Gun Guys Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2013 by Dan Baum

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered

  trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Portions of this work were originally published, in a different form, in Harper’s Magazine (August 2010) and online as a Kindle Single titled Guns Gone Wild (September 2011).

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Steve Lee for permission to reprint an exerpt from “I Like Guns” from I Like Guns by Steve Lee (November 2005). http://ilikeguns.com.au/. Reprinted by permission of the artist.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baum, Dan.

  Gun guys : a road trip / Dan Baum. — First Edition.

  pages cm

  eISBN: 978-0-307-96221-8

  1. Firearms owners—United States. 2. Firearms ownership—

  United States. 3. Firearms—Social aspects—United States. I. Title.

  HV8059.B38 2013

  683.400973—dc23 2012028767

  Jacket design by Jason Booher

  v3.1

  For my brother, Andy

  I like guns I like the way they look

  I like the shiny steel and the polished wood

  I don’t care if they’re big or small

  If they’re for sale, Hell, I want ’em all

  I like guns, I like guns, I like guns.

  …

  I don’t really get all the fuss

  Why they’re trying to take guns off of us

  ’Cause I ain’t going to shoot anyone

  No one shoots at me ’cause I’ve got a gun

  I like guns, I like guns, I like guns.

  —Steve Lee, from his 2010 CD, I Like

  Guns, which also includes the songs

  “I’ll Give Up My Gun,” “Gun Shy

  Dog,” and “She Don’t Like Guns”

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE: BIG BANG

  1 BARBIE FOR MEN

  2 CONDITION YELLOW

  3 THE iGUN

  4 BLOWBACK

  5 FUDD LIKE ME

  6 FLICKED OFF

  7 THE RUBBER-GUN SQUAD

  8 BRING IT ON, GOD DAMN IT!

  9 CONDITION BLACK

  10 IT’S NOT GOING TO BITE

  11 SPIN DRIFT

  12 FRIEDRICH AND BARNEY

  13 HE UPPED, I UPPED

  14 GUN SHUL

  15 HOGZILLA

  16 THE ARMED BONEHEAD

  17 DEAD AGAIN

  18 TRIBES

  EPILOGUE: SAMBA!

  POSTSCRIPT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Other Books by This Author

  A Note About the Author

  PROLOGUE: BIG BANG

  Dick Cavett: I always wanted a Luger.… The Luger is a sexy object; there is something about that design that is genius and appealing.

  Randy Cohen: We don’t have any say in the objects we find seductive.

  —On the public radio show Person Place Thing, February 15, 2012

  Within days of arriving at summer camp, it was clear I’d be forever consigned to right field, ignored by quarterbacks, left jiggling and huffing in the rear during capture the flag. At five, I was the youngest kid ever at Sunapee: a pudgy, overmothered cherub amid a tribe of lean savages. Though I’d begged to follow my brothers to camp, my first week in Bunk 1 was a fog of humiliations large and small. I knew nothing of baseball, tits, or rock and roll; I was quick to tears; I wet the bed. At the end of the first week, I feigned illness for the raw relief of the cool, sympathetic touch of the nurse’s hand on my forehead.

  At the edge of the woods loomed a mysterious monolith that was both exciting and vaguely disturbing: a giant white boulder neatly cracked in two. It must have stood five feet high—much taller than my head. The two sides lay just far enough apart that a person could slip between them, and I occasionally saw bigger boys disappearing along the path through the rock—it appeared to be some kind of portal.

  One hot day in the second week of camp, Bunk 1’s counselor led the ten of us through. The broken rock faces sparkled in the sunlight, and as we stepped in, a thick mantle of cool air enveloped us. I was disoriented for a moment, as though I’d entered into another dimension. Then the boy in front of me moved, the boy behind me shoved, and we emerged onto a sparsely wooded hillside.

  The ground sloped gently away, through white birch saplings, to a wooden platform floating on a sea of ferns. On the platform stood a big man with his fists on his hips. We trotted down the path and clattered aboard. Five urine-stained mattresses lay at the big man’s feet. On the mattresses lay rifles.

  Real guns! It was 1961, and, like many kids, I’d seen lots of gunfights on TV. I’d played cowboys with Mattel cap pistols and ambushed friends with primary-colored squirt guns. These rifles, though, were long and serious-looking, their burnished wood warmly reflecting the dappled sunlight. The big man, a crew-cut Rutgers footballer named Hank Hilliard, scooped up a rifle and opened its bolt with a slick-click that I felt in my spine. He pointed to the various parts and spoke their names, extending blunt fingers to show how to line up the sights. He sternly repeated the range rules. Then he eenie-meenied five of us to lie on the mattresses and warned us not to touch the rifles until he gave the go-ahead.

  I lay on my side, hands clasped between my knees, gazing at the steel barrel two inches in front of my eyes: MOSSBERG 340 KA NORTH HAVEN, CONNECTICUT .22 SHORT LONG OR LONG RIFLE. I cannot remember the names of my neighbors’ grown children or the seventh dwarf, but to this day I can summon every detail of that rifle and its metallic, smoky, chemical aroma: guns.

  A cartridge plopped onto the mattress—slender shiny brass with a rounded gray tip. “Pick up your rifles,” Hank boomed, and I hoisted the Mossberg into my arms. Across the far end of the clearing stretched a board fence on which he’d tacked sheets of white paper, each with a black dot at the center. “Open your bolts.” I worked the knob up and back. Slick-click. “Load.” I poked the nose of the cartridge into the breech and mashed it forward with my thumb. “Close your bolts.” I pushed the bolt forward and locked it down, the most determined thing I’d ever done. “Aim and fire at will.”

  The kid next to me grunted as his rifle popped off. The other three shot nervously in the next two seconds. I ignored them. For days, I’d enviously watched these boys swing bats and tennis rackets, throw spirals, and execute high dives. Now I tuned them out and squeezed the world down to my front sight, a bead-topped post looping tighter and tighter around the black dot. The rifle gave a slight jump against my shoulder and a distant crack. Hank dropped another cartridge on the mattress.

  We each shot five bullets and, after an elaborate ceremony of opening bolts and clearing chambers, pelted across the clearing to retrieve our targets. One kid’s was completely untouched. The rest had two or three holes, the shots scattered widely.

  All five of mine were inside the black dot, which I now saw was divided into five concentric rings. Several of my bullet holes touched; one nicked dead center. When I handed the target to Hank, he rocked his head back in surprise. “Damn,” he breathed, touching each hole with a pencil point. “Thirty-six out of fifty.” He handed back the target and gave me my first-ever man-to-man look. “Nice shootin’, Tex.”

  Was that my personal Big Bang? Did I get hooked on guns because I discovered I was go
od at shooting at precisely the moment I was experiencing my first feelings of masculine inadequacy? Is this why I’ve spent a lifetime carrying around an enthusiasm that has made me feel slightly ashamed? Or did I just think the guns were cool and fun, the way other kids fell for fishing rods and ant farms? All I knew at the time was that the rifle range replaced the nurse’s office as my refuge. By day I was forced to trudge through ball sports with the rest of my bunkmates, but when the shadows grew long and we were allowed an elective, I invariably chose riflery. I learned to breathe evenly, listen to my heartbeat, and let the shot go between beats, when the muzzle was steadiest. I learned to place the pad of my index finger against the trigger and squeeze so slowly that the shot came as a surprise. I came to love the snap of the rifle, the rich aroma of burned cordite, the magical geometry of a bullet’s razor-straight trajectory connecting to a tiny, distant point. I even came to enjoy the faint aroma of ancient urine soaked into cotton batting, because that, too, was part of the Camp Sunapee rifle-range experience. Ten targets of twenty-five-plus points won me a tiny bronze Pro-Marksman medal that first summer and a National Rifle Association patch to sew on my melton wool camp jacket. The National Rifle Association! Cool! Ten of thirty-plus points made me a Marksman the following year, and I soon moved on to forty-plus points: a Sharpshooter. As I returned to Sunapee summer after summer, I worked my way from prone to sitting to kneeling to standing, and my skill and enthusiasm got me invited to the range at off-hours—during rest period or meals—for one-on-one instruction and the high honor of cleaning the rifles with rags, bore brushes, and banana-smelling Hoppe’s No. 9 Solvent.

  It was, however, a confusingly bifurcated gun life. Aside from Hank Hilliard, I had no gun mentors. Neither my parents nor anybody in their circle of suburban New Jersey Jewish Democrats had ever hunted or owned a gun. None, I am certain, would have dreamed of touching one. “Jews make guns and sell guns,” my mother’s friend Bubbles Binder said with a gravelly laugh. “We don’t shoot guns.” I don’t know if there were gun ranges in or near South Orange, because taking me to one would have been the last thing my gentle, mercantile father would have dreamed of doing. So while riflery was a serious sport at camp, for the other ten months of the year my gun thing was allowed to spin off into the kind of violent fantasies that, in the mid-1960s, were not considered at all odd for a little boy.

  One whole aisle of E. J. Korvette’s toy department was given over to nothing but guns—Monkey Division bazookas, Johnny Seven One Man Army guns, Mattel Shootin’ Shell rifles, Hubley snub-nosed .38s, Okinawa Guns, G.I. Joes with all their lethal accoutrements, Zero-M secret-agent weapons, fabulously realistic Johnny Eagle gun sets, Fanner 50 cap pistols, Sound-O-Power M16s, Secret Sam folding-rifle spy briefcases, Man from U.N.C.L.E. guns, and on and on, all of them advertised relentlessly and unabashedly on Wonderama, Sandy Becker, and every other children’s television show. I can sing those commercials still. When I wasn’t running around the neighborhood in a plastic helmet with Chucky Blau and my Dick Tracy tommy gun, I was studying Combat!—“starring Vic Morrow as Sergeant Saunders”—with the devotional zeal of a Talmudic scholar. I slept with toy guns under and in my bed. I was always either holding a gun or pantomiming doing so, my hands aching for the rich fullness of stock and handgrip. Every few days, I looked up “rifle,” “pistol,” or “machine gun” in our 1960 World Book, lingering over photos and diagrams—the intricate sweep of bolt and trigger—memorizing make, model, caliber, muzzle velocity, and cyclic rate of fire. James Bond burst into my life in 1964 like a newfound god, and I began looking forward to the rare occasions on which our parents would drag my brothers and me to Temple Israel, because services gave me an excuse to wear a suit jacket like a grown-up, which meant I could conceal a plastic shoulder holster and Luger, with a Magic Marker jammed into the muzzle as a silencer. That delicious bulk under my arm could sustain me through an entire Kol Nidre.

  And then every summer it was back to Sunapee’s rifle range, where the merest suggestion of James Bond or Sergeant Saunders would get a kid banished, because the range was about marksmanship, not fantasy. Year by year, guns were working their way into my chromosomes from two directions—the manly discipline of precision shooting, rooted in the coldest imaginable reality; and the wildly sexy mythology of soldiers, cowboys, gangsters, and spies that made firearms overwhelmingly glamorous. I didn’t stand a chance.

  All of this was fine until about 1967, when, like the sun passing behind a cloud, my gun thing went vaguely dark. The signals were subtle but unmistakable: Guns were uncool, my obsession with them icky. At eleven years old, my friends were outgrowing Army playing; I remember precisely the day the nickel dropped. Chucky, Arthur Lewis, and I were up at the vacant lot on Irving Avenue, assaulting the same Nazi pillbox we’d been trying to take for longer than the duration of the real Second World War. I ran my heart out, serpentining like a demon to avoid enemy fire, biting my fist and heaving air grenades, k’tow-k’towing sound effects. I could tell, though, that Chucky and Arthur were simply going through the motions, slow and listless as we advanced under enemy fire. As I looked back to signal them to flank left, I found them sitting off to the side, talking and tossing pebbles at a can, their guns resting casually in their laps. It hit me like a rock in the forehead—they’re humoring me. And walking home, the death blow: We ran into Susan Stern and Caroline Bell, both of whom we’d known since kindergarten. They looked different now; slinkier, wiser—pretty. They wrinkled their foreheads at our toy guns as though to say, “Really, guys.…” Chucky and Arthur instantly began swinging their rifles like baseball bats, as though, surprised to find these long things in their hands, they’d discovered something reasonable to do with them. I was losing my lifelong platoon buddies to baseball and football—precisely the kind of impossible athletics that had driven me to the Camp Sunapee rifle range in the first place. I felt like a baby the size of a parade balloon—not merely abandoned: humiliated.

  The other tsunami flooding my gun obsession with disgrace was Vietnam. Opposition to the war was nearly universal in our suburb, where regiments of allergists and orthopedists stood ready to write young men excuses. The task of lining up a way out of the draft was preoccupying my oldest brother, and the war was becoming an unignorable presence in our lives. The cool kids in school were way out in front with flamboyant opposition, even in sixth grade, adopting the peace-and-love aesthetic that was blooming across America. To be seen with a toy gun, to be drawing war pictures, to be playing with toy soldiers: All of it was completely wrong. I was against the war, too, and aspired to the hippie aesthetic as much as any sixth grader. But that didn’t keep me from liking guns. To me, they were separate.

  I tried to make the transition with Chucky and the others; really, I did. I trooped off to Little League tryouts, hoping to wear one of those uniforms with BECK’S HARDWARE or SHOP-RITE on the back. Alas, I was shunted off to the so-called Pee-Wee League, a uniformless sump of the halt and uncoordinated known informally as “Fat-Kid League.” I gamely stuck with it for a season, playing right field for the Washington Senators, and my parents did all they could to encourage me. My father even had one of those fake front pages printed with a headline: DAN BAUM GIVES UP GUNS, BECOMES BASEBALL STAR.

  But I didn’t give up guns any more than I became a baseball star. I merely transitioned to the kind of guns a bigger kid might reasonably justify—a spring-loaded BB rifle and a CO2-powered air pistol. These verged on acceptable because they were more about hitting targets than fantasizing battle scenes. I couldn’t play Army anymore, but setting up paper targets in the backyard reawakened the pleasure I’d taken at camp in the disciplined practice of squeezing down a gun’s tremendous force and delivering it precisely to a distant point. Air-gun shooting let me keep guns in my life. It satisfied my hand’s urge for stock, grip, and trigger.

  In the rural South or the Rocky Mountains, nobody would have thought twice about my gun thing. I’d have gotten a shotgun for my twelfth birthda
y, taken hunter safety at fourteen, acquired a deer rifle for Christmas, and spent autumn tramping through the outdoors with my dad and uncles. Guns would have become a normal part of growing up, like chasing girls and learning to drive. In my New Jersey suburb, though, they made me a mutant, and my hobby was equally verboten at the private colleges I attended in the 1970s. When I bought my first real gun, during junior year at New York University—an elegant old Remington .22 rifle much like the ones I’d shot at camp—I kept quiet about it.

  By the time I was a voting adult, I’d begun to perceive the gun lover in me as some kind of malevolent twin. My upbringing, reading, and experience kept me believing in unions, gay rights, progressive taxation, the United Nations, public works, permissive immigration, single-payer health care, reproductive choice, negotiation rather than preemptive force, regulation of business to protect workers and the environment, and scientifically informed rather than religion-based policies. Guns were as firmly delineated a political battlefield as abortion or school prayer, and guns belonged to the other guys. When gun-control measures passed, my people won; when gun rights expanded, the other team won. Because I wasn’t yet thinking very seriously about the issue, I went along with my side, reliably lending my support to the calls for background checks, registration, assault-rifle bans, and waiting periods. None interfered with my enjoyment of guns because, aside from my .22, I didn’t own any.

  What did bother me, though, was the gut reaction of my friends to any mention of guns. “Ugh. I hate guns,” was the way they usually expressed it. And my friends’ contempt went beyond guns to the people who liked them. They wouldn’t have dreamed of saying “nigger” or “fag,” but they laughed at “gun nuts” or “gun loons.” I’d stay quiet during such talk, like Tom Hanks chuckling along at the anti-gay jokes in the first reel of Philadelphia.