Gun Guys (14 page)

The shoot lasted all day and into a blazing, tracer-streaked night. About once an hour, the guns fell silent so that range officers could replace and refresh targets and shooters could collect brass in big barrels for reloading. New guns kept showing up. A couple of guys spent an hour setting up a six-foot-long Soviet DShK 12.7-millimeter anti-aircraft machine gun that sucked everybody’s attention away from the ordinary Vickers and Brownings. When those guys finally started firing off a belt of cartridges the size of small flashlights, I could feel my clothing flutter.

Reporters can be cynical, but in thirty years of encounters, I’d had plenty of moments to marvel at the freedom of information that Americans enjoy. I’d challenged powerful government officials in interviews without having to think about the consequences. I’d received packets of sensitive documents in the mail, not from thieves but openly, in response to Freedom of Information Act requests. I’d published accounts of official wrongdoing and expected only accolades (as opposed to a midnight interrogation and summary execution). Day to day, I’d taken it for granted. Every now and then, though—especially when working in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and even in Europe—I’d felt awe for the uniqueness of America’s compact with its citizens. The power we enjoyed to
know
implied an amazing amount of trust in the people. Go ahead, the system seemed to say, discover and denounce the most explosive misdeeds of your government. The republic can take it. The republic depends on it.

I found myself thinking that way on the flattened mesa outside Wikieup, where ordinary Americans, some rich, some not so much, were playing with incredibly powerful weapons, blithely taking them out and blasting away on a sunny Saturday with no kind of official supervision. No other functioning country on earth trusted its people with such weapons. And the trust seemed well placed. An ATF official I’d met told me that, in the seven decades since licensing began, not a single licensed machine gun had been used in a violent crime. The people who got permits were thoroughly checked out, had thousands of dollars invested in their toys, and didn’t want to risk losing them.

If you bought the argument that the private ownership of firearms demonstrated America’s exceptional trust in its citizens, then to be one of the people who owned and used firearms was to make that trust manifest. To do so with a machine gun—well, that was the ultimate.

This was how the NRA and the firearms industry encouraged those
of us who liked guns to think, at any rate. It was how they’d managed to raise an otherwise ordinary hobby to the exalted plane of patriotic duty.

During the next break in the gunning, I found myself standing next to Roger Sprava in line for a cup of that watery 4-H coffee. His face flecked with powder residue, his hands streaked with angry red blisters from brushing against a red-hot barrel, he was one happy-looking man.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re not married.”

“No,” he laughed. “If I was married, I’d probably have a fancy bathroom instead!”

A
ll the anger about guns mysteriously evaporated when the subject turned to hunting. Even the most ardent gun-control advocates knew that too much tradition lay aback of hunting to think of meddling with it.
^*
Hunting could even be useful to them; it afforded the opportunity for some political jujitsu. By acknowledging hunting as a legitimate use of guns, gun-control advocates could offer an olive branch while condemning other guns and gun use. Politicians hoping to reimpose a ban on assault rifles could establish that they wouldn’t dream of interfering with the good guns with which Americans hunted, only with the bad guns with which they killed each other. Howard Dean: “I never met a hunter who needed an AK-47 to shoot a deer.” John Kerry: “When I go out there and hunt, I’m going out there with a twelve-gauge shotgun, not an assault weapon.” Bill Clinton: “You don’t need an Uzi to go deer hunting, and everybody knows it.” If the only gun use you countenanced was hunting,
the comments made perfect sense. If, though, you were into self-defense, competitive shooting, Walter Mitty fantasy, historical collecting, end-of-the-world preparation, tyranny prevention, machine-gun meet-ups, or you just thought guns were cool and fun, holding up hunting as the sole legitimate use of guns sounded either ignorant or offensive or both.

Still, the firearms industry recognized that the path to firearm legitimacy ran through hunting, and it was making a feverish attempt as I drove around Arizona to rebrand the AR-15 from “assault rifle” to “modern sporting rifle”—the firearm with which everybody was likely to be hunting in a few years. Most states didn’t allow people to hunt deer with the .223-caliber bullet that the basic AR-15 fired, but the cartridge was great for small game, and because of the gun’s unique modularity, it was easy to make it fire hunting-caliber cartridges. The website of the National Shooting Sports Foundation offered a video of a kindly old gent in flannel shirt and Elmer Fudd hat hefting a camo-painted AR. “Anti-gun folks insist on calling these rifles ‘assault weapons,’ to label these ‘bad guns,’ as opposed to more traditional-looking ‘good guns,’ ” he said, as soothingly as Wilford Brimley in a Quaker Oats commercial. “Truth is, it won’t be too long before lots of hunters call one of these rifles ‘Old Betsy.’ ”

As I traveled around talking to gun guys, “modern sporting rifle”—or MSR—was becoming the new term of art for the AR-15. Though I never once heard anybody use the term while speaking, the gun press used it universally. It was easy to get the sense that a kind of race was under way: Could the AR-15 lose its assault-rifle stigma and become thoroughly legitimized as a modern sporting rifle before the forces of gun control could mount another assault-rifle ban?

The truth was, a lot of gun-rights activists didn’t even consider hunters allies in the cause. They called them “Fudds” and dismissed them as dilettantes who lolled comfortably in their privileged status as the only legitimate gun users. Fudds couldn’t be bothered to raise a ruckus over handguns, concealed-carry rights, or the Second Amendment. As one gun-rights activist put it to me in an e-mail, “I don’t need phony gun owners, like the American Hunters and Shooters Association, muddying the waters.” What’s more, Fudds had dropped the ball on inducting a new generation into the gun life; the number of hunters was dropping, and their average age was increasing.

Hunters were a diverse group, attracted to the sport for myriad reasons, and hunting was a lot more complicated—physically, socially, ethically, and spiritually—than I could have imagined before trying it. I came to it as a way back to guns, many years after leaving my high school air guns. It was, as they said, a legitimate way to keep guns in my life. I could feel their weight and shape in my hands as I walked the woods.

My first hunt was in Georgia, in 1985. I’d crossed the Mason-Dixon line to take a job as a police reporter for the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution
, whose newsroom was a vast cavern of cigarette smoke, with green-screen computer terminals the size of small refrigerators. The Internet lurked just over the horizon, and newspapers like the
Journal-Constitution
were snoozing through the lazy, corrupt twilight of their media dominance. The city desk may have been anchored by good ol’ boys who packed their cheeks with tobacco and put salted peanuts in their Co’Cola, but the reporters with whom I spent my days were largely cynical, urban Yankee transplants like me.

With nobody in my life who could teach me to hunt, I bought an ancient copy of
How to Hunt Deer and Small Game
, a 1959 hardcover full of terrific black-and-white photos of men in checkered duffel coats and Elmer Fudd hats trudging through the Maine snow. I pored over utterly unfamiliar concepts (“Slice through the anus-end of the lower intestine and carefully lift it free of the body cavity …”). I wasn’t sure if, when the moment came, I’d be able to kill a big mammal with a gun.

The spindly Remington .22 I’d bought in college wouldn’t reliably knock a deer over and wasn’t legal for hunting, so I paid a pawnshop sixty-five dollars for one of the rifles I loved from old war movies: a British .303 Lee-Enfield, a blunt-nosed monster of wood, iron, and brass that was made in 1916 and weighed slightly less than a grand piano.

Thus equipped, I drove south one autumn evening to the Oconee National Forest, expecting to pitch my little tent in the silent woods and wake in solitude before dawn of opening day. As my headlights swept the forest’s campground, though, I beheld the pandemonium of a miniature redneck Woodstock: dozens of tents pitched side by side, roaring camp-fires, gigantic jacked-up pickup trucks rumbling through, and hundreds of skinny white men whooping and hollering and passing around bottles of Evan Williams bourbon while boom boxes balanced on truck hoods blasted George Strait and Ronnie Milsap. This was obviously an annual ritual. I wedged my tent between two others and joined a nearby camp-fire. “Hey, man,” a ropy Confederate said, offering the bottle. “You from
Atlanta, ain’t you.” To these guys, Atlanta—forty minutes away—was another planet; not quite Yankeeland, but close.

“Worse, actually. I’m from New Jersey, and I
live
in Atlanta.”

“Yankee boy!” one of the men laughed, spinning the cylinder on a long-barreled .357 revolver. “Well, you’re welcome here if what you come for is to hunt deer. That’s what we’re about tonight: hunting deer.”

“I’m here to hunt deer,” I said. “But it’s my first time. What do I need to know?”

Everybody started talking at once:
You want to take and hold just back of the point of the shoulder. Spray your legs with this here deer estrus to mask your scent. Get you a place to sit while it’s still dark so you’re there when the sun first comes up. Deer can only see motion; sit still enough and they’ll walk right up on you. Get in a tree if you can; deer don’t look up. Cut the scent glands out the hind legs first thing so they can’t taint the meat, and then be sure to wash your knife. Keep the wind in your face. Watch you don’t cut the gut getting it out the deer or your meat will taste like shit
.

It was too much to absorb, especially with that bottle of Evan Williams going around, but what came through was how sincerely the guys wanted to initiate me into their world. A man who hadn’t grown up hunting must have been an oddity for them—and a Yankee certainly was—but they didn’t pay that any mind. What mattered was that someone wanted to know how to hunt, had bought himself a rifle and a fistful of deer tags, and had come to try it. They took me in like a kid brother, not in a condescending way but with tenderness and concern. What they were doing, I’d come to understand years later, was
recruiting
. Like the baby-faced kid who would insist I shoot his AR-15, the guys in hunting camp were doing what they could to widen and strengthen the circle of gun guys—or at least of Fudds. When people talk about a “brotherhood of arms,” it isn’t just soldiers they mean.

I finally staggered off to bed and woke in darkness to the
tweedle-deet
of my pocket alarm clock. The camp was stirring, bacon and coffee heavy in the air. I felt my way down a dirt road in blackness, walking for twenty minutes or so before turning into the woods. I crunched through the dry leaves until I guessed I’d put plenty of distance between me and everybody else. It felt like the heart of the forest primeval. By starlight I could make out a broad swale ahead of me. I sat with my back against a tree, with a good view of any animal that might pass.

It took a long time for the sun to rise. An eerie mist rose from the rotting leaves. The squirrels began to stir and the birds to chirp. Voles
scurried beneath fallen leaves. Gradually I discovered that I could see color—the yellow of the leaves on the forest floor, the bright orange of my vest, everything slowly morphing from shades of gray. I looked at my watch: 5:59. One minute to the start of my first-ever deer season.

Out of nowhere, the woods exploded with gunfire—a great ripping wave roaring from every direction. It seemed that every man from the campsite had opened fire the second it was legal to do so, whether he had a target or not. I slid lower on the tree, lest a stray bullet find me. I heard a
thump-rustle
in the swale below, and trotting through, about seventy yards away, was a panicked yearling, no bigger than a German shepherd, looking to get out of the bullet storm. Like a cat on a mouse, I fixated. Whatever doubt I’d had about my ability to kill vaporized in a flash of predator energy. I’d come out to kill something, and here something was. I hoisted the Enfield to my shoulder and sighted on the deer’s rib cage. When I pulled the trigger, the gun thudded hard against me; the shot must have sounded, but it hardly registered. I looked over my gun barrel and the yearling was gone. Had I disintegrated the tiny animal with my enormous rifle? A second passed, and another
thump-rustle
in the brush told me he had fallen.

I walked down the hill with my hand wrapped around my mouth in horror. The little deer lay with its front leg twisted under it, eyes open, stone still. A big red hole glowered from its rib cage like an angry third eye, and vivid red blood splashed the yellow leaves. My face was hot, as though I’d smashed a priceless vase; my first impulse was to run away in shame and tell nobody what I’d done. But I took a breath, removed the magazine from the rifle, and jacked the cartridge out of the chamber. Then I knelt beside the deer and did exactly what
How to Hunt Deer and Small Game
—and my drunken brothers from hunting camp—had taught me to do. It was remarkably easy, and very quickly the remorse and disgust I’d felt gave way to a sense of wonder at the complexity of a mammal’s anatomy and—as corny as it would have sounded to my colleagues in the newsroom—gratitude to the deer for letting me take him. The whole job took less than twenty minutes. I dragged him from the woods, laid him in the trunk of the car, drove him home, and, after a day of taking him apart, cooked him three different ways and held a dinner party at which my friends ate every bit of him.