And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (8 page)

Fuck.

I suddenly began to see the merits of being armed.

I checked in with the press office on the third floor of the convention center. I didn't, technically speaking, need the pass anymore, but I knew Uncle Mark might be impressed that I could get one, and it's not often that I can impress a member of my family. I met him and Dad in front of the NRA Store—an ad hoc retail area selling everything from T-shirts to shot glasses, all emblazoned with the NRA logo. My dad was wearing a freshly acquired “NRA Rivers to Freedom” hat, and both he and Mark were carrying large yellow bags with—and I'm not kidding here—at least ten pounds of catalogs and pamphlets each.

“That looks heavy,” I said. “You guys only got here an hour before me. How'd you get that much stuff?”

“Well,” said Dad, as we made our way into the crowded convention center hall, “it wasn't this busy before you got here.”

We walked into the hall, which was packed with booths and displays like any other convention, all being attended to and milled about by thousands of enthusiastic gawkers. A billboard outside the city had promised “Acres of Guns and Gear,” but I hadn't taken it to be literal until I stepped onto the convention floor. There were so many guns—all made safe by the removal of their firing pins, I was assured by Uncle Mark—and so many people, I felt like I was in an old western movie or a military garrison.

Most of the men and women in attendance looked like people anywhere, people you'd meet at the grocery store or Rotary Club. They were a mix of, from what I could gather visually, white collar and blue. Veterans wearing the patches of their fighting groups; some people in shooting vests or hunting shirts, a fair number who looked like they had just left the country club in order to pop over and look at guns for a bit. The people watching was great. I, for one, had been concerned about my sartorial choice for the day. I tend to dress like a paunchy, preppy, slightly disheveled tourist, as if I am perpetually late for a clambake. I wanted to fit in, to blend, so I wore a fishing shirt with some aggressively sized pockets and a canvas cap, blue jeans, and a pair of Timberland boots. I hoped to pass for a hunter, rather than an imposter. My attempted ruse only made me more self-conscious, so I tried to focus on other people.

After hours of careful study, I come to the conclusion that there are five types of people who attend the NRA convention.

1. The Sportsmen—These are the guys who hunt a couple of times a year, maybe a bit more frequently. They go after turkey in the spring, deer and upland birds in the fall. They're normal guys, not prone to fits of political outrage. You find them looking at the more pedestrian guns—shotguns, deer rifles, the occasional pistol. This is my dad. He enjoys hunting, enjoys guns, but they are certainly not the center of his world.

2. The Period Purists—I like these people very much, especially the cowboys. One, in a black hat, black jeans, and black boots with a white-and-black western shirt, black holsters bearing pearl-handled silver pistols, and a black mustache so perfect it looks as if it was torn from a poster for the movie
Tombstone,
walks with an affected swagger, a genuine mosey. There are other purists—the Prohibition Tommy Gunners with pinstripe suits and delusions of Johnny Depp grandeur; the WWII guy in the basement with the fedora and working replicas of the disposable Liberator pistols, which were manufactured by General Motors and dropped from planes to the French Resistance; the Kentucky Riflemen with their enormous muzzle-loading rifles and coonskin caps. The list goes on. I like the role playing, the sense of propriety. For these people, it's about authenticity, not necessarily firepower. I like that.

3. The English Shootists—Not surprisingly, these people had a relatively small footprint at the NRA show. English-style or English-manufactured shotguns are elaborate, handcrafted affairs. The wood is furniture quality, the steel perfect and often ornately decorated. These guns start in the tens of thousands of dollars, and English shooting is often as formal as a Royal wedding. For pheasant hunting, the men don knickers, vests, ties, tattersall shirts, and tweed blazers. Their hats are elaborately pinned and their boots are hand-sewn brogue-style. They are gentlemen and, also, snobs. They're fun to look at, but try to talk to them and you quickly get the sense that these men are, pardon the language, douche bags.

4. The Bulletheads—Car enthusiasts and campers have gearheads, the kind of individuals who obsess over the performance of products. These are the high-performance people, the ones endlessly fascinated by the details, passionately devoted to the potential of guns. Uncle Mark probably fits into this camp. He loves to handle guns, to examine the exact machining of their parts. He loves to learn about tweaks and customizations. He fawns in the presence of those champions who have so seamlessly melded man and machine—the three-gun shooters who switch from pistol to rifle to shotgun with speed and capability, the quick-draw pistoleers, the riflemen able to split a hair from a hundred feet, in the dark, after a few beers. In the same way racing drivers appreciate someone like F1 Champion Michael Schumacher, so too does Uncle Mark appreciate someone like thirty-two-time champion shooter Jerry Miculek. We even stop to get his autograph. I get one and Mark gets one for each of his sons.

5. The Pseudoparamilitarists—These are the guys who scare me. These are the ones who keep automatic rifles buried in their backyards. They seem transfixed studying the details of tactical vests, awed by knives, fascinated by near-military-grade anything. The irony, of course, is that most of the people wandering the floor with telltale signs of actual military service—desert camo backpacks with their name patches on them, worn military boots, and so on—did not fall into this group. They were more the Bullethead or the Sportsmen. No, these Pseudoparamilitary guys were straight pretenders. These are the people who warn of the impending race war, the people who believe the best defense is a good offense. They care, seemingly, about destruction; and they terrify me. A pair of these guys walked past me with a dead stare in their eyes, and all I could think of was Columbine. One imagines these guys storing fifty years' worth of canned peaches in their basement in advance of the Millennium, stockpiling munitions for 2012 and reading books about James Earl Ray with eagerness and avidity. I'm not saying these people are violent. Most, I would imagine, are actually far from it. But they are a little too interested in violence for my own comfort level. I do take some comfort in the notion that, should an apocalyptic war break out in Pittsburgh, at this moment, I am probably in the safest possible place.

What the hell am
I
doing here?

We walked from booth to booth. We didn't talk, not as much as I would have thought anyway. Uncle Mark studied the menagerie of guns with the eyes of a medieval monk transcribing a bible, pausing occasionally to point out the CEO of this gun manufacturer, the designer director of that one. He and Dad explored the hundreds of versions of the Model 1911 .45-caliber pistol. It's the one-hundredth anniversary of the design, and dozens of manufacturers presented dozens of designs of the gun. Dad was interested. He thought maybe he was in the market. It was the sidearm he carried in the army and, now that he's close to retirement, I get the sense that he's interested more for the nostalgia than the owning. To that end, we handled perhaps a hundred versions, Dad asking questions that I find to be insightful and targeted to the manufacturers' representatives. Uncle Mark poked fun at him, chiding his big brother for asking “dumb questions.” Dad laughed.

I snapped a surreptitious photo of the actor R. Lee Ermey, who was signing autographs at the Glock booth. He played “Gunny” in
Full Metal Jacket
and seems to show up on the History Channel every time weapons are the topic. He wore a sergeant's cap, pressed shirt, and pressed pants—all military grade—and a dazzlingly undazzling pair of cowboy boots. It was a pop-culture touchstone, something I could relate to and I was grateful. I picked up a couple of catalogs and a few tchotchkes. I was particularly fond of the miniature pistol key rings. I couldn't wait to walk into the offices of, say, the cable company to dispute a bill. When the clerk tried to blow me off, I would put my keys on the desk and say “there's a bigger one where that came from,” at which point I would get free cable for a year. My imagination, as you can see, has a way of wandering.

After a couple of hours of meandering and gun handling, we took a break for lunch. In the outer corridor of the convention center, food vendors were offering hearty, meaty meals. We settled on BBQ and sat at a table overlooking the river, eating silently. I was tired—much more tired than I had thought—and the food was helping to revive my gun-addled mind. I was impressed by the enormity of the event. One representative at the Smith & Wesson booth said they were expecting more than a hundred thousand people to come through over the course of the three-day convention. I ate my convention-grade pulled pork and beans and was lost somewhere between thought and a nap when Uncle Mark snapped me out of it.

“So what do you think?” he asked.

“It's . . . amazing,” I said. I wanted to be enthused, but also convey a sense of bewilderment.

“Pretty cool, huh?”

“Yes, very,” I agreed.

“So what would you buy if money was not a limitation? What's your lottery gun?” he asked.

Shit. I realized that in all the people watching, I hadn't paid attention to a single gun I had handled. That was sort of the point of my being there, to learn about the guns, figure out what kind I would want to buy for my first hunting adventure. That was part of why he wanted me to join them here, for the spectacle, yes, but also the education.

“Gosh, I'm just not sure,” I said. “I sort of liked that . . .” Here, I fumbled for the name, any name of any of the guns I had held. “That, uh, Stoeger side-by-side.” I remembered seeing those words on a sign, but I hadn't the faintest recollection of the gun itself. I knew side-by-side meant two barrels next to each other, but I couldn't place the actual gun. It was like trying to pick a needle out of a stack of needles. I saw the whole, not the individuals. So I did what comes naturally to any reporter—I diverted.

“What about you?” I asked. “What would you buy if money were no object?”

“I haven't found it yet,” he came back. “Jim?”

“I liked that 1911 with the rounded grip,” my dad said. “But I'm a dirty old man; I'd probably go with the calendar girl.”

This stunned me for a couple of reasons. One, I have never in my life heard my dad talk about a pretty girl. Yes, once I saw him get a lap dance at my brother-in-law's bachelor party, but he looked as uncomfortable with the situation as I did—like he was trying hard to be one of the guys. Second, my dad is anything but a dirty old man. If anything, he's the consummate gentleman. He always drops my mom off at the door at church so that she doesn't have to walk across the parking lot. He holds doors. He looks people in the eye. He's no letch. So, to hear him say something like this—and in front of me no less—was astounding.

However, he did have a point. If you are not an avid collector, the NRA convention floor can be daunting, and any diversion—whether it's an obscure actor or a moderately pretty blonde signing copies of her firearms calendar—can be welcome.

We walked for several more hours and I took notes about specific guns—a tiny, pink, .22-caliber rifle designed for little girls, a pink-and-white assault rifle for when they grow up. By God, am I glad someone thought of my daughter. I shouldered several shotguns and aimed a few pistols at nothing in particular. Uncle Mark helped me understand fit and function. He seemed genuinely happy to be, at long last, helping me understand guns and hunting. He pointed out the things I needed to look for, recommended price ranges—new or used—and warned me against brands that have lagged in quality in recent years or those that inflate their prices for no good reason at all. It was like having a personal shopper, and I learned that I should expect to pay between $1,100 and $1,500 for my first shotgun. I want to pay that much, he explained.

“If you go cheap, you won't hit anything and you won't have a good time. It's all about personal preference.”

I began to see him in a different light. When I was young and would visit him, I felt uncomfortable with the piles of gun catalogs and old copies of
Guns & Ammo
lying around. I was uncomfortable with the violence, the vigilance. I liked being suburban and blithely unaware of such things and found his seeming obsession disquieting. However, after seeing Mark in his element, I came to appreciate his passion. He wasn't a gun nut; he was an enthusiast and a man with something more than a hobby but slightly less than an obsession. And he shared his lifetime of knowledge freely. All my misgivings, my hesitations and apprehension, melted away as we discussed the merits of an all-wood stock versus those of a polyvinyl, his preference for over-under-style shotguns versus semiautos (I admit a similar preference and it has everything to do with looks, though semiautos are better all around). And I learned—a lot.

We explained to Dad who Ted Nugent was as we passed a booth where Uncle Ted was signing autographs, and we fingered untold dozens of Model 1911s—so many in fact that I was able to distinguish quality from crap, good design from bad—when suddenly Mark snapped to attention.

“That's it,” he said and began bird-dogging a booth an aisle or two over.

“What?” I asked, trying to keep up. I was carrying both my bag and my dad's. His weighed every bit of twenty pounds by now and he was getting a little tired, so I offered to help.

“That's my lottery gun.”

Among shooters, there are cults. And of these cults, none are quite so interesting as .50-caliber rifle owners. Unlike the distinguished gentlemen of the English persuasion, these guys own a very specific weapon: the Barrett rifle. If you've ever seen the awesomely bad Charlie Sheen movie
Navy SEALs,
then you'll remember the character “God.” He was the sniper, the guy who could see through walls and shoot through buildings thanks to his trusty Barrett rifle.