Sunday Review: Gun Guys (a book)

By James Knudsen

Frequent visitors to Moristotle & Co. know that my handle is “The Loneliest Liberal.” I came up with the moniker a while back, not in the hope of gaining sympathy, I just found that my social views didn’t fly with the people I encountered at gun ranges and with being a gun enthusiast in a blue state...well, you get the picture. So when I heard about a new book titled Gun Guys, A Road Trip, by Dan Baum, and that the author was a liberal who grew up in New Jersey, I had a feeling that I had finally found a kindred spirit. I introduced the book in my column yesterday.
    Gun Guys details Baum’s year-long journey through the United States talking to people about guns. He stops at every gun store he sees, attends gun shows, talks to people who enjoy the many different shooting sports, and through it all tries to understand what it is about guns that makes them so divisive.

    Baum begins by explaining that he has no business being interested in guns given where he grew up. Raised in suburban New Jersey by Jewish Democrat parents, neither of whom had any interest in guns, Baum discovered at a young age at summer camp that he had a natural aptitude for shooting. Back home in South Orange, he was informed by a family friend, “Jews make guns and sell guns; we don’t shoot guns.” Still the fascination persisted into adolescence during the late sixties. During this time to be cool meant to be against the war in Vietnam. Baum was against it, but he still liked guns. He grows into an adult with all the usual progressive views regarding taxes, civil rights, and foreign affairs and yet he enjoys a hobby that is firmly entrenched in the enemy camp and feels as if he’s “the child of a bitter divorce with allegiance to both parents.”

Swap Jewish guilt for Catholic guilt and you basically have me (few years older). I recognized the situations he described, which he likens to Tom Hanks’s character in Philadelphia laughing at the gay jokes. He’s also quick to point out that both sides feel no qualms about making snide remarks regarding the opposing camp. It turns out we progressives are just as likely to make sweeping statements that have no resemblance to reality.
    Baum embarks on his gun walkabout and soon realizes that, to pull this off while deep in gun guy territory, he’s going to need a gun...with him. That’s right, he’s going to have to carry. And so begins a year-long experiment in walking around armed. (Turns out he’s not me.) It does provide the necessary credibility needed by someone who has written for The New Yorker and Rolling Stone.
    Thus armed, he begins his travels across the nation to talk to people who shoot guns—machine-guns, three-gun competition, and at a wooden eagle at a Schutzenfest in Cincinnati. He talks to people who advocate for concealed carry; a rabbi, and an African-American Detroit suburbanite who got the faith after having a gun pressed to his head in his own back yard. He visits the armorers to Hollywood who provide the guns, real and rubber, that put the bang in hour-long TV dramas. And he attends the funeral of a young man who was gunned down in New Orleans with his own .38 revolver under his sport coat.
    Baum’s quest is to understand why guns elicit such “visceral” responses. And why does a fondness for guns equate with political conservatism? Despite having to endure barrage after barrage of anti-Obama rhetoric at gun stores, gun ranges, and on gun websites, Baum does come to appreciate the gun world’s feeling of being “overmanaged and under-respected.” He also offers proposals in the postscript, written post-Aurora and Newtown. To gun guys he insists that we do all the stuff we preach about like securing firearms and getting proper training. And he poses the question to Democrats, liberals, and progressives everywhere that given a thorough cost-benefit analysis we might conclude that we are losing far more voters than we gain in pursuing gun control and in the process spending resources that could be re-directed toward issues like income inequality and education, which would resonate with the very working-class voters Democrats lose to the GOP because of the gun issue.

I think I would have enjoyed reading Gun Guys even if I hadn’t become a gun owner a dozen years ago. But having done so I’m sure I enjoyed it even more for being able to understand that much more the many references to specific firearms. I appreciate it as a liberal. I appreciate it as a gun guy. I don’t know how a conservative gun guy would feel about the book, and I doubt I ever will. But as I ponder who the audience for this book is I finally grasp the parallel struggles micro and macro. In the opening pages of Gun Guys Baum refers to the gun-loving part of himself as a “kind of malevolent evil twin.” If he can learn to live with the disparate halves of himself, perhaps we as a nation can find a way to do so as well.
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Copyright © 2013 by James Knudsen

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