Gun Guys (10 page)

“No.”

“No other metal?”

“Just my gun.”

She didn’t laugh, but neither did she reach for the .357 Magnum. “You’re going to have to return that to your vehicle.”

I opened my mouth to assert my rights but decided I was unwilling to risk a gunfight to defend Bernie Herpin’s regulation.

Herpin was a stolid man in his fifties, with a broad, unexpressive face and old-fashioned, large-framed glasses that added to an overall ranine aspect. “I’m unarmed, by the way,” I said. “I hope that’s okay.” I told him about the encounter downstairs, and he rolled his eyes. Passing the ordinance had been one thing; enforcing it was another. He still thought regulating gun shows was wrongheaded.

“What’s next?” he asked as we took seats in his office. “The bulletin-board-at-work loophole, the ad-in-the-paper loophole, the sell-to-your-neighbor loophole?”—all of which were legal ways to buy guns.

Herpin told me how the 1994 assault-rifle ban had woken him up to the need to defend the Second Amendment, and how he’d fought to allow licensed adults to carry guns into K–12 schools because someone checked out and licensed was no threat, and might be able to stop a school shooting. He went on to say that President Obama’s bailout of General Motors was on the same spectrum as gun control: government taking power from the people, and as his rhetoric devolved into standard-issue right-wing
Obama bashing, he became less interesting than I’d hoped. I glanced at my watch and the window; I still had a few hours in which to make miles before the sleet closed in. I thanked him for his time. But as I stepped out the door, he called to me in a new tone—almost hurt. I paused at the door, half in and half out.

“You’re from Boulder, so maybe you can explain something to me,” he said. “The Democrat party used to be the party of the workingman, who is the hunter, the gun guy. How can it now be anti-gun, anti-ATV on the public lands, anti-hunting? The leadership of the Democrat party criticizes conservatives for our
tastes
.”

I told him I was the last person who could explain that, and he waved me off with one hand while lifting the phone with the other to chew out the security guard downstairs.

In that last moment, Herpin had finally said something interesting. Most proponents of gun control doubtless would argue that their position was based on public safety. But to Herpin, the pro-gun-control position felt like an attack on his tastes, on who he was as a person. Maybe he was wrong, but that was how he heard it. There are two steps to a message, I remembered: the sending and the receiving.

Outside of Walsenburg, Colorado, I saw a sign for Hollowpoint Gun Shop. My plan on the trip was to stop at every gun store I saw, so I pulled over and checked my look in the rearview. NRA cap: check. Worn leather jacket: check. Gun on hip: check. I was about to walk armed into a gun store; if I didn’t get cut down in a blazing crossfire, everything should go swimmingly.

Hollowpoint was a cozy little place—low-ceilinged, stocked mostly with fishing rods—overseen by a beautiful, petite woman named Erin Jerant. She wore a crocheted vest, her gray hair in a bun; I half expected her to offer me a cup of tea. Gun guys dream of finding, say, an 1897 Bergmann No. 5 pistol in the shop of a sweet old lady who says, “Oh, I don’t know why anybody would want that old thing. I’m glad to see it go.” I thought maybe I’d hit the jackpot.

Alas, Erin was not that sweet old lady. A quick look at her price tags indicated that she’d been up late at night scanning the prices on
GunBroker.com
. Her guns were as expensive as any. And there weren’t many dusty old rancher’s rifles but, once again, a rack of AR-15s that
wouldn’t have looked out of place in the armory at Fort Polk. “Everybody wants one now,” she said, touching the muzzle of a black rifle. “You’ve got your end-of-the-world types who buy them. For ranchers dealing with prairie dogs and coyotes, they’re great.” She looked up into my eyes and recited the gun-guy liturgy. “The way crime is just out of control, you can’t blame people.”

I mentioned that I’d found a couple of gun stores closed and asked how business was.

“Last year was good, when Obama got in. I am sure that as soon as he knows this term is over and he’s not going to get reelected, he’ll try to push through all kinds of gun bans, and we’ll have another good few months. But long-term, no, it doesn’t look good. Only people I see in here anymore are almost as old as I am. I’m giving myself five more years and then retiring.”

She leaned on the counter, and a dreamy look came over her. “Last year, though,” she sighed, “I had them standing five deep in here filling out their 4473s;
^*
you could smell the testosterone.”

The specter of a new assault-rifle ban had become, to some gun guys, what the Holocaust was to some Jews: the organizing dread of their lives. The original ban came in 1994, after the country had been brutalized by the crack-cocaine murder wave of the late eighties and early nineties. It was aimed at the AK-47, which was being disgorged by the tens of thousands from China and the collapsed Soviet empire, and at the American-made AR-15. Sponsors of the ban, in their haste to “do something” about gun violence, made enough gaffes to give their opponents endless political ammunition and make the entire exercise as polarizing as possible. They mangled brands and model numbers—a couple of proposed laws would have banned guns that didn’t exist—and garbled gun parts. When Senator Dianne Feinstein said of assault rifles on national television, “They have light triggers, you can spray-fire them, you can hold them with two hands, and you don’t really need to aim,” gun guys were paying attention. They knew that assault rifles didn’t necessarily have lighter triggers than other guns, and any gun could be held with two hands, fired rapidly, or fired without aiming. Feinstein and her allies were trying to ban something
they didn’t even understand. Instead of listing every conceivable variant of the AR-15 and AK-47, the law banned characteristics deemed too military for civilian possession, such as pistol grips, bayonet lugs, collapsible stocks, and barrel shrouds that protect shooters’ hands from heat. Banning guns by characteristic turned out to be like banning Pontiacs for their chrome pipes and death’s-head shift knobs. Smart entrepreneurs simply churned out “post-ban” AK-47 and AR-15 knockoffs that lacked the cosmetics but were every bit as lethal. Ironically, it’s entirely possible that the bill’s mostly Democratic sponsors ended up putting
more
assault rifles and high-capacity magazines on the street, rather than fewer. The long debate in 1993 and 1994 that led to the ban, and the additional months before the law took effect, gave everybody who wanted such things, or thought he might someday, ample time to stock up. I was living in Montana at the time; gun stores were selling AK-47s off pallets for $110 apiece—along with hastily manufactured thirty-two-round magazines by the case. It was like watching people preparing for a zombie invasion.

A sunset provision, in any case, gave Congress and President George W. Bush the chance to let the ban expire a decade later. When Representative Carolyn McCarthy of New York was pushing to reinstate it, the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson asked her on television if she knew what a barrel shroud was. After trying to evade the question, she eventually blurted, “a shoulder thing that goes up,” a line that instantly became infamous. Senator Charles Schumer was given to declaring that machine guns, assault weapons, and cheaply made pistols were available “in cyberspace for the taking.” In truth, you could find guns through the Internet, but actually buying one required following all the standard background-check and paperwork rules, and machine guns weren’t available that way at all. Once again, gun guys were watching. They saw the ban supporters’ inability to domonstrate even a passing familiarity with the things they were presuming to ban as the height of elitism. They convinced Congress to block reinstatement, and “pre-ban” AR-15s and AK-47s returned to gun stores.

Whether the short-lived ban saved lives is a topic of unending contention. What is undeniable is that it contributed to one historic death—that of the Democratic majority in Congress. The November after President Clinton signed the assault-rifle ban, gun guys helped give the Democrats their worst drubbing since 1946, ending their hold on both houses.

Even though they beat reinstatement, gun guys did not stand down from red alert. The ban had so permanently inflamed their outrage
gland—an organ prodded ceaselessly by the NRA and the gun press—that when it looked as if another Democrat was going to win the White House in 2008, the gun industry had its best year ever. A common novelty at gun stores was a poster of Obama’s smiling face over the words
FIREARMS SALESMAN OF THE YEAR
. And in fairness, the petite Erin Jerant’s fear may not have been entirely irrational. Soon after the election, the new attorney general, Eric Holder, let slip that reinstating the assault-rifle ban was one of “a few gun-related changes that we would like to make.” The comment set off such a shitstorm that within weeks he was mumbling that all he’d meant was “enforcing the laws we have,” exactly the NRA’s position.

The AR-15 was so prevalent everywhere I’d been so far that it was starting to feel like one of my story’s protagonists. The more I read about it, the more it seemed like the future—the iGun, perhaps. Even the business surrounding it was different from the gun industry of the past. While the big traditional firearms companies—Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Remington, and Colt—made AR-15s, they were hardly the whole game. At least thirty American companies, some of them two- and three-man shops, were making them. It was an industry that lived not in huge, smoky factories, but largely among the engine shops, custom extruders, and welders in edge-of-town industrial parks. When I reached the Grand Canyon State, I went looking for one.

I showed up in Phoenix the week that Congress passed President Obama’s health-care bill, and the city was undergoing a collective nervous breakdown. It made it hard to talk to Arizonans about anything else, even their guns. In the airless waiting room of a Jiffy Lube, an elderly gentleman became so distraught over the new law that he was making himself short of breath; I feared he might suffer a stroke. “It’s been socialism for the past fifty years, but now it’s out-of-the-closet, bare-assed naked!” he cried, as overture to a twenty-minute monologue delivered at top volume to an audience of two—me and a heavyset woman glancing nervously over her copy of
Prensa Hispana
.

“Sir,” I finally said, reaching over to pat his seersucker knee. “Allow me to reassure you: All that has happened is that you lost one. It happens to my side all the time. Believe me; the republic is fine.”

He refused to be consoled.

I had some time to kill before an appointment, so I roamed Phoenix in my freshly lubricated car, following the lead of Gun Store Finder. The first store it sent me to was out of business—the
GUNS
sign creaking in the hot breeze but the windows were whitewashed over—and so was the second. Peering through the glass door, I could see that it had been vacated recently: A poster on the wall advertised the Taurus Judge revolver, which had been a hot new item that year. I was beginning to feel like an epidemiologist on the trail of a mysterious plague that was leaving behind a string of desiccated gun-store corpses. At a time when gun sales were strong, something was killing off the stores.

But it was time to get to Glendale, so I hacked my way through the traffic to a vast grid of gray, unlandscaped, steel-sided buildings adorned with vaguely technological but opaque corporate names like Technotron and Tronotech. I drove around and around until I was sure I was lost, and at that moment, directly in front of me, a sign appeared for the place I was seeking: Patriot Ordnance Factory. I parked and banged on an unmarked steel door.

After a rattling of locks, the door swung open, and Frank DeSomma looked me up and down. “You found me,” he said, waving me into a cheaply furnished office and locking the door behind us. DeSomma looked less like an Arizona gunmaker than a discount-electronics salesman on Flatbush Avenue. Short and soft, he wore a powder-blue leisure suit, gold chains, and a big, knobby gold ring. His dark hair was slicked back, and a Vandyke adorned his meaty features. In an accent so heavily Brooklynese I could practically smell the pickles, he launched into a predictably despairing monologue about President Obama’s health-care bill. I let him go on for ninety seconds, tapping my foot; it was the cost of doing business in Arizona that week. Finally, I held up a palm. “Spare me. Let’s talk about guns.”

DeSomma shrugged, smiled, and got down to the story of his business. His family had moved to Arizona from Brooklyn when he was eight. All his friends had firearms, and as a budding aerospace machinist in his twenties, he was as enchanted by guns’ mechanical perfection as by the flash and boom. In 2002, with the ten-year assault-rifle ban soon to expire, DeSomma sensed that the market for the AR-15 was about to take off. He sold an apartment building and asked his wife if he could use $25,000 of the proceeds to start a gun-parts business.

All AR-15s are functionally identical; it’s the interchangeability of their parts, after all, that makes them so thrilling. But DeSomma thought he
could make a better gun. The AR-15 had been known since the Vietnam War for being lightweight and accurate but finicky and prone to jamming. DeSomma figured the problem was the way it used gases from one firing round to eject the casing and insert the next round into the chamber. Pushing the bolt directly with hot gases meant covering it with dirt, eventually fouling the rifle, so DeSomma revived an idea from semi-automatic rifles that predated the M16. He engineered a way to use the gases to push a rod, or piston, and have the rod push the bolt, adding a little weight but keeping the bolt cleaner. He took his invention to the big gun-industry trade show in 2004, and people thought he was crazy for taking AR-15 development in a reverse direction.

Thus began one of those signature stories of ingenuity and pluck that crop up often enough to sustain the American dream. For the first four years, DeSomma paid himself zero, plowing every available nickel back into the business. By the time I met him, he was paying himself a meager $250 a week but had twenty-five employees making a thousand rifles a year, which sold for a breathtaking $1,900 to $2,600 a pop. He was selling a few to police departments every year, but the bulk of his sales went to civilians. And he was banking on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.