Gun Guys (45 page)

Henigan looked at his watch; he had a meeting to attend.

As we rose, I asked if he’d ever subjected his desire for stricter gun control to a cost-benefit analysis. The benefits were murky, but what about the costs? I mentioned all the serious work Americans needed to do to arrest climate change, expand access to health care, reduce a crippling income gap, and regulate the financial sector. I told him about all the working guys I’d met on my trip who wouldn’t even listen to such talk, because they didn’t trust Democrats when it came to guns. Given that assault rifles—scary-looking as they were—didn’t seem to pose a public safety threat, wasn’t Brady doing the liberal tribe a disservice by needlessly handing the Republicans a big, fat cudgel with which to beat senseless the progressive agenda?

Henigan was the wrong guy to ask. I might as well have asked an infantry sergeant under fire in a Kandahar foxhole to explain his role in managing America’s relationship to global Islam.

“I don’t care what it does to the
progressive agenda
,” Henigan snapped. “We’re a single-issue group. Which is not to say that our typical supporters are not progressives. But we’re here to advance a gun-control agenda, period.”

Descending toward I Street in the elevator, it seemed to me that Dennis Henigan was as much of a problem for liberals as was Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s shrill and ubiquitous executive director. Henigan, in fact, may have been a bigger problem.

And he wasn’t the only one. Using the law to diminish the gun was only one tactic in the campaign to smash the enemy’s idols. Another was to attempt to expunge the gun from public consciousness. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency wouldn’t allow Columbia Pictures to advertise the Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg comedy
The Other Guys
in its bus shelters until it rolled out a poster that changed the guns in the actors’ hands to badges and pepper spray. Capital One bank invited customers to “Personalize your card with an image of your choice” but refused to let a New Jersey woman use a photo of her husband hunting; no “death imagery,” Capital One said. The Maplewood, New Jersey, Little League wouldn’t let a gun store called Constitution Arms sponsor a team, though it accepted sponsorships from stores selling tobacco, alcohol, and Cluck-U Chicken (“Large Breasts, Juicy Thighs, Luscious Legs”). Twelve-year-old Zachary Fisher of Roseville, California, was sent home from school for wearing a T-shirt commemorating his victory in a trapshooting competition. Lots of cities did buybacks to get guns off the street, but Providence, Rhode Island, also did
toy
-gun buybacks, trading dolls and board games for toy guns. If gun guys could be like the Taliban in their absolute intolerance of even a slight disagreement, well, so could those on the anti-gun side. And if Sean Thornton’s experience was any indication, teachers apparently believed that it was better to pretend that guns didn’t exist than to teach kids how to stay safe around them.

The year before I met him, he’d set up a booth at the National Education Association’s annual conference to try to interest teachers in the NRA’s Eddie Eagle GunSafe Program, which taught kids four things to do if they happened upon a gun:
Stop. Don’t touch. Leave the area. Tell an adult
. Not particularly sophisticated, perhaps, but simple and apolitical. “That whole weekend, I had maybe six people come up who were open to the idea,” he said. “The majority were very upset with us—that we were even there, that we were the NRA. They wouldn’t even listen.” I asked a Boulder friend who taught third grade how she’d feel about Eddie Eagle, and she was adamant. “I don’t want the NRA in my classroom getting kids all excited about guns.” She sounded like the right-wing parents who opposed sex education because they felt it would encourage kids to have sex. I didn’t tell her that, though. She didn’t seem ready to listen.

If liberals thought they were weakening the enemy by smashing its idols, they had it exactly wrong. It was hard to think of a better organizing tool for the right than the left’s tribal antipathy to guns. From the kid at the Family Shooting Center in Colorado to Infidel in Nebraska, from Biff in Louisville to the sparkly-eyelashed parks worker in Wisconsin, America was full of working people who wouldn’t listen to the donkey party—about anything—because of the Democrats’ identification with gun control.

The Democratic strategists Paul Begala and James Carville recognized this trap when they wrote of the gun-show loophole in their 2006 book
Take It Back
. “Democrats risk inflaming and alienating millions of voters who might otherwise be open to voting Democratic. But once guns are in the mix, once someone believes his gun rights are threatened, he shuts down.” The NRA and Republicans knew it, too, of course, and were doing all they could to whip up hatred of the “elitists,” “liberals,” and “gun grabbers” in the Democratic Party—the same “effete corps of impudent snobs” that Republicans had been invoking to consummate the awkward marriage of working people to the GOP since the time of Spiro Agnew.

But the tactical damage that reflexive anti-gun sentiment did to the Democratic Party was the least of it. At a time when the economy was plummeting and the electorate was polarizing, vilifying gun owners seemed simply, and needlessly,
impolite
. The historian Garry Wills wrote in the Baltimore
Sun
that handgun owners were “accessories to murder” who had implicitly “declared war on their neighbors.” Newspaper editorialists called gun owners “a ridiculous minority of airheads,” “a handful of middle-aged fat guys with popguns,” and “hicksville cowboys” with “macho” hang-ups. For Gene Weingarten of
The Washington Post
, gun guys were “bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches.” Mark Morford of
SF Gate
called female shooters “bored, under-educated, bitter, terrified, badly dressed, pasty, hate-spewin’ suburban white women from lost midwestern towns with names like Frankenmuth.” It was impossible to imagine getting away with such cruel dismissals of, say, blacks or gays, yet among a certain set, backhanding gun owners was good sport, even righteous. When I told an elderly friend of my mother-in-law—a generous and civic-minded Unitarian—that I was interviewing gun people, she spat, “I certainly hope you’re going to condemn those
awful people
.”

Which ones? I thought. Marcey Parker? Casey Gunnels? Rick Ector? Most of the gun guys I’d met were admirably careful, sober, self-reliant individuals. They had taken up the responsibility to handle incredibly dangerous weapons with great care, and were doing so safely. Even the unpleasant ones I’d encountered weren’t doing any harm. For that matter, the one guy I’d met who’d actually shot someone—Tim White—had devoted his life to keeping others from doing likewise. The community of gun guys had work to do in getting its members to keep their guns locked up, and no doubt awful people existed among the ranks. But I was alarmed at the breadth of the brush my mother-in-law’s friend was willing to deploy.

In the fall of 2011, I called an energetic gray-haired woman whom Margaret and I had met at the Iron County Fair, in far northern Wisconsin, more than a year earlier. Her name was Janet Bewley, and when we met her she was campaigning as a Democrat for a seat in the Wisconsin State Legislature. She’d won, and since then Wisconsin had scrapped its long-standing prohibition on concealed carry and had gone all the way to being a shall-issue state. I wanted to know whether Bewley had voted for or against.

“For,” she told me in the chewy, countrified accent I remembered well. “I don’t like guns. I wasn’t raised with them. But you don’t pass laws based on what your gut says. You pass laws based on the Constitution and what’s best.”

Before casting her vote, she looked next door at Minnesota, which had become a shall-issue state two years earlier. “The sky didn’t fall there,” she told me. “We haven’t seen a wave of shootings there. My constituents, by and large, were for it. They said, ‘It’s in our culture. Don’t turn it into a big liberal agenda.’ ”

The gun debate reminded her of another issue important to northern Wisconsin: snowmobiles. “People want to be able to drive their ATVs through town to go ice fishing, and there’s a whole lot of people against it because they don’t like
those people
. Some people are just so anti-gun their brains explode when you try to talk about it. Same thing; it’s
those people
. My own husband, he’s a UCC minister and he says, ‘I don’t like guns.’ And I tell him, ‘It doesn’t matter what
you
like or don’t like. That’s not how we make law!’ ” I wished her a long and productive political career—a politician who could see past her own prejudices.

Given that the vast majority of gun owners hurt nobody, and that most traditional gun-control measures couldn’t be proven to have saved lives,
what good came of insulting, belittling, and maligning
those people
—the 40 percent of Americans who owned guns? Where was the public benefit in blaming them for “blood-soaked streets” and an “epidemic of gun violence” that in most of America didn’t really exist? By 2010, gun owners—rightly or wrongly—were feeling put-upon, marginalized, and tarred with everything from Columbine to the Mexican drug cartels. Wasn’t escalating the culture wars toxic for the nation and antithetical to the notion of “liberal”? As Sarah Palin put it at the 2011 NRA convention, “Those left-wing groups are supposed to be so tolerant of everybody’s lifestyle, but they’re intolerant of
our
lifestyle.” How about this for a bumper sticker, borrowing a phrase from the abortion-rights movement:
DON
’
T LIKE GUNS? DON
’
T HAVE ONE
.

O
ne winter evening, I went with Margaret to hear the Brazilian music at the Laughing Goat. It’s a place with a menu heavy on fair-trade coffees, herbal teas, local artisan goat cheese, and vegan soups—a hard place for a guy on a low-sanctimony diet, but lovely nonetheless. My experiment in stepping out armed still had some weeks to run. I wore the Glock under a heavy wool sweater and a tweed sport coat. As soon as we got inside, it was clear what a dumb idea it had been to come packing. The place was crowded and heating up fast. I stood in a corner, back to the wall, and in fast motion I stripped off my jacket, shrugged off my sweater, and pulled the jacket back on. After dancing for about twenty minutes, I was ready to keel over. “Aren’t you hot?” Margaret shouted above the din, plucking at my bristly tweed lapel. I retreated to the men’s room, tucked the holstered Glock into the front of my pants—where I’d never carried before—and untucked my shirt over it. Slow dancing was out, and I had to be careful not to bump up against anybody. Most of all, though, it was disconcerting to dance samba with a loaded, cocked 9-millimeter handgun pressing against my penis.

This obsession with guns was never going to leave me; it was time to lay down the burden of decoding it. I didn’t have the time, money, or competitive urge to go running and gunning with Marcey and Jeremy. I didn’t have a group of Ashkenazi homies with whom to shoot apart a carved eagle. I’d never have the dough to assemble a rare and valuable collection. I didn’t sense tyranny and genocide behind every tree, so I felt no
need to stockpile rifles as an antidote. I was under no illusion that I had to take my gun samba-dancing to feel safe.

If I had it to do again, would I have trained my obsession instead on guitars or cameras? Probably. Either might have satisfied that male craving for exquisite machinery, and it certainly looks like more fun to bring music or art into the world than to cozy up to a device that wreaks such misery. But I yam what I yam, neither the first gun guy nor the last. Psychoanalysts have argued since Freud’s time about whether it’s love of guns or fear of guns that signals retarded sexual development. I prefer to withhold judgment on a person’s pleasures, as long as no harm is done. Guns will be with us for a long time. People will continue doing evil and stupid things with them. Would that we could weigh the physical harm they inflict against the political and social damage we do by vilifying those who feel about them differently than we do.

The community of gun guys turned out to be more complex than I’d imagined. I didn’t necessarily enjoy every encounter, but for the most part I found my fellow gun guys passionate, responsible, and fully aware of the tremendous power they wield every time they pick up a firearm. That was true even for the screamers. They convinced me that handling guns can, if done right, impose a welcome discipline on one’s life and, properly supervised, can be particularly healthy for young people. I came to regret the way guns and the people who like them are mocked and excoriated. It can’t be pleasant to feel oneself on the losing end of a demographic trend, and castigated in the bargain.

I’m no less a Democrat than I was when I started. But I did come away with a greater appreciation for the way many Americans feel overmanaged and under-respected. And once my ear was tuned to that frequency, I began hearing that same frustration in other contexts. I ran into a friend one day in Boulder who, as a mountain biker, was locked in a struggle with hikers over access to trails outside of town. “They don’t understand mountain bikes, and they can’t be bothered to understand the people who ride them!” he fumed. “They have preconceived ideas of who we are and what mountain bikes do to trails, and want to sit back and dictate based on their prejudices!” Swap mountain bikes for guns, and mountain bikers for gun guys, and he sounded a lot like Bernie Herpin or Wayne LaPierre.