Gun Guys (34 page)

Among the many lies I’d always assumed Hollywood taught us was that people can walk away from killing someone in a gunfight psychologically unscathed. One hardly ever sees a protagonist affected by the killing he does on-screen. James Bond? Marshall Dillon? Do we ever see them wringing their hands afterward and blubbering in guilty self-doubt? If you totaled up all the people shot dead on-screen by Steve McGarrett on
Hawaii Five-O
, for example, he’d have a higher body count than Jeffrey Dahmer. At the end of each show, he walked away calmly from the corpse he’d just created, and in the next episode he seemed perfectly well adjusted.

In reality, of course, police officers who kill in the line of duty are often disarmed and withdrawn from the street until not only an investigation of the shooting can take place but a psychological evaluation as well. The Army is starting to recognize that a soldier who kills on the battlefield is likely to be a psychological casualty. Even the NRA has acknowledged that killing somebody with a gun is a traumatic event, no matter how justified the shooting, and is likely to haunt the shooter forever.

For all the blathering I’d heard about defending oneself with a gun, Tim was the first person I’d met who’d actually done the deed—and he surprised me by seeming more like McGarrett than the reality I expected. He was sorry that he’d had to kill Shank, but he didn’t seem tortured by the experience. Maybe if the circumstances had been more ambiguous, Tim would have spent a lifetime wondering if he’d really had to pull the trigger. But I imagine taking a .380 slug through the brisket was pretty convincing. “Them are the rules,” he’d said, as though that’s the code of the street thug. It seemed a pretty good rule for everybody, though: If someone shoots you, shoot him quick before he can pull the trigger a second time. Even the Dalai Lama, when asked in 2001, said he was down with that.

I wasn’t carrying my gun in Chicago; it wasn’t permitted. But I looked forward to putting it back on once I had reached a more permissive jurisdiction. This probably wasn’t the lesson with which Tim wanted to leave me, but hearing firsthand from someone who’d actually defended himself with a firearm made me believe not only that I’d be able to do it but that—provided the need was as clear-cut as Tim’s—I’d also be able to live with having done so.

E
verybody we meet—
everybody
—has a gun story,” Margaret said as we unfolded our napkins at a little restaurant near Lake Michigan’s northern shore. “And a gun figures into the most important moment of their lives.”

“You want a gun story?” said a voice from the next table. Margaret and I sighed. A young man with a buzz cut and eyelashes so blond they sparkled leaned eagerly toward us. “I didn’t have toy guns as a kid. My dad said, ‘When you’re old enough, I’ll let you have a gun and teach you to use it.’ But no toy guns. He caught me once playing with a friend’s pop gun, and he threw it over the fence. That was my dad’s way of teaching me they’re not toys.”

The waitress set down our orders, big crockery vessels of cheese-beer-and-bratwurst soup—Wisconsin in a bowl—but the man at the next table kept talking. “He’d fill a milk jug with water and red food coloring and have me shoot it with a .30-06. That made a big impression on me. That’s what a bullet can do.”

There seemed no way to avoid a conversation. “You have guns now?” I asked.

“Oh, sure. Lots.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“Maintenance for the county parks department.”

“Mind if I ask who you voted for in the last election?”

“McCain.”

“How come?”

“Who else? Obama?” He snorted, cutting into his steak.

“Why do you say it like that? Workingman like you—I’d have guessed you were a Democrat.”

“Not as long as they want to take my guns, I’m not,” he said. He tucked a chunk of steak into his cheek and talked around it. “You can’t go on a college campus and find a lot of professors who support gun rights. There’s an elitism—that guns are for the unwashed. The yokels. The people who like Sarah Palin.”

Among the guns with which we were traveling was a clever little backpackers’ .22 rifle that came apart and fit into a short nylon case. I wanted to buy an inexpensive telescopic sight for it, and when we passed a huge chain store, Gander Mountain’s Gun World, in Germantown, Wisconsin, I begged Margaret’s pardon and pulled into the parking lot.

Gander Mountain’s Gun World was overwhelming—two floors of clothing, canoes, sleeping bags, fishing gear, and camp-cooking supplies, and an entire room devoted to guns. Margaret went to look for a tent-patch kit and camp-stove fuel; I sidled up to the optics counter. Two salesmen stood with their backs to me about twenty feet away. One glanced over, ran his eye up and down my clothes, and turned back to his colleague. They may have been engaged in urgent business, but I didn’t get that vibe. The clerk had seen a wimpy-looking middle-aged man in pleated pants and glasses, reeking of the metropole, and decided I wasn’t a member of the tribe. (I wasn’t wearing the NRA cap.)

I waited him out, and eventually—reluctantly—he detached himself and walked over. He was a big man with a deeply creased face; he’d have looked at home in a bunkhouse.

“Yes?” he said, crossing his arms.

I told him what I wanted, and, sighing, he unlocked the case, reached in, and put a scope on the counter. “Register’s in the front,” he said, turning away.

“How did you pick this one?”

“You said you wanted a scope for a .22. That’s a scope for a .22.”

“Is that the only scope you have for a .22?”

He narrowed his eyes. “Just what is it you want?”

“I want a scope for a .22. I don’t want to spend too much. I’d like it to be fairly small, so that it fits in the gun’s case. I was hoping to look at several and decide.”

“How much do you want to spend?”

“I don’t know. Fifty bucks?”

“That one there’s the only one costs less than fifty dollars. Register’s up front.”

“I think not. Thank you.”

Without so much as a shrug, he put the scope back in the case and returned to his friend.

“Hey,” I called to his back. “How about a holster for my carry gun?”

He stopped and returned, all smiles. A licensed gun carrier: Now I was part of the clan. “What kind of gun you carrying?”

“Never mind,” I said, and headed for the door.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been treated that way in a gun store, and for a long time I thought it was something about me personally. But the National Shooting Sports Foundation was sufficiently aware of the rude tendency of gun-store clerks that its monthly magazine,
SHOT Business
, was running a feature that summer called “The Undercover Shopper,” in which a potential customer, sometimes a woman, would go into three or four stores pretending to be a newbie—and record the clerks’ reception.

Again and again, clerks treated the undercover shopper with open contempt. If she didn’t know the nomenclature, they embarrassed her. If the undercover shopper was a man who asked greenhorn questions, they shrugged him off. If, in other words, customers weren’t already part of the club, gun-store clerks didn’t want them around.

One theory circulating was that the attitude went back to the years after the Second World War, when any man who had to ask questions about guns revealed himself as someone who’d evaded battle and was therefore beneath contempt. To me, though, it felt like that same old gun-guy anger. You’re one of us or you’re not—and we can tell by your clothes and by the questions you ask. For gun-store clerks to circle the wagons against potential new customers seemed like rage that overpowered self-interest—especially since it was the opposite of the welcome I received at most gun ranges.

Gun-guy anger was becoming so tedious that I found myself expending a lot of energy fending it off—driving past gun stores, walking away from gun guys starting to puff themselves up with fury, avoiding the gun bloggers and online forums. Gun politics all but ruined my enjoyment of firearms. Although the vitriol surrounding gun politics was what had first attracted me to this project, it was the cultural division represented by the politics that I’d set out to explore. The bickering about this or that “gun right” was something I’d hoped to avoid entirely.

But turning my back on the fight over gun rights completely didn’t feel right, either. That gun-rights zealots could be rude didn’t necessarily invalidate their argument. Data about the effects of gun-control measures were available to examine and interpret. Philosophical points of view could be compared and contrasted. When it came to whether restrictive gun laws did good or did harm, reasonable people could disagree.

Finding reasonable people was the problem.

But I decided, finally, to try. I’d cease pushing the absolutist gun-rights community away and approach it willingly—even if I had to do it with a chair in one hand and a whip in the other. But, being weary of the bullies, the haters, and the shouters, I went looking for an honest, reasonable, and soft-spoken gun-rights activist to take me by the hand and explain his worldview in detail. I confess that I expected such a man to be a compromiser—someone who could feel the pain of those most horrified by gun violence and delineate gun-control measures that might save lives from those that would merely inconvenience people and restrict liberties, one who would be seeking a negotiated solution. When I found him, though, he turned out to be anything but. The man best able to give me the gun-rights viewpoint without raising his voice was the founder of an organization widely revered by gun-rights activists as so absolutist that it made the NRA look like a bunch of milk-and-water sissies. He was a courtly, learned, likable man of sixty-four named Aaron Zelman, and when I first heard the name of his organization I thought it was a joke: Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.

He was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, in 1946, not long after his father, the schlemiel, abandoned his mother. Grandma took over, carting a bereft daughter and fatherless baby to a dirt road at the edge of Tucson,
where, her doctors said, the dry air would do her arthritis good.
Such a place for Jews
, their friends in Winthrop said, but the Zelmans liked it. Plenty of Jews lived in Arizona; the Goldwassers, for example, might have anglicized their name to Goldwater because it looked better on their department store, but that didn’t fool anybody. Most of all, the Mexicans lived their way, the cowboys theirs, the Indians theirs, and the Jews theirs. You worked, you obeyed the law, you kept to your own, and you got on fine. Nobody bothered anybody simply because of who he was, and that meant a lot to Grandma; tattooed on her arm, she carried a numbered keepsake of a different place and time.

Aaron grew into a tall, grave boy. At school, he liked history, and certain lessons stuck with him, perhaps because the movies he liked reinforced them. Again and again, one group of people set up another to be dominated by taking away its guns. The British marched on Lexington to seize the colonists’ powder and shot, the Union blockaded the Confederacy to disarm it, the cavalry hanged men who sold Winchesters to the Indians, the British
—again
—disarmed India. “Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India,” Mahatma Gandhi wrote in his autobiography, “history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.”

And, of course, the Nazis had hewed strictly to the letter of their laws as they stripped the Jews of their guns, homes, businesses, and, ultimately, their lives. It was the 1938 ban on Jews owning guns that, as Aaron saw it, made the Holocaust possible. At his bar mitzvah—a dark, mumbling affair at Tucson’s stuffy Orthodox shul—one of Grandma’s ancient friends gripped his arm with a veiny tattooed claw and rasped, “Understand, we couldn’t defend ourselves.” His breath smelled like the bottom of a well.

In Tucson during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, though, guns were simply objects, with no particular moral or political significance. Western Auto, Sears, and Montgomery Ward sold them as freely and easily as tools or auto parts—pick them out of the case, pay your money, and walk out, no paperwork. The Browse Around Store had barrels of military surplus rifles for ten or fifteen dollars apiece, and if you wanted a gun that none of the stores carried, you could order it by mail from Sears, Roebuck and have it delivered to your house, parcel post. Aaron and his friends thought nothing of roaming the town with their BB guns or .22s, shooting pigeons. If they were going quail hunting after school, they’d carry their shotguns in the morning and stow them in their lockers. Aaron
wasn’t much of a shooter, except at the rifle range at Jewish summer camp, but he finally bought a gun when he was sixteen, at Stan’s Swap Shop. He laid a few dollars on the counter and walked out with an old British Webley revolver. Legally, he should have been eighteen, but he was so tall and somber, like a young Abe Lincoln, that Stan didn’t bother asking. It must have been obvious to him that Aaron was as responsible as a man needed to be to own a gun.