Gun Guys (21 page)

I’d become accustomed to finding gun stores boarded up, so the blue, steel-sided building outside McCook, Nebraska, was a welcome sight, sporting not only a banner announcing
GUNS
in letters six feet high but an
OPEN
sign on the door. I suited up—NRA cap, holstered gun—and walked inside.

Outdoor Sports was a small shop in a huge space, airy and under-stocked. Behind the counter, all by himself, sat a man of about sixty, wearing plastic-framed glasses, a bristle mustache, and an orange T-shirt that said
FIDDLER ON THE ROOF
. He looked more like a philosophy professor than a gun merchant. I half expected him to speak with a British accent when he stood up to introduce himself as Greg Hepp.

Greg’s face lit up when I owned that I was working on a book about why people like guns. “I’ve wondered about that myself,” Greg said, “and I’m in the business.” I picked up a pre-1964 Winchester Model 70 hunting rifle, whose style and workmanship made it, for gun guys, the equivalent of a 1955 Chevy Biscayne.

“This is one beautiful weapon,” I said.

Hepp held up a palm. “I have a degree in English, and I must take exception to your rhetoric,” he said. “Don’t call it a ‘weapon.’ Do you know what the dictionary definition of a weapon is? ‘A device used either offensively or defensively.’ That means against humans. Not all firearms are weapons. That one there, for example, is a hunting rifle.”

From a rack, I hefted an M1 Garand, the American infantry rifle from the Second World War and Korea. Lord knew how many people this one had killed. “This is a weapon, though, right?”

“That
was
a weapon. Now it’s a historical artifact.” He picked up a Civil
War Zouave musket. “Just like this. It
was
a weapon. But would you call it that now?” He set it down and folded his hands on the counter.

“People use firearms for all kinds of things that have nothing to do with offense or defense,” he said. As though to prove his point, he handed me a flyer from a stack. The Southwest Nebraska Rifle and Pistol Club was holding a small-bore bench-rest contest that weekend. Each shooter would have fifteen minutes to fire ten .22 rifle bullets at a paper target fifty feet away. It was gentlemen’s shooting, slow and precise. “You have skeet shooters,” Greg said. “They wouldn’t dream of pointing a shotgun at a person. Their shotguns are sporting goods, like tennis rackets. I get collectors in here who don’t even shoot the guns they own. The idea that every gun is a weapon is most destructive.”

I looked at some price tags. Nine hundred dollars for that Garand, eleven hundred for the Winchester, five hundred for an ordinary Stevens twelve-gauge side-by-side—all pretty high. “People around here can afford eleven-hundred-dollar guns?”

“All the time.”

“No recession?”

“Not here. People have to eat. The government pays farmers to grow and it pays farmers not to grow. It pays them in good times and it pays them in bad times.” He laughed good-naturedly. “It’s you Democrats. Agriculture is the biggest welfare program there is.” I hadn’t mentioned my politics; so much for my camouflage. Perhaps I needed to wear belts of ammunition across my chest.

The door opened and two women entered—a mom in her late thirties with a teenage daughter. The mom took from a folded piece of paper an enormous gold-colored coin about four inches across and as light as cardboard: an aluminum reproduction of a 1930s-era twenty-dollar gold piece. “We dug this up in our yard,” she said. “Can we pawn it? It’s bullion. That’s what my father said when I showed it to him. Some of these were gold, but some were bullion.”

I put my hand over my mouth. The only kind of bullion that would make a coin that light was chicken bouillon.

Greg was the model of politeness and respect. “I’m not really a pawnshop. Guns and tools are all I take.” The thing was worthless, but he wasn’t going to say that. “Let me see what you have there,” he said. He unfolded the paper in which she’d wrapped the coin, a Wikipedia printout on the original. It described the coin as thirty-four millimeters across.

“This is quite a bit bigger than thirty-four millimeters,” Greg said—
five times bigger, at least. “Also,” he explained gently, “bullion is 99.5 percent gold. A bullion coin this big would be quite heavy.”

“Can I pawn it?”

Greg chuckled. “I wouldn’t be able to give you anything for it. It’s not a real gold coin, you understand.”

“Mom, let’s go,” the teenager said.

The woman put the heel of her hand against her forehead and paused. “It would sure help. I don’t know how I’m going to …” She let the sentence hang.

“Mom.”

The woman let out a sigh and turned to go. Greg called her back to take the coin.

As they passed through the door, a young man came in, wearing a John Deere cap and overalls with no shirt. He carried a Marlin .22 rifle with a black plastic stock.

“Do you buy guns?”

“Yes.”

“I want to sell this one.”

Greg picked up the rifle and examined it with care. It was clearly the type sold at Walmart for about $129, but Greg inspected it as judiciously as he might have a 1920 Holland & Holland double .500.

The kid reached out and touched the focusing ring on the scope, which fell free and clattered across the counter. “That’s broke,” he said.

“Yes, I can see that,” Greg said. He set the rifle down. “How much would you like for it?”

“I don’t know,” the kid said. “How much you want to give me?”

“I never make an offer,” Greg said. “I might make you an offer and fifteen minutes later someone else might offer a thousand dollars more and then you’ll think I ripped you off. How much would you like?”

“I don’t know.”

“Son, when you walk into a store, there’s a price tag on every item. You don’t make an offer; you pay the price that’s being asked or you don’t. Tell me the price of this rifle and maybe I will buy it from you, but maybe not. That depends on the price.”

“Well,” he mumbled. “I got to get some money in a hurry. How about three hundred?”

Greg cocked his head to one side sympathetically. “I can buy this gun new for less than half that.”

“What about the scope?”

“Forgive me, but the scope would be worthless even if it wasn’t broken.”

The kid looked down sadly at the rifle. He chewed his lip with anxiety. Greg said, “Why don’t you do a little research and see what kind of price you’re likely to get.” The kid picked up his rifle and left, forlorn.

“I’ve been thinking about your question,” Greg said, gliding past the irony of those two visits immediately upon his extolling the area’s wealth. “About why we Americans like guns so much. For some people, I’m sure it’s just to tick off the liberals. You know: Liberals hate guns, so I love them—that kind of thing. But I also think it’s visceral. You like them or you don’t. My sister can’t be around guns. They give her the willies, and she gets all nervous and upset. She knows that’s not rational, but there it is. Over in Palisade a few years ago, there was a man with a rattlesnake in a bell jar—a live one. He’d set it up on the bar and bet you that you couldn’t keep your hand on the glass when the snake struck. He made a lot of money on that bet. Everybody knew the snake couldn’t bite through the glass, but nobody could keep his hand there. They had a visceral reaction. It’s the same with guns. I couldn’t tell Barbara Boxer not to hate guns. She hates them, and that’s all there is to it. Maybe something happened to her once that makes her feel that way, but she can’t help it. It’s just how she’s made.”

This is the genetics argument—that each of us is born hardwired either to love or hate guns. That more men than women love them suggests that it’s a sex-linked trait. That more conservatives than liberals love them suggests it’s … what? That one’s politics are also hardwired, commonly coupled with a love or hatred of guns the way blue eyes often come with blond hair? Why, then, if one’s likes and preferences are indelibly etched on our mitochondria, bother with politics at all? It would be no more possible to talk people out of their views than to talk them out of their shoe size. I suspected that Greg Hepp was trying to be a gentleman and allow everybody his or her own worldview. But I left his store feeling strangely hopeless.

Determined to stay off the interstates, I took US 6/34 east from McCook. The highway followed a rail line, punctuated every ten miles or so by an identical settlement: grain elevator, gas station, bar. As soon as I passed one elevator, the next hove into view in the hazy distance. The hamlets and the flat terrain between them were so similar that I might as well have
been driving around the tiny planet of
The Little Prince
, passing the same raised landmark again and again.

The distances were disorienting. I realized that over the years my eyes had become close-range instruments, focused on things as far away as the length of my arms—newspaper, computer screen, handlebars of bicycle. Out here, I locked onto the horizon and felt my eyeballs stretching—bulging from my head as in a Warner Bros. cartoon—trying to cope.

It was hard to get a handle on conditions out on the Plains. Some farmhouses looked prosperous, freshly painted and surrounded by great swaths of perfectly mown lawn, but others appeared abandoned. The unsettling encounters in Greg Hepp’s store echoed around in my skull. The grocery stores and bars looked like something out of a Walker Evans photograph, and the billboards along the highway told a hard-luck story of their own:
SPEND TIME WITH YOUR KIDS, KIDS NEED BREAKFAST
,
AVOIDTHESTORK.COM
,
POUR FAT FREE OR 1 PERCENT FOR KIDS 2 AND UP
,
AND
,
NEAR AN INDIAN CASINO
,
1-800-BETS-OFF
, advertising a treatment center for gambling addiction.

With the setting sun behind me, the yawning tedium of sun-blasted corn morphed into a glorious Van Gogh. Pink light slanted among the cornstalks, and each stood out vividly from the rest. Grain elevators were transformed from monochromatic plinths of cement into delicate sculptures of light and shadow. Houses that had looked forlorn at noon waxed stately and inviting at sundown. Unable to find a state park in which to camp, I pulled in behind a farmhouse that looked as though it had been abandoned in the 1980s. I scraped a mountain of rusted tin cans aside with my foot and set up my tent. It was too hot to eat, so I dug out the .22 pistol and silencer, lined up some of the old cans on a split-rail fence, and amused myself plinking them off.

An entire freight train slid across the prairie: 104 cars, and I could see all of them at once. Beyond that, a thunderstorm reared up, a foaming black cloud the size of Pluto, pulsing with lightning, dragging misty tentacles of rain across the horizon like a Portuguese man-of-war. The people under that, I figured, must think it’s a rainy evening everywhere. Out here, it was just another feature of a landscape too big to grasp. The thought gave me the creeps, and I crawled into my tent.

The next morning, Gun Store Finder directed me to a boarded-up gun shop in Hastings. Then I found a live one in town, but a hand-lettered
sign taped to its locked door said,
MEET ME AT THE GUN SHOW AT THE GRAND ISLAND CONV. CENTER
.

The gun blogosphere and magazines were lit up that spring with fearful rumors of the feds “closing the gun-show loophole,” and my in-box had been filling with equally hopeful memos from the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence and Mayors Against Illegal Guns. The loophole at issue was a gap in federal law that allowed people to sell guns at gun shows without computerized background checks. Gun
stores
had already been tamed. In 1968, Congress—spurred by assassinations and riots—passed the first gun law that affected the average gun owner: the Gun Control Act of 1968. It banned mail-order gun sales, prohibited in-store sales to felons or lunatics, and imposed a waiting period on handgun sales. For nearly three decades, though, the law largely ran on the honor system. A buyer signed an affidavit saying he wasn’t a “prohibited person,” but who knew? Not until 1994 did the Brady Law give the Gun Control Act teeth, by requiring stores to run a computerized check on a buyer’s record, in lieu of a waiting period.

The background-check requirement applied to federally licensed gun dealers at shows as well as in their stores. The “loophole” applied to everybody else. People without licenses could, under federal law, set up tables at gun shows and buy, sell, or trade as many guns as they liked without background checks or paperwork.

I’d started going to gun shows in 1989 in Montana and had bought any number of interesting old guns with nothing more than cash and a handshake. One particularly great find—a 1933 Remington Model 8—I’d snagged in the parking lot of the University of Montana field house before even walking inside to the show. Spotting the rifle in a guy’s trunk, I’d dickered with him a little and clinched the deal for $130—a happy transaction between consenting adults. It had never occurred to me that it might be unreasonable.

Since then, a few states—post-Columbine Colorado among them—had closed the loophole by requiring everybody at a gun show, dealer or not, to run background checks. Nebraska had closed it halfway, allowing the free-and-easy sale of rifles and shotguns but requiring a background check for handgun sales. In most states, though, gun shows were utterly unregulated. Felons, drug addicts, wife beaters, and schizophrenics who couldn’t buy a gun at a store could in theory buy all they wanted and unleash mayhem.

“In theory” was the operative phrase. Professors from the Universities of
Maryland, Michigan, and London studied crime data from the vicinities of 3,400 gun shows—including those in loophole states—and found that the shows, loophole or no, had no effect on local homicide or suicide rates. Still, to those most worried about gun violence, letting people buy guns with no background check seemed crazy.

In truth, though, a much bigger loophole existed, one neither side wanted to discuss. Under federal law and in most jurisdictions, ordinary people—those who weren’t licensed gun dealers—not only could sell guns at shows; they could sell guns anywhere they liked. I had sold a lot of guns, including that Remington 8, through classifieds in
The Missoulian
. A buyer came to my house, put cash on the kitchen table, and off he went—no questions, no paperwork, and no one the wiser. A gun is not like a car; there’s no title. I’d purchased most of my guns in the same casual way. A guy showed up at my house with a Walther PPK, I gave him three hundred dollars, and he drove away; we didn’t even exchange names, let alone sign papers or run a background check. A seller was not supposed to deal with a buyer who he had “reason to believe” was prohibited from purchasing guns. Each of us, under federal law, was to decide whether those prison tats on a buyer’s neck, those claw marks on his face, or his incoherent babbling made him a prohibited buyer. By some estimates, nearly a third of the
legal
gun sales in the United States took place with no background check or paperwork—and only a tiny percentage of those were at gun shows.