Gun Guys (51 page)

If young black urban men liked guns so much, the gun blogger Robert Farago had a solution: train more of them to shoot. He argued in a March 26, 2012, posting titled “Guns and Inner City Kids: A Modest Proposal on Guns” that disciplined, supervised firearms instruction might satisfy these young men’s natural fascination with guns, teach them safe gun handling, and demystify guns to the point that they don’t feel a need to carry. Moreover, he argued, by holding out the prospect of getting a permit to carry legally if they stayed straight and passed their gun-handling classes, training young men to get their concealed-carry licenses might actually make better citizens of them. “If you can convince inner city kids on a rifle team that staying out of trouble will allow them to carry a gun legally when they reach adulthood
and make it happen
, you will create a new corps (in the nonmilitary sense) of trained, responsible gun owners within inner city communities. People ready, willing and able to defend themselves and the rule of law. How great is that?”

While most black civil rights groups support gun control, the big exception is the Congress of Racial Equality, founded in 1942, which pioneered the Freedom Rides, among other achievements. CORE, whose national chairman, Roy Innis, was a member of the NRA board, frequently took the gun-rights side in writing amicus briefs; one example is its brief in
Edward Peruta v. County of San Diego
, a 2011 case. CORE opened its argument with a historical argument. “CORE’s interest in this case stems from the fact that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for self defense is an important civil right that was denied to African Americans under the antebellum Slave Codes, the Black Codes passed just after the Civil War, and under the Jim Crow regimes that persisted into the twentieth century.”

Readers might also enjoy reading “The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration,” by Robert J. Cottrol of Rutgers School of Law and Raymond T. Diamond of Tulane University Law School, in
Georgetown Law Journal
, vol. 80 (1991–92): 309.

Representative Bobby Rush’s son Huey was shot dead in Chicago in 1999.
According to the website
OnTheIssues.org
, which tracks the positions political leaders take, Rush has voted against reducing the waiting period to buy a handgun, voted against laws that would indemnify the gun industry from product liability lawsuits, voted in favor of closing the gun-show loophole, and has an F rating from the NRA.

Jeff Cooper wrote in
Jeff Cooper Commentaries
, vol. 5, no. 7 (June 1997), “I coined the term ‘hoplophobia’ in 1962 in response to a perceived need for a word to describe a mental aberration consisting of an unreasoning terror of gadgetry, specifically, weapons. The most common manifestation of hoplophobia is the idea that instruments possess a will of their own, apart from that of their user. This is not a reasoned position, but when you point this out to a hoplophobe he is not impressed because his is an unreasonable position. To convince a man that he is not making sense is not to change his viewpoint but rather to make an enemy. Thus hoplophobia is a useful word, but as with all words, it should be used correctly.”

Jeff Cooper’s classic volume is
Principles of Personal Defense
, published in 1972 but reissued many times since.

CBSNews.com
reported Robert Reza’s shooting as “Emcore Shooter Robert Reza Kills Two, Self, Say Police,” on July 12, 2010.

The statement on
this page
that support for gun control among the public is dropping comes from a Gallup report on November 26, 2010, “In U.S., Continuing Record-Low Support for Stricter Gun Control.” In 1990, 78 percent of Americans thought gun laws should be made more strict. By 2010, that was down to 44 percent.

President Obama’s decision to allow holders of concealed-carry permits to wear their guns in national parks was reported in
The Washington Times
on February 22, 2010, by Stephen Dinan, as “Parks Open to Holders of Concealed Guns.”

The National Shooting Sports Foundation’s annual report,
Industry Reference Guide
, is a trove of information about the gun business and gun-guy demographics. All of the information about the aging of the shooting community comes from the
Industry Reference Guide
s of 2010 and 2011. The line about the future of shooting sports being “precarious” comes from the second paragraph on page 1 of
The Future of Hunting and the Shooting Sports: Research-Based Recruitment and Retention Strategies
, published by the National Shooting Sports Foundation in 2010.

To the extent young people are hunting, they are more and more doing it with bows. Archery was the one type of shooting sport that the
Industry Reference Guide
reported to be on the rise. Everyplace Margaret and I traveled, we found lots of floor
space in gun stores given over to archery. On the approach to Belle Fourche, South Dakota, for example, we encountered Triggers, a compact store wedged into a roadside strip mall. Inside were only about twenty-five rifles and ten handguns, while dozens of bows hung from the ceiling in long, colorful echelons. Really, Triggers was an archery store with a little bitty gun annex.

“Young people are all over archery,” said Justin Raber, the fit and eager young owner. “It starts when they’re little. The 4H has an archery program, but no riflery. And look at the hunting shows on the Outdoor Channel—they’re all about archery. It just looks better on television than gun hunting—the string being pulled back, the arrow flying through the air—you can see it hit the deer. There’s more to watch than when a guy puts a gun to his shoulder and goes
bang
.”

Archery season always comes before rifle season, he said. Young people want to be out when the weather is good and the elk are bugling. It’s warmer. It’s easier to camp. “And young people don’t want to do what their fathers did,” he said. “They want more of a challenge.”

He took a bow off the wall. “Tell you something else: There’s no hassle to buying a bow. No 4473s. No bullshit with the ATF. You put down your money and you walk out with it.” He placed the bow in my hands. It was light, made of carbon fiber. With pulleys at either end and an electronic red-dot sight, it seemed less like a throwback to Indian times than something issued by NASA. “That’s the future you’re holding there,” Justin said.

Given that the National Shooting Sports Foundation is the trade group for the firearms industry, it’s surprising how many gun guys ignore it so completely. When I quoted the figures from the
Industry Reference Guide
in an article about the AR-15 business called “Guns Gone Wild,” published on Kindle Singles in September 2011, the gun blogger Robert Farago of
The Truth About Guns
took off after me as though I’d quoted Charles Schumer or Sarah Brady, and judging from his readers’ comments, most agreed. I sent Farago the pages from the
Industry Reference Guide
, but if he looked at them, he didn’t respond. Six months later he was still going on about it, telling his readers, “Dan Baum Is Still Wrong, But You Knew That,” even though I’d published nothing further on the subject. I was reminded of the wisdom of the sociologist C. Wright Mills, in his 1959 book
The Sociological Imagination
: “First one tries to get it straight, to make an adequate statement. If it is gloomy, too bad. If it leads to hope, fine.”

The point isn’t the insults against me. What’s striking is the refusal of many gun guys to acknowledge the demographic problem that their own trade group has identified. As someone who likes to shoot and thinks that firearms instruction, properly done, can be good for young people, I’d like to see the shooting sports continue. While I assume most gun guys would say likewise, many seem to prefer the defensive
crouch to acknowledging that something about guns and shooting is failing to appeal to young people. The hostile, defensive crouch may well be it.

The article about young people turning away from automobiles and driving is “To Draw Reluctant Young Buyers, G.M. Turns to MTV,” by Amy Chozick in
The New York Times
, March 22, 2012.

Those who participate in practical shooting—running and gunning—insist that standing still and squeezing off aimed shots at a target is useless practice for defending yourself with a gun. “You take Olympic shooters, and they practice all the time, and they can hit a fly off a cow’s nose from 100 yards,” a retired New York police commander told Al Baker of
The New York Times
in the December 9, 2007, article “A Hail of Bullets, a Heap of Uncertainty.” “But if you put a gun in that cow’s hand, you will get a different reaction from the Olympic shooter.” Typical New Yorker: He thinks cows have hands.

That the magazine
Soldier of Fortune
held the first three-gun contest in the 1980s is common wisdom, but I was never able to document it.

One can read about Cincinnati’s German regiments in the Civil War at
cincinnati.com
and about the Kolping Society at
kolpingcincinnati.com
.

For information about police killings during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, readers are referred to the case of the Danziger Bridge, in which eight officers of the New Orleans Police Department were involved in the killing of two unarmed civilians on September 4, 2005. Although state charges were originally dismissed, five of the officers were convicted in federal court on August 5, 2011, on charges related to covering up the shooting and deprivation of civil rights.

Here is a sample of the invective directed against me on
AR15.com
after I asked if any gun buriers would like to be interviewed anonymously. First someone discovered this passage I had written in a 2010 blog about the Tanner Gun Show:

The guy who posted this said I was being “overly dramatic and deliberately putting out false information.” I’m still not exactly sure what it was about this paragraph that got him so upset. Nothing in it was untrue; I even avoided the mistake, which gun guys hate, of calling magazines “clips.” Maybe the line about “man-killers.” Several people took exception to the reference to Klingons.

It wasn’t until someone discovered a
Washington Post
story about Margaret and me getting cheated out of a D.C. apartment we’d rented for Barack Obama’s inauguration that the “Arfcom army” went completely wacky. Range_Officer posted in tall red letters, “THIS GUY IS AN OBAMA SUPPORTER,” and then the vitriol really flowed. Someone went to my website and posted a picture of me with Margaret and Rosa. Wrote Meadowmuffin: “Is nice that obango lickers were the first to get bent over financially after his inaugeration [sic] then the rest of the country after them. That family pic looks just like a poster for liberal types, go write about your hero the kenyan and wookie instead.” Added Fxntime, “I put forth the motion that said liberal troll-turd be banned as the worthless commie obama butt kissing socialist mangina he is.”

This went on for about two weeks, and then I was banned from
AR15.com
by its owner, Edward Avila of Rochester, New York.

The Dalai Lama quote about shooting back was taken from “Dalai Lama Urges Students to Shape World,” which ran in
The Seattle Times
on May 15, 2001. Reporter Hal Benton paraphrased the Dalai Lama this way: “The Dalai Lama said acts of violence should be remembered, and then forgiveness should be extended to the perpetrators. But if someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, he said, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun. Not at the head, where a fatal wound might result. But at some other body part, such as a leg.”

Gus Cotey’s and Sarah Thompson’s articles on the mentality of gun-control proponents, and the Theodore Haas interview, can be found on the website for Jews for the Preservation of Firearms ownership.

I confirmed the story of meeting Gideon Goldenholz with Goldenholz himself, in a telephone interview on January 6, 2011.

The number of privately owned guns in the U.S. is always a guess. According to “U.S. Most Armed Country with 90 Guns Per 100 People,” a Reuters story by Laura McInnes on August 28, 2007, the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies estimates 270 million. This isn’t too far from the estimate of David Hemenway et al., who in an article titled “The US Gun Stock: Results from the 2004 National Firearms Survey,” in the journal
Injury Prevention
, vol. 13 (2007): 15–19, estimated at least one privately owned gun for every adult.

That Russia has a murder rate four times that of the United States comes from
Seventh United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems
, covering the period 1998–2000 (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Centre for International Crime Prevention). The U.S. had a 2008 murder rate of 4.2 per 100,000 people, and Russia’s was 20. Ireland, Switzerland, Indonesia, Greece, Hong Kong, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar were all around 0. Colombia topped the list at 61.