Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (26 page)

When the heavy gunfire of the English at the infamous battle of Culloden in 1746, for instance, snuffed out Bonnie Prince Charlie’s claim on the crown it also traumatised generations of Scots. In defeat, many of them left Britain. It was a Celtic exodus that led to the establishment of American towns with names born from sentimentality, like Perth in New York or Aberdeen in Maryland. And these tartan-wrapped communities brought with them the traumatic memories of clearances and English despotic rule.

These memories played an important part in the evolution of American culture, particularly in the southern states; one that has within its heart the central tenets of independence of spirit, the belief in a punitive route to justice and a deep distrust of the meddling of the state, all of which typify your American gun-loving patriot today.

This legacy partly explained, at least to me, why Americans have let forty-four states pass some form of law that lets gun owners carry concealed weapons,
¹⁸
and why, after Florida sanctioned the Stand Your Ground law – exonerating citizens who used deadly force when confronted by an assailant – twenty-three other states went ahead and did the same.

It also explained to me why those who have a gun for recreational shooting in the US number some 20 million strong, and why they spend an estimated $9.9 billion a year on their hobby – almost $500 per shooter.
¹⁹
Why men and women across America form countless small clubs and societies dedicated to the gun. Hobbyists like those who gather in Arizona’s western desert at the Big Sandy Shoot, the largest outdoor shooting meet in the world. They meet twice a year at a stony range a quarter of a mile long and there blaze away with
rifle and machine-gun. Over 1,000 targets litter the landscape: some that speed along the length of the range, others that explode in a burst of sparks when hit. And at the end of the weekend, with over 3.5 million rounds fired and their targets lying decimated upon the Arizonan soil, these shooters pack up and go back to their lives.

Then there are those civilians whose passion is for sniping. They sign up to $220-a-day training courses to do this. So popular are these courses that one US company sold over 20,000 of its $5,000 civilian-adapted RC-50s, a rifle capable of piercing an armoured vehicle from a mile away.
²⁰

Then there are those who go shooting for ideological reasons: to help America regain a path to redemption. This, at least, is the view of the people at Project Appleseed, folks who dedicate their weekends to the historical tradition of rifle marksmanship, using black powder rifles and historical sharpshooter techniques. They gather in isolated groves and hidden woodlands, convinced that their guns can renew national confidence, that the grand ideals of America – ethics, discipline, community – can be galvanised through gunfire.

Then there are those communities that gather not just to shoot, but to dress up, cook and enjoy the sheer spectacle of it all. For me this community intrigued the most – because their actions seemed much more about pleasure than power. This was why, with such a choice of communities in the US to meet, I alighted upon the group that both pursued joy through gunfire and also summed up the deep-rooted truths of Americana: the rootin’ shootin’ cowboy.

Brad L. Meyers prefers to go by the name ‘Hipshot’. When you call him this, his face lights up. This Michigan-born southern Californian has been many things in his seventy-odd years – a student, a marine biologist, a carpenter – but his passion is for Single Action Shooting, of which he is president of the national society. This means he enjoys dressing up as a cowboy and blazing away with his pistol.

Hipshot has always loved the Old West; the gunslingers of the
OK Corral were the heroes of his childhood. The others on the Single Action Shooting Society (SASS) board – or the Wild Bunch – have similar passions and names. Here in the cowboy shooting community you have to have an alter ego. So there’s a Judge Roy Bean, a General US Grant and a Tex – Wyatt Earp and Butch Cassidy have long been claimed. They say their particular form of sport – Cowboy Action Shooting, around since 1982 – is the fastest-growing outdoor shooting sport in the US; they’ve now got over 97,000 weekend cowboys in eighteen countries worldwide.

‘It’s a celebration of the cowboy lifestyle. Last year 900 people made it to our End of Trail annual meeting, where we had twelve stage matches taking place,’ Hipshot said in a gravelly voice, explaining that ‘stages’ comprise a series of plates that ring when hit.

Hipshot looked the part, manning the society’s stand at a Midwestern gunshow dressed in leather boots, shiny pinstriped trousers, a dapper frock coat and a wild rag of a red bandana around his neck. He stood out starkly among the tactical police gear on sale in the cavernous exhibition, but the required dress for society shooting events is western clothing typical of the time, so there was little else for it. He pointed down to his outfit.

‘All of this grew out of a concept of “What would a soldier of fortune have looked like 100 years ago?” Of course, the entire Wild West period was for a very short time – about twenty years, the space between the civil war and when trains started hauling cattle.’

‘So why do you do this?’ I asked Hipshot, nodding at his garb.

‘Oh, we come for so many reasons. Some like the dressing-up; some like the cowboy way, where a man’s word and handshake was his bond; some are gun collectors; some are western film buffs; and some are just into the shooting.’ They come in their luxury recreational vehicles and in the evenings light up a barbeque, crack open sweating cans of beer and enjoy the silence of the stars. And you believe Hipshot when he says they pose no threat. That there are very few accidents at their meetings. Nobody locks their trailers and trucks, and nothing is ever stolen.

It’s a world that sounded a little seductive, as fantasy worlds often do. A world separated from the endlessly sad statistics of some 30,000
annual gun deaths in the US.
²¹
One even at odds with its own past: Dodge City’s first local government law was actually to ban the carrying of firearms – the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral kicked off because Wyatt Earp was trying to enforce a similar law.
²²

But such historical truths did not bother Hipshot. ‘It’s all about fantasy. But it’s a life, too. I’ve developed lifelong friends, who I’d never have met in any other way. We have a saying: “They come for the gun and stay for the people.”’

Camaraderie based around guns is far from new. Gun clubs date back to the Middle Ages; one of the first recorded was the St Sebastianus Shooting Club in Cologne, set up in 1463.
²³
But it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the sport went mainstream, with organisations such as the National Rifle Association in the UK leading the way. They held their first competition on Wimbledon Common in July 1860, and so appealing was the skill of marksmanship that Queen Victoria graced that fine day, probably with half an eye towards encouraging the skill of sharpshooting to help keep her Empire intact. She even raised a rifle to her unflinching face and fired the first round.
²⁴
With that queenly shot, the sport of shooting was fixed with a royal seal of approval and its reputation was further boosted nearly four decades later, when shooting was listed as one of the sports in the modern Olympics. It was this community of sport shooters that I was drawn to next.

Today, shooting is a major competitive industry, spawning thousands of national and international sporting events and featuring in every Olympic Games since 1896.
²⁵
Of course, it has undergone significant changes since its early days. Targets were once the shape of humans or animals, but after the Second World War this was phased out for round targets to avoid an association with guns and bloody violence.
²⁶
But back in the 1900 Olympic games in Paris, such sensitivities were far from the organisers’ minds. They held a live pigeon-shooting event – the first and only time in Olympic
history when animals were killed purposefully.
²⁷
Nearly 300 birds died that day, and the event proved to be such carnage, with the cries of dying birds and rivulets of blood staining the stadium sand, that even the stomachs of the French audience turned.

If that event was short-lived, the duelling event was even less popular. That competition, held in the 1906 and 1912 games, had the competitors facing dummies, not love rivals, dressed in sombre overcoats. Bull’s-eyes were pinned to the mannequins’ throats.
²⁸
It was too raw a sight to last.

These quickly ditched sports reflect the wider chaotic history of the early modern Olympics – like when Russia’s military shooting team arrived in London for the 1908 games nearly two weeks after it had ended. They were following the Julian calendar, while Britain was on the Gregorian calendar.

Despite these birthing pains, shooting has since emerged as a major sport. In 1896 there were just five events. By the London Olympics of 2012 there were fifteen: nine for men, six for women.
²⁹
Such shooting matches require intense focus and a skill so exact that marksmen use techniques to lower their pulse to half its normal rate, firing between heartbeats.
³⁰

It has a history, too, filled with wonderful distractions, like the fact the oldest Olympian was a shooter – the Swede Oscar Swahn. He took part in the 1920 Belgian Olympics at the age of seventy-two, winning a silver medal for the double-shot running deer contest. Or the story of the Hungarian pistol shooter Károly Takács, who, after his shooting hand was badly maimed by a grenade, taught himself to aim with his left hand. He went on to take gold in the 25m rapid fire pistol competition in the 1948 London Games.
³¹

However sporting, though, where there is shooting – unless properly contained – death can often be seen lurking in the shadows. In 2000, three Colombian gunmen tried to kidnap the former Olympic target shooter Bernardo Tovar and his son of the same name. Father and son were coming back from practising and were armed. The younger Bernardo fired his .22 calibre pistol, killing two of his three attackers and wounding the third.

But is such a thing inevitable, I wondered. Can you have sports
shooting without violence? Was the peaceful pastime of amateur cowboys the exception or the rule? Do guns inevitably alter things for the worse? I had encountered so much death on my journey that I was sceptical about whether you could have guns without tragedy. But one place I had read about appeared to prove me wrong.

In the distance was the Esja, a volcanic range whose western parts, formed some 3 million years ago, rose to rain-laden heights. Its summit, 780 metres from the speckled sea, lay hidden from view. A thick grey wedge of cloud had spilled down its sides and covered the sky, and beneath its clouded rim, across the freezing waters of Kollafjörður bay, the sound of gunshot sounded in the whitened air.

I had travelled a short distance from the Icelandic capital of Reykjavík, a city washed in the cold, perpetual light of a northern summer, to attend the final day of the national skeet shooting competition. Thirty-one men were there, and some, dressed in tracksuits with their cold metal shotguns made safe, hanging like broken sticks over their blue and black tabards, waited in quiet clusters. They sat with the patience of men who were used to silence and the passing of slow days.