Gun Guys (27 page)

Maybe all the boarded-up gun stores were a clue.

Packed in my car was a thick booklet called the
Industry Reference Guide
, published annually by the National Shooting Sports Foundation. It was glossy, colorful, and in 162 pages deconstructed the firearms business from every conceivable angle. It tracked the number of hunting licenses for the past twenty years and the average money that each hunter spent. It charted trends in gunmaking by type of gun, caliber, and manufacturer; and import/export by source and destination. It mined excise tax data. It teased apart participation in the shooting sports by age, sex, income bracket, state, and region. It included polling about the public’s attitudes toward guns and gun laws. All of it looked, at first glance, like good news for the gun industry.

Handgun, rifle, and shotgun sales had about doubled in a decade. The number of federal background checks grew every month. The average hunter was spending more every season. The public’s appetite for gun control was weakening.

And yet … those shuttered gun stores I’d found all over America were not mere anecdotes. The number of licensed gun dealers had fallen by about half in twenty years. Walmart appeared to have been as toxic to mom-and-pop gun stores as it was to locally owned clothing stores, shoe stores, and hardware stores. But Walmart didn’t entirely explain the disappearance of gun stores, because, except in Alaska, Walmart didn’t sell handguns. Online shopping wasn’t putting gun stores out of business, either. A shooter could buy a gun online—on the auction site
GunBroker.com
, say—but unless the gun was very old and/or the buyer had a special federal license, the gun had to be shipped to a gun store, where the buyer had to go through the same background check as anybody else—and the store collected a fee. Besides, gun prices tended to be high online; physical gun stores always seemed to have a price advantage.

No, the reason gun stores were closing was this: While more and more guns were being sold every year, they were going to the same shrinking group of aging white men. The NSSF’s
Industry Reference Guide
showed that participation in every shooting sport except archery was down over the past decade; some—like skeet, trap, and rifle target shooting—by double-digit percentages. Despite a big industry push to get more women shooting, their participation had hardly budged since 2002. The average age of “avid” hunters was almost forty-four, and, as the guide put it, “the increase in gross dollar value … is coming out of the wallets of virtually the same amount of hunters.” The average age of participants in all the
shooting sports (except air-gun shooting) had gone up by as much as 5 percent just since 2002.

The table that really spelled doom, though, was the one that broke down gun purchasers by age. Two-thirds of handgun buyers were forty-five or older. For shotguns, the numbers were only slightly less dire; ditto for rifles, probably because of the AR-15. As the NSSF put it in another of its reports, “Data suggest that the future of hunting and shooting sports is precarious.” To say the least.

Gun guys had a hard time accepting this. Whenever anybody mentioned online the statistical evidence that demographics were slowly whittling down gun culture, gun bloggers reacted furiously, talking about how crowded their local ranges seemed to be. At the same time, though, the standard gun-blogger shorthand for the typical shooter was “OFWG”: old fat white guy. The longer I studied the
Industry Reference Guide
, the more it looked like the chart of a terminally ill patient.

I e-mailed Jim Curcuruto, director of research analysis for the NSSF, to be sure I was reading his numbers right. Perhaps he would tell me that older shooters had always done most of the buying, that cash-strapped young people were perpetually mediocre customers, and that they always started buying guns when they got older. Maybe nothing was new; maybe the industry would be just fine. To be sure, I asked him for parallel data from, say, ten, twenty, and thirty years ago—to demonstrate that what I was seeing was not the beginning of the end.

“We don’t worry too much about the future,” he wrote back, in a cheerfully brittle e-mail. “We’re focused on the present. We don’t want to predict anything.” Don’t want to predict anything? I had in my hand a 162-page effort to predict all kinds of things. Yet Curcuruto would have me believe that the one set of numbers the foundation didn’t have was the historical evidence that the shooting sports and the industry that depended on them were withering away.

Maybe so. I could certainly understand the foundation not
wanting
those numbers. The
Industry Reference Guide
made it pretty clear: If the 2010 trends continued, the idea of bickering over gun policy was likely to look, in a few decades, as archaic as fighting over women’s suffrage or temperance. After decades of bitter skirmishes over gun rights and gun control, it was looking as though the issue would be settled by nothing more urgent than fashion. Surely some folks would continue hunting and shooting, but by and large, young people wanted to be urban and digital,
and guns were the opposite. For the consumers of tomorrow, guns were so yesterday.
^‡

So perhaps at least part of the rage I was encountering everyplace I traveled was born of panic. The gun-rights movement, and gun culture in general, seemed to be making a flamboyant and belligerent show of themselves in precisely the way that a flower grows intensely fragrant just before it dies.

But that didn’t explain everything, because what was also coming through again and again was that gun guys felt
insulted
. They had something they liked to do—own and shoot guns—and because of it they suffered, they believed, a continuous assault on their hobby, their lifestyle, and their dignity. The endless parade of nitpicky laws seemed to do naught but express disapproval of gun culture. And every time somebody went crazy with a gun, the mainstream reaction was always “We have to do something about guns,” which the gun guys heard as “We’ve got to do something about gun guys.” At precisely the moment they were sensing their numbers shrinking, gun guys were experiencing what they perceived as a nonstop attack on their very worth as human beings.

But how to tease apart everything that might have been making them feel that way? Many of the partially educated, rural, middle-aged guys in the bulge of the gun-guy demographic hadn’t seen a real wage increase since 1978. And then there were the guys like the laid-off harbor dredger breakfasting on booze and the haggard young man at the gun show selling his futuristic carbine so he could hold on to his house. Job security: gone. Employer-provided health care: gone. Pensions: gone. House: underwater. They’d had their livers pecked out while women, immigrants, blacks, and gays all seemed to have become groovier, sexier, and more dynamic players in American culture than they were. If the ashen aftermath of the
financial meltdown was making everybody feel like a loser, those guys must have felt like the bottom of the bottom.

The list of reasons to be angry was too long to get one’s mind around. The cloud of indignities had no name. We had no vocabulary to describe it. There was no way to put one’s hands on it, examine its contours, pick apart its elements. Even to examine it closely felt embarrassingly like making excuses for one’s own sorry lot. And to the extent that I was different from them, it was only by a matter of a few degrees. If Infidel and Biff weren’t where they’d hoped to be at this stage of life, well, neither was I.

It started to rain as the commercial strip petered out and turned to open country south of Louisville. I turned on my wipers, smearing days of smashed insects across the glass. I shifted in my seat and felt the solid bulk of the Colt against my kidney. It felt good. It reminded me that I wasn’t merely an aging freelancer at a time of publishing-industry collapse; I was a member of the sheepdog cadre—vigilant, clear-eyed, sober, and true. I had the skill, courage, and maturity to manipulate a device of boundless lethality and keep its power safely contained. I didn’t need to kill anybody for my gun to give me stature; the exact opposite was true. What bolstered my self-esteem was my ability to live alongside a firearm, day in and day out, without ever harming anybody. The gun made me useful, relevant, special. If that’s what the pale young man at Tilford’s had been after in asking his father to buy him that fat shotgun revolver, who could blame him?

Guns give us an identity. They make us supermen. A gun guy sees it this way: If you want to limit my contact with guns, you must be saying that you don’t trust me with them. You, who may never have shot a gun and know nothing about what it means to handle and operate one, are presuming to make judgments about my ability to do so. You want to diminish me as a man, a citizen, a sovereign entity—and I’ve already endured quite enough of that, thank you.

T
he first time I saw Marcey Parker, she was happily firing a submachine gun through a window. This was a year before my gun-guy walkabout, and the window was in a freestanding plywood wall that stood by itself in the middle of a field of grass, like a set in a cowboy movie. Marcey hunched over her gun like a pro, sighting down the barrel, rattling off four-shot bursts, her brown ponytail bouncing from the recoil. After tearing up a row of steel targets with several loud
rat-a-tat-tats
, she ran to the next window, dropping the magazine from her gun with a clatter and jamming in a new magazine from a pouch on her belt. Behind her ran a man in an orange safety vest, holding at arm’s length a small box that I took to be a pocket camera. After shooting through all four windows, Marcey dropped the magazine, jerked the bolt open, and yelled, “Clear!”

The man in the orange vest looked at the box in his hand, which turned out to be a timer that could hear shooting begin and end, and called out her minutes and seconds. A small crowd, watching the subgun match from behind a rope at the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot, applauded politely.

Marcey laid her hot gun on the shooter’s table with stylish, casual flair, removed her hearing protectors, and shook her long brunet hair free of a rubber band. It was hard not to stare. She was forty-six but looked to be in her thirties, with high cheekbones, large, wide-set eyes, and a strong, rounded figure—a total babe. She was as carefully made up here on the
gun range as she’d have been at a cotillion—rouged, powdered, her lips painted deep rust with a hairline brown outline. She fluffed out her hair with painted fingertips, removed her shooting glasses, and replaced them with rectangular rimless ones. When she did that, and irradiated me with a wide smile, she looked strikingly familiar.

“How you doin’? You need anything? We got cold water and drinks in the truck,” she said, as though
I
was the one who had just run a sun-blasted course firing three hundred rounds of nine-millimeter.

“What exactly is it you’re doing out there?” I asked.

“What you got out there is a bunch of steel plates you got to knock down,” she said.

“It’s a machine gun,” I said. “How hard is that?”

“Well,
one
of those plates is red, and if you hit
that
one, you get a penalty. What it is, is a balancing act. You shoot a long burst, that’s quick—but you risk hittin’ the red one. Shoot short bursts, you’re more exact, but slower. See?”

Marcey’s husband, Jeremy, walked up, cradling a Sterling submachine gun, and kissed her lightly on the lips. He had a craggy face with hooded eyes and a mouth that fell naturally into a soft smile. In my memory, she’s bigger than he is, but I know that isn’t true. He is wiry and compact and has a quieter, less flamboyant personality, so he seemed to take up less space.

I asked to hold the Sterling and, after ascertaining that it was unloaded, Jeremy placed it in my hands. The Sterling was the British-made successor to the Sten gun, little more than a metal tube with a big spring inside, like a beefy shock absorber. It had a folding metal stock and, projecting from the side, a long, curved magazine—a simple $7,500 device that probably cost less than a hundred dollars to manufacture.

“Did you hear me going
dink-dink-dink-dink
?” Marcey asked him. “I was hittin’ ’em, but they weren’t fallin’ over!”

“A lot of us didn’t bring hot enough loads today,” Jeremy explained. He’d made all the ammunition with which he and Marcey were competing, assembling bullet, powder, brass casing, and primer into finished cartridges on a workbench in the garage at home. He gave me the calculations that went into finding the perfect combination of controllability and oomph for each cartridge, taking ten leisurely minutes to spool it out for the non-nerd, so long that I started thinking the sport was more about math than marksmanship. “Those Marcey were shooting were power factor 150, which is bullet weight times velocity divided by a thousand. I didn’t want to load her up too hot, because she was using a borrowed gun
and hot loads are hard on the lower receiver.” The range officer called his name, and Jeremy took the Sterling from me, adjusting his hearing protectors as he approached the firing line.