Happiness Is a Warm Gun
(Page 2 of 3)
I LIKE GUNS. I grew up on Army bases, surrounded by them. My father, a World War II vet, had a German Luger pistol that was given to him by a surrendering panzer officer in Czechoslovakia. I was fascinated by the gun, with its short barrel and long handle, and would secretly play with it for hours. My father had some old hunting shotguns that had belonged to his father, but they sat unused in a closet. He had tried hunting and found he didn’t have the stomach for it; neither did I. But he taught me to aim and shoot. Most important, he said, squeeze the trigger; don’t pull it. When I was twelve, I followed his advice and won a turkey shoot against a bunch of soldiers. Then, in junior high, I joined the Junior NRA, and every Saturday morning two friends and I would ride our bikes to an indoor range and shoot .22 rifles at targets, working our way up the marksmanship ladder. It was fun. There were moments of Zen when everything went right—breathing, seeing, squeezing—and I couldn’t miss the bull’s-eye. I think the last time I shot a gun, though, was thirty years ago, when some friends and I went out to the Hill Country around San Antonio to blast a .45 pistol. I stopped shooting rifles, I guess, because I wasn’t a hunter, and I never felt a need to carry a handgun in the city, even after a couple of scary run-ins with armed criminals. It just never occurred to me that I would feel any safer packing heat.
When I finally got the nerve to start actually handling guns at the trade show, I found myself once again fingering a Luger. It was a CZ 2075 RAMI 9mm, and it was light and fit easily in my hand. I aimed at the floor and pulled the trigger, which clicked softly, nothing like that old army pistol. The saleswoman told me I couldn’t buy it here, because this was a trade show, but she could help me find a dealer in my area. I thanked her and walked over and picked up a Beretta, a 92FS Vertec Inox Lasergrips 9mm pistol, to be precise. I aimed and pulled the trigger. I accidentally turned on the laser, and a small red light appeared on the floor. Cool. I grabbed a Tikka T3 Tactical rifle, a long, black thing with a super-sized scope, cocked it, aimed at one of the lights on the ceiling fifty feet up, and squeezed the trigger. I tried a Heckler & Koch 9mm that had a flashlight under the barrel, but the trigger was stubborn. The triggers on the SIG Sauers were kind of rattly. I aimed and dry-fired a beautiful brown $12,400 Mauser M 98 .30-06 rifle.
I had expected the convention crowd to be heavy on solo males, camouflage, and red necks, but it turned out to be two-to-one men to women, solidly middle class (jeans and khakis, sport shirts, and running shoes were the unofficial dress code), with plenty of kids. It looked like a Saturday afternoon at Academy. Over at the Smith & Wesson area, a woman in slacks with a nice haircut said to her husband, who had a dazed look in his eyes, “I’m going to have to put a leash on you.” A man picked up a .357, held it, cocked, and sighted. “Ummmm, um, um,” he moaned, putting it back. I knew, I think, what he meant: The Smith & Wessons, especially the revolvers, were beautiful instruments, pure and simple pieces of solid machinery. A woman and her eight-year-old daughter and twelve-year-old son inspected them too. “Mom, look at this,” said the girl, sighting down a .357 revolver. She expertly popped the cylinder out and peered inside. “This one holds seven.” Her mother replied, “I like the .22,” and moved along the wall until she stopped and picked up a smaller pistol. “That’s what I was looking for,” she told her son, “a concealed carry.” Her son picked up a .500 Magnum, which is fifteen inches long and weighs six pounds. “Dang!” he said. His mother laughed.
I asked a guy at the Taurus booth about the difference between revolvers and automatic pistols, and he said that if I was a beginner, which I obviously was, I should start with the former and move up to the latter. I asked him why most people bought handguns. Protection, he said. He showed me a Taurus safety feature, where if you use a special key to rotate a little button a quarter of a turn, you can’t fire the gun. “Tell you a story,” he said, glancing quickly around. “A guy I know carried one of these, had this safety on. Three black guys jumped him, one took it, aimed it at him, and pulled the trigger three times. Click, click, click. The safety was on! So he clocked him, called the cops, and that guy’s in jail.”
There were lots of booths dedicated to hunting. One had a sign that read “The Greatest Cape Buffalo and Hippo Charges Ever Filmed!” and on a video screen a cape buffalo lumbered toward the camera and a man with a rifle. When the beast was maybe ten feet away, the man shot it in the mouth, which exploded in blood. Next came the hippo, straight at the camera. Again, when it was ten feet away, the hunter shot it in the head; after another step or two, the hippo tumped over. There were other shootings on the video too, but they weren’t so dramatic—a hippo retreating and an elephant walking away. An excerpt from the video, called Death by the Ton, played these same four shootings over and over, while Mark Sullivan, the hunter in the video, talked, and Ted Nugent signed autographs. “You can’t find these anyplace else,” Sullivan announced to the small crowd that had gathered. “We let them charge us just so we can kill them dead at our feet. I sell these movies all over the world, and I’m the only professional hunter in the world who does this. And in about a year from now, this great guy right here—we’re gonna even do more than that.”
“I’m gonna kill ’em with guitars,” said Nugent.
Sullivan laughed. “It’s amazing. We will do things nobody has done. There’ll be a law against you.”
“I’ll shoot anything, baby. I’d throw a grenade if they’d let me.”
NUGENT SEEMED TO BE everywhere. The hard rocker played “The Star-Spangled Banner” twice at the convention, at the opening ceremony and again before his seminar, “God, Guns, and Rock ’n Roll,” on Saturday. That afternoon he was introduced by NRA president Kayne Robinson, who said, “We haven’t had a better spokesman anywhere in our entire movement, whether it’s bow hunting or gun hunting or hunting liberals!” Nugent, the long-haired, teetotaling, freedom-loving writer of classic rock songs like “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” (“she’s so sweet when she yanks on my meat”), came to the stage, which was draped in red-white-and-blue bunting, with an assault rifle in each arm. He led the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance (the fourth or fifth time that members had stood and put their hands over their hearts), then strapped on a red-white-and-blue guitar, hit a big, sustaining chord, and said, “This is dedicated to the United States Army and the Marines and the Air Force and the Navy and the Coast Guard and the National Guard and the Cavalry, because those great warriors are over there crushing evil so we can have a National Rifle Association party over here. Never forget that! God bless the war!” Then he played the National Anthem, awash in feedback and noise, just like Jimi Hendrix did at Woodstock 36 years ago. At the end he said, “Thank you and God bless the NRA, God bless America, God bless the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule—the very pillars of a unique and wonderful celebration we call self-government. Do the French suck or what?” The audience hooted and hollered, especially, it seemed, the two young men behind me. “Yeah!” one yelled. “Oh, f— yeah!”
Nugent, whose rock-and-roll star has dimmed somewhat in the past decade, has found new life as a hunting rights advocate and, lately, as an agitator for the NRA. His seminar consisted of him standing in front of the crowd and saying things like “You gotta kill the bad guys” and “I love Americans with photos of dead stuff” and, speaking of Tom Petty, “The dope smoker’s music sucks.” His most practical advice was to go out and get more people enrolled in the NRA. There are 4 million members, he said, but 13 million hunters. Be like him and his family, he urged. “No one is allowed to hang out with us unless they’re an NRA member.” Other ruminations were more extreme. “I’m raising hell for the Second Amendment every day of my life because I love to crush the punks. I like to think I have a crosshair painted on all things Michael Moore, and I just aim for the fat!” Later, he got more specific: “I want carjackers dead. I want rapists dead. I want burglars dead. I want child molesters dead. I want the bad guys dead. No court case. No parole. No early release. I want ’em dead. Get a gun and when they attack you, shoot ’em.” It was the hardheaded American creed, felt by anyone who had ever walked down a sidewalk packing heat, eyeing strangers, and hoping that some punk would give him the pleasure of uttering that perfect phrase delivered by great warriors of the past: Go ahead. Make my day.
Of course, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. At the “Women, Personal Protection & Power Politics” seminar, which was so crowded they had to bring in extra chairs, a series of placards stood alongside one wall of the packed room; the first read “Pick a purse, carry concealed, and still be fashionable with today’s wide choice of holster handguns.” A video was shown that featured several stories of armed citizens fighting off criminals: a clerk in a convenience store shooting at an armed robber, a woman who scared off a rapist with a gun. After the video, moderator Sue King said to the predominantly female crowd, “Most of us have been spared the horror of violent attacks. But that’s us on the screen. You could easily be placed in the same position on the way to your car from this meeting on the way home.”
And then Suzanna Gratia Hupp spoke. She’s the NRA’s trump card when it comes to concealed handguns. The 45-year-old state representative began her talk by mocking the passive way that women often think about guns. “How often have you said Clinton-esque things like ‘Can’t we all just get along?’ or ‘We just want peace and tranquillity’?” Hupp may have thought that way at one point, but she doesn’t anymore. Back in 1991, Hupp, a Houston chiropractor at the time, illegally carried a concealed .38 for protection, but when she went to places that she felt were obviously safe, like a Luby’s cafeteria at lunchtime, with her parents, she would leave it in her car. “We had finished eating,” she told the crowd, “and a man drove his truck through the window and, um, started shooting. My first thought was, it’s a robbery. I expected he’d say something like ‘Put your wallets on the table.’ But he didn’t. He was just simply walking from one person to the next, taking aim, pulling the trigger. Going to the next per son, taking aim, pulling the trigger. It took me a good forty-five seconds to realize—that’s all he’s going to do. And forty-five seconds is a really, really long time.”
