the ultimate cudgel of the political gun community. There it is in the Constitution! “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Of course, that’s not all the Second Amendment says. The full text reads, “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Those who support stricter gun controls have long argued that the militia means the National Guard, and that gun rights are collective, not individual. Gun enthusiasts countered that by “militia,” the founders meant the community of armed citizens. In Heller and McDonald, the Court finally settled that debate, at least as far as the law is concerned, by coming down on the side of the individual right. Gun enthusiasts rejoiced.

It’s a mystery to me why the gun-control community has allowed their opponents to walk off with the Second Amendment. If the amendment guarantees an individual right to own a gun, it also confers a right to regulate gun ownership. It’s right the text: “...a well-regulated militia....” Even accepting the gun enthusiasts’ definition of the militia as the broad community of armed citizens, it seems clear that the Second Amendment not only allows but requires regulation. Put another way, Sarah Brady has Second Amendment rights too: the right to have the militia -- the community of armed citizens -- well regulated. Why is she -- and the rest of the country that wants tighter restrictions on guns -- not making a Second Amendment case?

#4 MEANINGS

Fri, 2 Jul 2010 07:16:32 -0600

I don’t buy the line of some gun enthusiasts that firearms are no different, as a hobby, than tennis or beer-stein collecting. Guns are incredibly powerful things, physically, emotionally, and psychologically. There are many easy-to-see reasons why we like them -- the history, the mechanics, the fun of shooting them, the way they get us outdoors, and so on. But there’s a lot beneath the surface, too, and this trip I’m on is in search of it. Today I’m in Wisconsin.

A lot of books have been written about guns. Many are jeremiads from one side of the divide or the other, and aren’t very good. A few are excellent, though, and I have one in particular on my mind today: Gun Show Nation, published in 2006 by Joan Burdick. She’s a political scientiest and something a shooter herself; she has no instinctive horror of guns. She does, however, begin to explain what has been for me a longstanding mystery: why a fondness for guns is associated with conservative politics.

She notes the way a gun empowers the individual and thus reinforces the rights, responsibilities, and sovereignty of the self as opposed to the collective. “Individualism, not collective action, and ownership, not partnership in the political process, redefined the language of rights by ambitious conservatives like Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms, George F. Will, Barry Goldwater, and Phyllis Schlafly,” she writes. Commitment to individuals’ gun rights, she argues, relieves people of the responsibility to work on behalf of the greater good. “How much easier it is to believe in the politics of the gun, and to fight for our right to be armed, than to step in front of the gun and build social and civil institutions that sustain our society and promote economic and political justice,” Burdick writes. She may be overstating it some -- some people just like guns, even liberal collectivists -- but there’s a lot there on which to chew.

I had those words on my mind yesterday when I was interviewing a wealthy gun collector. We were looking at his remarkable assemblage of turn-of-the-20th century firearms, reveling in their workmanship, when he suddenly snapped into a long disquisition on the way FDR had begun the nanny-state “death by a thousand cuts” that has ruined the nation. “The people who don’t like guns, he said, “live in a world where food appears and money appears because, ‘I don’t have to be greedy and make money off the labor of other people because we have this big government,’” he said breathlessly. I ran Joan Burdick’s ideas past him and he thought she was right. “It’s the individual that this country was created to protect,” he insisted. “The Bill of Rights is all about protecting the individual. Everybody is responsible for his own life, or at least that’s how it should be. Now, though, there’s an expectation that government is going to give you things. Everything has become an entitlement -- food, housing, health care, even a mortgage. The government told the banks that owning your own home is a right, so lend money to people who can’t afford it. That’s how we got in this mess.”

He went on at some length, taking in illegal immigrants, black families destroyed by welfare, children raised to have high self esteem that they hadn’t earned and may not deserve. His long speech was historically and factually dubious, but there was real feeling behind it. He’d been born rich and inherited a successful family business. But his immigrant grandfather had started it from nothing, and he’d worked hard himself to keep it going. He was thoroughly convinced that the brand of liberalism launched by FDRs New Deal and adopted by almost every administration since then -- Democrat and Republican -- had destroyed individual initiative in the United States and turned us all, essentially, into wards of the state. His vast gun collection summoned for him a time when a man stood on his own two feet and succeeded or failed entirely on the basis of his own grit and talent. The impulse to take away peoples’ guns, he believes, is a combination of “kumbayah” self-delusion about the violent nature of mankind, and a deep-seating loathing of individualism. It was hard to get him off the subject; he came back to it again and again, all day.

#3: DECEMBER 2009

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:14:52 -0600

I am trolling the Tanner Gun Show in Denver’s Mercantile Mart, looking for a waistband holster to fit my Colt .38. Men wearing cargo vests and camo caps tend hundreds of tables in a room as big as a blimp hangar. The shoppers are essentially the same folks with whom I’ve been attending gun shows for the past twenty years—middle-aged white guys, a few of whom have brought along their wives or teenage sons. They’re moving slowly, hefting pistols, sighting along rifle barrels, making the snappy music of bolts and actions.

What has changed in the past two decades are the types of guns and the vibe. In the early nineties, gun shows were low-key. It was easy to see the men behind the tables as little odder than camera or model-train buffs. I liked guns and hunting; these guys liked them a little more. Most of the guns were hunting rifles and fowling pieces. Handguns were vintage Colt Peacemakers, finely engraved commemoratives, or dueling pistols: show guns.

The weapons at this Denver show seem to have been designed by Klingons. Many are short, black, high-tech semi-automatics—ARs in the jargon—the civilian version of the rifles American soldiers carry in Iraq and Afghanistan. They fire a bullet unsuitable for most hunting, and are crusted with combat-ready lasers, flashlights, night-vision scopes, and red-dot sights. They start at around a thousand dollars. The tables that don’t cater to the AR crowd hold other modern man-killers: rough-finished Yugoslav AK-47’s for three hundred dollars apiece; Barrett .50-caliber rifles capable of penetrating an armored limousine; brand-new stainless-steel semi-automatic pistols with fifteen-shot clips selling for upwards of eight hundred dollars; tinny chrome-plated pocket pistols for less than a hundred bucks. There’s also plenty of body armor, web gear, combat fatigues, bayonets, silencers, stacks of thirty- and fifty-round magazines. It feels less like a “show” than an arms bazaar in Peshawar.

The amiable gents I remember are mostly gone, too. Vendors stand behind their tables with shoulders back and fists balled, visibly and mysteriously angry. “Buy it now,” a bearded man growls as I handle one of his AKs. “Tomorrow they may not let you.” He’s wearing a t-shirt that reads, “Welcome to America, Speak English or Get the Hell Out.” A square-jawed woman at the booth of Florida-based Equip 2 Conceal warns, “The way crime is going you can’t afford not to carry a gun.” For a hundred and ten dollars, she says, Equip 2 Conceal will run me through a three-hour course and let me walk out of here legally qualified to carry a concealed handgun. Another table offers posters of Klansmen over the words, “The Original Boys in the Hood,” and such books as Can You Survive? Guidelines for Resistance to Tyranny for You and Your Family, with a cover depicting a blood-dripping Commie sickle slicing through a U.S. map. Across the tables and at the snack bar, conversations are full of furious references to the “jackbooted thugs” of the ATF, liberal “gun-grabbers,” and the difference between the “real Americans” of the west and the “elites” of Washington and New York.

This kind of talk has been around since the Clinton years, and gun shows started militarizing after 9/11. But at the Tanner Show, I am aware of how thoroughly they’ve taken over gun culture. What’s odd is that gun guys have little to be angry about; they’ve won just about every battle they’ve fought for decades. The assault-rifle ban of the Clinton years is long since repealed. The Supreme Court just settled two hundred years of debate by ruling that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to own a firearm, not just a “militia” right. The number of people carrying concealed weapons has exploded, because almost all state legislatures have made carrying a gun a right, not a matter of local discretion. As for “the way crime is going,” it’s been dropping for a dozen years. Gun guys should be celebrating.

After Barack Obama was elected, though, I had a hard time buying cartridges for hunting season —and handgun ammunition, forget it. Hoarding emptied store gun racks, stripped bare the cartridge shelves, and shot prices through the roof. A popular poster at the Tanner show is Obama’s smiling face with “Firearms Salesman of the Year” below it—that and his mug shot in Joker make-up over the word “Socialism.” As the first unabashed urban-intellectual president most gun owners can remember, President Obama pushes all kinds of buttons. It’s an article of faith that he intends to ban private guns and confiscate them the minute he gets the economy fixed, health care passed, and Afghanistan pacified. A lot of the fear and anger is ginned up by the NRA. But it’s real.