Unconventional Worlds: The Gun Show
By Daniel Rigney
The Hunter. The Protector. The Warrior. The Sports Shooter. The Fantasist. The Collector. The Violent Criminal. These are among the many overlapping tribes of the gun culture in the United States today.
One way an outsider can begin to understand an unfamiliar cultural world is to participate actively and observantly in its public events – its conventions, its liturgies, its political rituals and other carnivals -- as a cultural visitor. Today I’m visiting and reporting on the cultural world on display at a large Texas gun and knife show. Here I'm a stranger in a strange land.
The Doors of Convention
Gun world is only one of many worlds we can enter through the magic doors of a big-city convention center. In the coming weeks I’ll be visiting a bridal extravaganza, a sports collectibles trade show, an art car exhibit, and what is reputed to be the world’s largest international quilting convention.
Entering each of these cultural worlds through the magic doors is like entering a fresh episode of the Twilight Zone. I’ll be keeping a hawkeye out for amusing and unexpected details as I visit these strange and diverse cultural worlds in my role as a mild-mannered reporter on the daily planet.
Today’s episode of the cultural Twilight Zone features a visit to the gun show.
The kind of cultural visiting I’m proposing is similar to what anthropologists call ethnography. Here’s how it works. Enter a milieu other than the ones you already know. Unfamiliarity is good here. You can try to defamiliarize yourself with a milieu you already know well, but it’s not easy. Participate in the public events of the host tribe in so far as you legitimately can, and be a thoughtful guest , even as you would have others visit one of your own tribal gatherings thoughtfully. Try to be what Saul Bellow called a “first class noticer.”
Notice especially the things that surprise or intrigue you about what you’re seeing and hearing. Attend to fine details. Make some notes. Interpret your remembered and recorded experience with whatever intellectual tools you have available to you. Write about this experience, and try to write clearly.
Make good use of the resources available to you. If you live in a large city, as I happen to, take advantage of its diverse multitude of public events . In this instance I’ll be drawing upon the resources of a major convention center that hosts an array of travelling trade shows and cultural spectacles throughout the year.
The big city convention center is a moveable feast, except that the center remains stationary and a different festival comes to town every week, like a traveling circus.
Here in Houston the opportunities for “conventional” research of this kind are almost limitless … and cheap. My total receipts at the gun show today come to $2.50 for round trip transportation on the Houston Metro light rail, $8 for a gun show ticket, and less than $6 for a package of Ken’s Real Pecan Smoked Spicy Pork & Beef Survival Sticks. That’s about $16 total, including lunch.
Plus, as a bonus, my wife and I also get to attend a hurricane preparedness program in an adjoining exhibit hall for free. It’s a twofer. Ten or fifteen dollars go a long way when you’re doing unconventional ethnography at a convention center in Houston.
Gun World: A Dispatch from the Front
This morning we’re riding downtown aboard Houston’s sleek Metro lightrail train to spend quality time at the monumental George Brown Convention Center. My wife is especially interested in the hurricane workshop in Exhibit Hall B, while I’m drawn by morbid liberal curiosity to the Houston High Caliber Gun and Knife Show next door.
A supporter of perennial far-right presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche has set up a table in front of the gun hall featuring a tastefully-understated picture of President Obama wearing a Hitler moustache. The activist is having a polite but deeply-felt conversation with a security officer about whether his presence there is legally appropriate. The two eventually reach some sort of compromise. I later see the activist passing out leaflets, sans table, and engaging passersby in earnest conversation about their shared commitment to the life of the unborn. Did I mention that this is in front of a gun and knife show?
Walking past the National Rifle Association political recruiting table and into the exhibit hall, I push my chapbook of Emily Dickinson poems deeper inside my pocket. I’m not looking for trouble here. A sign outside the entrance sternly but ironically declares “No Concealed Handguns….” Just inside the door, gun buyers and sellers are submitting their guns for inspection and approval to carry inside, unloaded, for sale or trade. I don’t see any background checking. I guess anyone can come in for any reason, including kids. I walk straight in, unarmed. Surrounded by so much protection, why do I not feel safer?
I’ve never been to a gun show, and I am no expert in the various family-protectors and safety products available here in the free marketplace of the gun bazaar. I’m a relative newcomer to gun world myself. I did once fire a round of .22 ammo into the nearby Gulf of Mexico as a kid, and I’ve known many people through the years who have been in serious relationships with guns -- and for whom, indeed, happiness is a warm gun -- so I’m not a complete stranger to gun world. But I am not quite prepared for the strangeness I’m walking into. To gun people, this is just another Saturday. To me it’s a twilight zone.
With fresh eyes, I’m probably noticing things in this streaming social video that would pass unnoticed by those who’ve lived in gun world all their lives. But they, in their turn, can spot details that I, as a naïve and culturally half-blind outsider, am oblivious to. I’m calling this the insider/outsider paradox: Each of us, as either insider or outsider, can see things the other wouldn’t normally notice. Consider, for instance, the gun lover at a quilting show. But more about quilting on a future expedition into another world.
Growing up in Texas , I’ve known many friends and neighbors of the gun-owning persuasion, but I’ve never seen so many gunthusiasts in one place and at one time in the surrounding presence of literally thousands of little mortality machines. Again I think: Surrounded by so much protection, why don’t I feel safer? I recall that years ago, in my undergraduate classes at a Catholic college, I asked students whether they would feel safer if everyone in class were packing heat. They laughed at the absurdity of the thought. I’m not laughing now.
Gun and Knifewear
But back to the convention hall. What does one wear to a gun show? Should I have worn cowboy boots, if I had any? A conservatively-correct T-shirt perhaps? If I had one? Luckily for me, I didn’t have to dress up in a special costume to pass as a rifle and knife shopper. The folks (mostly menfolk) at the show, though considerably whiter than the “average” diversely-hued Houstonian, are dressed in the standard casual summer uniform of Texas: T-shirt or open collar shirt with jeans or shorts. Political shirtfront slogans are quite acceptable so long as they are not offensively liberal, and they’re especially welcome when they show a decent regard for the second half of the Second Amendment. I don’t see any Obama paraphernalia here.
It may surprise some to know that virtually no cowboy boots or hats are in evidence. Urban Texans no longer wear the traditional cowboy ensemble and accessories except when they attend corporate-sponsored rodeos, which are essentially nostalgia festivals to commemorate a past that few living Texans actually remember at first hand, and that may scarcely have existed outside of Hollywood. Even John Wayne was a fictional character – played, as you probably know, by Marion Morrison of Iowa. When we lived in San Antonio, I saw more cowboy hats on the heads of departing tourists and conventioneers at the airport than I did in the rest of the city combined.
While cowboy garb is out of fashion at the gun show, paramilitary themes are still in. A few in the gun hall today are sporting camouflage outfits (camo T-shirts, cargo pants, etc.). Some fashions seem never to go out of style in the well-regulated ranks of the citizen's militia.
The favored footwear today is not cowboy boots, but athletic shoes. New Balance cowboys are everywhere, though I don’t hear any new political balance in their talk.
Many of these guys – the crowd appears to be 90+ percent male, 90+ percent Anglo – have grown up in the gun culture. The crowd skews older, toward what Southerners used to call “old boys,” but I’ll bet many of them have been in the gun life since they were young boys. I’m wondering whether their own children and grandchildren do most of their shooting now on video game screens.
Favored headgear this year is baseball or fishing caps bearing identity logos ranging from U.S. Marines and Vietnam Veterans to Jack Daniels and Texas A&M. (I even see a Red Sox shirt. I wish I’d brought my Astros cap.) But except for the slogans on their T-shirts, these folks are largely indistinguishable from the people at a suburban mall, or a baseball game, or at the huge event next door whose purpose is to raise the level of community awareness and prepared response when the next major Gulf hurricane inevitably hits. Not if. When. The Hurricane Next Time
At one of these two adjacent convention events – the hurricane preparedness workshop and the gun show -- I see a T-shirt with an unadorned peace symbol. At the other I see a peace symbol adorned with the words “Peace Through Superior Fire Power.” Can you guess which T-shirt I is displayed proudly at which event?
And can you guess in which venue men can be seen walking up and down the aisles between display tables offering for sale or trade an assortment of high-powered rifles, usually pointed toward the ceiling, that they had registered earlier with security? Thank goodness there are armed security guards at the gun show. What if some dangerous or deranged person had wandered in and gone ballistic?
The gun exposition and the hurricane exposition next door share a common under-theme of fear. At one event I see people expressing an understandable fear of natural disaster and making plans as a community to survive it together, mainly through governmental and non-profit agencies from the National Hurricane Center to local citizen volunteer groups. At the other event I see people expressing an understandable fear of crime (and for many, a love of sport-shooting and hunting as well). Judging from the inventory of tactical weapons and survival products for sale, some appear to be pursuing armed survivalist strategies, both parapolice and paramilitary, to protect themselves and their families with as little government assistance or interference as necessary in the event of political emergency. Communal Survivalists at the hurricane show vs. Individual and Family Survivalists at the gun show.
It occurs to me then that hunters, and those who feel hunted by intruders or invaders and seek superior firepower to protect themselves, may actually be two different but overlapping constituencies within advocacy organizations such as the NRA that serve as the political and lobbying arm of this particular special interest – i.e., gun ownership and use.
Of course, some may reside in the overlap -- identifying with both hunter and hunted, with both predator and potential prey. The worldview of the so-called “survivalists,” for example, seems built largely around the belief that it’s a kill or be killed world out there, and that our children must be protected, and prepared to take care of themselves, with home arsenals in the event of a personal or social hurricane.
Magazines in the Gun Rack
A few days after my visit to the gun show, I stop in at what must surely be Houston’s largest magazine rack, featuring some 350 titles displayed along 100 or more feet of shelving. I’m doing background for the blog, loitering self-consciously in the gun, knife, fishing, hunting, and war buff section of the magazine wall, as I furtively examine titles and browse content. I’m checking out the semi-automatic centerfolds. That sort of thing.
Later, safe at home, I venture casually into the vast gun-related periodical literature available online, where I do more personal reading. I have lengthy conversations with an old friend who has known the hunting and fishing culture since he was a young boy growing up in a town in Central Texas, and who was immersed in the military culture as a young adult. He and I have been talking for years – decades, actually – about gun world. I rely on him for deep background.
Later I spend a couple of days with this gun-culture guide in Wyoming. During my visit we stop by a gun and gunsafe store whose friendly and helpful floor salesman wears a hip pistol, a U.S. flag baseball cap, and a T-shirt that reads “Don’t Tread on Me.” He confides that his sidearm may help deter someone who comes into the store with a shotgun shell in his pocket and suddenly turns a display gun into a live weapon. “Unfortunately,” he confides, “there are a lot of crazy people that come into a gun shop.” You can’t be too careful these days.
Back at the bookstore in Houston, I’m counting nearly 40 magazine titles devoted specifically to guns and gun culture. I’m not even counting the knife, fishing and historic war buff sections. Gun magazines alone seem to account for more than ten percent of the bookstore’s entire periodical inventory. Bear in mind that this is Houston. I don’t recall seeing this many gun magazines in the bookstores I’ve browsed in Berkeley or New York, let aloneVancouver or London.
The Tribes of Gun Nation
What occurs to me as I graze the gun mags is that each seems aimed toward a particular segment of the gun culture, targeting various segments or niches of the arms industry market. Organizations like the National Rifle Association seem to provide a big tent covering many smaller, diverse and overlapping subcultures, and covering over potentially divisive differences among them.
Purists in the hunting community reportedly resist the trend, promoted by gun manufacturers in search of new markets, to bring the latest in lethal technology into forest and field. Granted, tradition-minded hunters may spend good money on a technically-advanced gun sight, paying as much or more for the scope as they do for the gun. But traditionalists seem less keen on innovations such as computer-assisted hunting, which now includes the kind of remote hunting that turns one’s home video screen into a live video game, with real live game on camera at some distant location, locked in the digital crosshairs and ready to drop. Imagine the thrill of killing live deer roaming hundreds of miles away, using nothing more than your child’s computer and a joystick. African safari, anyone?
Some traditional hunters also disdain the practice of shooting game in a stocked preserve (fish in a barrel, fowl in a Cheney expedition). Contrary to stereotype, traditional hunters are generally conservation-minded and environmentally aware folk who respect their prey. (Mr. Cheney may have missed the memo.) Hunters are commonly called "sportsmen," but among some hunters there are lingering questions concerning whether hunting should be regarded as a sport at all if the hunted animals are not also armed. For these, hunting is a meaningful recreation, not a "sport."
The Protectors include, most obviously, constituted law enforcement officials who, in professionalized police agencies, are well-regulated and devoted to serving and protecting their communities. Protectors may also include private security personnel who, under ideal circumstances, are trained and restrained in their use of deadly force.
But there are also those individuals who, acting on their own, seek to protect themselves and their families from harm by keeping deadly force in the house, car, or even shoulder holster, with or without carry permit. I observe a wide assortment of personal security devices on display at the show. I see not not just gunware (especially concealable handguns, including pretty-in-pink purse pistols for the ladies), but also stunware, alarm systems, and a full panoply of other products designed both to create and to allay fears.
3. The Warrior. After hunters, the military sector of the gun culture may be the best-represented today. These are people, mostly men, drawn to patriotic and military themes, who are often (though not always!) rather vociferously conservatarian in their politics and rhetoric. These include not only professional soldiers but, at the margins, “soldiers of fortune” who are in the mercenary business in real life, and not just in their dreams. Some mercenaries, I’m told, really do love the adrenaline rush of war. But those who romanticize wars and those who actually fight them are not always the same people.
Several here today are dressed in camo. Some wear flags and combative slogans on their clothing, They don’t seem as interested in the deer rifles (though no doubt some are avid hunters) as in the automatic and semi-automatic black metal-stock assault rifles and grenade shells. These are the “tactical” weapons, and gun manufacturers are now trying to sell firearms of this kind not just as combat weapons but as hunting weapons as well, a cultural drift that some in the traditional hunting culture resist.
Particularly noteworthy in this group are those whose symbolic messages promote a strong alliance between religion (and not just any religion) and the nation-state. I’m reminded of the Boy Scouts of my youth, and its coveted God and Country Award. The religiously-armed would add a third term to the creed. Faith. Flag. Firearms.
Re-livers of an imagined past include the revolutionary reeancters at Colonial Williamsburg (and at some Tea Party rallies) and the Civil War reeanctors, seen mainly in Southern states who, according to a national news account of one such event last year, extend hands across enemy lines at Burger King prior to their theatrical performances.
Specialized books, magazines and online niche businesses minister to the psychological needs of those who, for one reason or another, sentimentalize the wars of the past. I know of one used bookstore in San Antonio, for instance, that specialized in World War II memorabilia. In another tribute to the Big War, the cable History Channel (sometimes satirically called the “Hitler Channel” for its seeming preoccupation with World War II) produces a steady supply of heroic tales of past sacrifice and glory. I see little sign, however, of a Vietnam war buff culture. Maybe too many are alive who remember the actual war itself.
War buffs are not all history-minded, however. The Jetsons of the gun world, whose fantasies are ahead of them rather than behind them, seek instead the very latest new offensive and defensive technologies, such as laser sights and computer-assisted gun games and gadgets. They’re drawn to the hypothetical and ever more advanced and destructive weapons of the coming decades.
Historical and futuristic fantasists are, respectively, the Flintlocks and the Jetsons of the gun world. I’m going to call the bow-hunters honorary members of the Flintlock tribal group. (Arrowheads were, after all, often made from chips of flint.) But unlike the true Flintlock, who is nostalgic for the guns of agrarian times, the bowhunter yearns to go even further back in technological history, at least for an afternoon, to the legacy of hunting and gathering. The pre-agrarian fantasist procures protein the the old-fashioned way -- though today, perhaps, with the aid of a hyper-engineered bow and laser-crafted arrows.
We have not even begun to venture into the e-zone of the Virtual Jetsons, those in the gaming culture (sometimes disdained as “geeks” or “nerds” or “America’s Youth”) who play violent video games based on the notion that the goal in life is to rack up points by blowing away imaginary others, whether they be Nazis , auto thieves or Zorks. Real computer warriors in the armed forces are now trained on combat simulators and onscreen wargames of this very sort, and real drones are launched from remote screens by young men and women who may first have trained on Nintendo when they were younger.
How will the gun industry get real guns into the hands of America’s couch commandos, in place of the joysticks they now hold? America’s youth has an enormous and well-fed appetite for virtual violence. This thirst needs only to be captured and connected to instruments of real-world violence. One strategy for capturing this market, it appears, is to produce transitionally realistic games like laser tag and paintball, which combine the safety of video games with the simulated dangers of simulated combat.
But if the armaments industry is to secure its future in U.S. markets (supplementing the sales and profits it continues to make by supplying both sides of civil wars in developing nations, or by fortifying elites in oil-rich nation-states), the industry must devise newer and subtler strategies, and more innovative and seductive product ideas, to entice the emerging domestic markets of adolescents and, increasingly, of women.
I imagine that many gun collectors have analogous artistic interests. Indeed, I see several examples of admirable craftsmanship on display today, particularly in the metal engravings and wood carvings that adorn some of the guns and knives in this living gun-art museum.
There are surely other subcultures and sub-subcultures in the U.S. gun world of which I am unaware, and no doubt national variations in gun cultures as well. Buying and selling arms is by now a well-entrenched transnational and international industry. Gun-running to Mexico, for instance, which goes back at least to the days of Pancho Villa, is still in the headlines this morning.
Meanwhile, technologies of mass destruction, which rocketed to new heights during the Cold War, grow ever more sophisticated and destructive, and in some instances more portable and easy to transport across even the most secure borders. In the post-Cold War era, the United States now leads the world in arms sales, and the whole world is now a gun world. We live in explosive times.
In light of the growing sophistication of portability of weapons of mass destruction, I'm led to wonder: Would a strict and absolute construction of the second half of the Second Amendment protect the right of individual citizens to keep and bear nuclear arms? I'm no constitutional scholar. I'm just asking.
7. The Violent Criminal. Soon after I posted a draft of this article, I opened the Sunday, July 17, 2011 Houston Chronicle to read the following two front-page headlines: "Were Gun Smugglers Paid by U.S?" and, further down on the page, "Twisted Sisters to the Aryan Brothers: The stories of 'featherwoods' tell a tale of blood, beatings, and bad deeds and bad ends."
The first headline concerns a U.S. Congressional investigation of a controversial FBI "Fast and Furious" anti-gun trafficking operation in which at least six Mexican drug cartel figures involved in gun smuggling are alleged to have worked as paid FBI informants.
The second headline names several Texas women, known as "featherwoods" in their own twilit subculture, who have been linked by police to the criminal activities of white supremacist males with whom they have been involved -- activities that have included several murders. Criminal organizations throughout U.S. history have been well-armed, though not all have been ideologically-driven. We would be less than honest if we did not acknowledge frankly that violent criminals and criminal organizations are an unwelcome and unrepresentative, but nonetheless significant, component of the gun nation, and a not-so-unwelcome source of gun industry markets and profits.
Underworlds of the criminal kind represent a side of the gun culture that respectable gun owners are understandably hesitant to talk about. But clearly many, especially among the Protectors, live in fear of the predations of armed criminals, and have armed themselves accordingly. Organizations such as the NRA would certainly not claim these predators as their own, for both moral and political reasons, though they resist gun regulations that many law enforcement officials believe would assist them in their roles as community protectors. Meanwhile, the arms industry continues to profit from the lucrative sale of guns and ammunition to violent criminals.
Factions and Frictions in the Gun Community
The gun community, we have seen, is not monolithic. It contains an array of diverse subcultures and potentional factions. And where there’s faction there’s potential friction. Internal disputes among the tribes of gun nation, where they exist, could potentially flare into internecine tribal warfare if organizations like the NRA fail to maintain a solid front in defense of the second half of the Second Amendment. Imagine what might happen if the Hunters, the Protectors, the Warriors, the Sport Shooters, the Fantasists, the Collectors, and other tribes within the gun-owning community begin to split apart, forming shifting and competing coalitions, and taking up political arms against each other, metaphorically at least, even as the Un-Gun Culture continues to surround and attack the NRA's political fortress from the outside.
My guess is that the NRA would not like to see latent and nascent frictions among existing factions exploited as political wedges by outsiders for whom happiness is not a warm gun.
Enjoying Survival Sticks for Lunch
With the heat rising toward 100 degrees outside the convention center as we approach lunchtime, I decide to take a break from the hard work and deep play of urban ethnography. I head for a food booth and get me (as we say in Texas) some Ken’s Real Pecan Smoked Spicy Pork & Beef Survival Sticks – just the greasy energy food I need to survive another hour as a curious liberal nerd in this living munitions museum.
The Latest in Gunware, Stunware, and Field Cutlery
After lunch it’s time to inspect the hardware. The gun community, as we’ve noted, displays its own distinctive aesthetic sense in some of the items on show in this weapons gallery. Artfully-carved wooden gun stocks appear attractively in a choice of colors, including red, white, blue, and pink (for the ladies), with matching “pink widow” knives. The growing women’s market reminds us that guns are not just for theatrically hypermasculine men any more, and never were, really. Women, while tiny minority of those present today in the convention hall, are browsing or buying alongside the men. The segmented and diversified arms industry depends on them, and other "emerging markets," for its domestic and global future.
Folk-artistic leather goods, including wallets, belts and holsters with beveled western-style designs, remind me of the cowboy wallets and belts we made in my Texas junior-high leather shop decades ago. Arrowheads in a variety of styles, both found and recently made, are impressively crafted.
I walk around the exhibit hall inspecting the latest in gunware and field cutlery. Items of interest include a line of coal-black “Bad Ass” shotguns that resemble military-style tactical assault weapons. I’ll bet those bad boys could stop a man in his boot tracks. Then there are the grenades waiting to be filled with explosives. Remind me now: Which wildlife are hunted with grenades? And what intruders do they protect us from?
A fast talker is hawking the latest in stunware and imitation law enforcement badges affixed to genuine leather gun-permit card cases. I watch the salesman work hard to close the deal with a prospective female customer on a stun gun and a pseudo-cop badge.
“Most of your assaults,” he says rapidfire, “occur while you’re walking from the building to the parking lot, when you least expect it. [Savor that second-person “you.”] Flash this official-looking badge and a man will stop in his tracks. He’ll see it and know immediately that you’re trouble. When you call the cops on him, though, they’ll probably send you some guy who just got out of police academy, and when he arrives, if you move, he’ll pull his gun on you, thinking you’re the criminal. Pull out this permit badge and he’ll think twice. He’ll say to himself, ‘Could this be a fellow officer?’”
The salesman touts the virtues of a stun gun he's dealing, claiming that “this will fry a man through a shirt and a jacket. Not like the ones you see on You Tube.” I forget which ones I’ve seen on You Tube.
I wonder how many times this salesman has given these badge and stun gun pitches, to how many fearful women and men, at how many gun shows, in how many towns and cities across the country. His product is fear, and fear sells in the United States. Entire industries, from insurance to security systems to tabloid television, feed it, milk it, and live on it.
I overhear a conversation exploring alternative philosophies of parenting. The voices are coming from what sound like Dr. Phil’s id:
Vendor (older man): People ask me how I got my kids to behave so well. I beat the shit out of them, that’s how!
Middle-aged Woman at Counter: Yes! Yes! You’re damned right. They have to learn respect.
It would be easy for critics of the gun culture to see in this passing exchange an easy confirmation of crude cultural stereotypes. Crude stereotypes of the gun culture are just that – crude, like so much of our casual thinking about so many things. But it would be equally simple-minded to deny, in the face of overwhelming evidence to contrary, that deep undercurrents of violence are a serious issue in our national culture, and that these undercurrents may surface in many different and pernicious ways, both in our public lives and at home. Our culture of violence surfaces in our sports and recreations, our entertainments, our crime statistics, and even in our parenting.
As I continue to stroll through the aisles of the show, I see stacks of books and magazines representing printed expressions of the several subcultures of the tradeshow I’m visiting. One book title catches my eye: “Thank God I Had a Gun,” with a a cover illustration of a vulnerable woman defending herself from a dark-shadowy assailant.
I have a theological moment. I ask myself, “Am I among people here who believe in a God who loves guns, and who wants us to have one or many to protect our families and our borders from dangerous enemies, both foreign and domestic? I wonder again about our fears: The bigger the angst, the bigger the arsenal?
Magazines on display at the gun show have titles like “Combat Handguns” and “Gun World.” I look for, but don’t find, “Soldier of Fortune” and “Predator Xtreme.” I see magazines of a different sort as well -- short and long ammo clips (the latter known as extended magazines) that enable repeated firing without reloading.
Happily, I see no evidence here of incipient and potentially violent racial conflict. The crowd, overwhelmingly white-Anglo, is not visibly aggressive. Among the few African-Americans I see today is a group of five or six young men, wearing black clothing, who enter the show right behind me and proceed to examine merchandise together. Moments later I see a young white male wearing a T-shirt that reads: “I noticed that you’re gangster. I’m pretty gangster myself.” Was this a hip-hop fan expressing admiration for urban music? Was he a white supremacist making a confrontational statement?
Later I do some webwork and find online the T-shirt in question. Looking further, I learn that the phrase on the shirt, and similar phrases, are apparently in common usage across racial lines and in both urban and rural settings, and are usually used in a humorously good-natured, non-threatening way. Still, I worry about the convergence and possible collision of gun politics and racial politics. Maybe I shouldn’t worry.
Guns and Hurricanes
Earlier I mentioned that the Houston High Caliber Gun and Knife Show is occurring next door to an exhibit hall hosting a region-wide hurricane preparedness exposition. By the end of our visit to Houston’s convention center, I’m privileged to witness both cultural events, representing two cultural worlds and expressing starkly different messages.
The hurricane preparedness program seems to send the message “We’re all in this together,” while the gun show seems to say “It’s every individual and family for themselves.” Both represent a kind of survival mentality, but each approaches survival in a different way. The two events are a few feet apart physically but worlds apart culturally.
While most of the organizations represented in the booths and tables of the hurricane preparedness exhibition are from the public or non-profit sector (but with one large natural gas company helping underwrite the event), most organizations with booths in the gun show appear to be small and medium-sized private-sector businesses offering an array of small arms and security products for home and hunt, many of these manufactured by large corporations, including Browning, Colt, Remington, Smith & Wesson, Winchester, and Savage.
The big arms industry (missiles, tanks, fighter jets and the like), based largely in the United States, is notably absent from today’s gun show. I don't see display booths for Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics or Raytheon. The big boys wouldn’t waste their time on the small fish here today. They and their lobbyists and dealers are hunting bigger and more lucrative game.
Surviving the Survivalists
For better or worse, the High Caliber Gun and Knife Show and the cultures it represents are not isolated phenomena that will soon disappear as we leave our frontier past behind and venture further into the 21st century. With technological advance comes continual advance in the power and sophistication of tools of violence, both defensive and offensive. Tribal reunions celebrating these technologies and the cultures that surround them, such as this gun show in Houston, occur all over the country every weekend. According to http://gunshow.com, nearly forty such shows are scheduled to occur in the United States this weekend alone, and not just in Texas. In fact I’ll bet there’s a gun show coming soon to a convention center near you.
Some of the children I see at the Houston gun show today may well live into the 22nd century, and some will no doubt pass their family’s firearm traditions to generations yet to come.
I worry for future generations. I don’t worry about the children of the hunters and sports shooters and collectors so much as I do about those of the fear-stricken -- the ones who feel hunted and under potential assault, and whose fears are both created and allayed by the arms industry. And I don’t worry as much about the youthful first-person shooter-gamers (as distasteful and even horrifying as their enjoyments are to me) as I do about the fantasists who have some trouble distinguishing their dream lives from their waking lives, and about the passionate deep-enders who are even now teaching their children that it’s a kill or be killed world. In sociology there’s something called the self-fulfilling prophecy. You may have heard of it. It suggests, in this context, that living with gun loaded and finger on the trigger can make a dangerous world even more dangerous, especially when your adversaries are doing the same.
As I leave the gun show, a guy at the door stamps my hand (GUN) in case I want to come back in later. Not today, thank you. I walk away realizing more clearly than when I came in that Gun Nation USA, Inc. is a complex and multi-faceted world with many overlapping tribes. The Hunter. The Protector. The Warrior. The Sport Shooter. The Fantasist. The Collector. Many other subcultures and sub-subcultures also find a place under the big tent of the NRA -- although other, smaller tents, such as the Liberal Gun Club, the Blue Steel Democrats, and the Pink Pistols (a group of gay and lesbian gun owners whose motto is "pick on somebody your own caliber") -- pose a potential challenge to the NRA's fathership.
I have no doubt now, if I ever did, that gun world is an intricate and interesting world on its own terms. It clearly offers opportunities for “deep play,” in anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s phrase, not only to its native participants, but also to amateur urban ethnographers like me who are curious about how Earthlings live in all their glorious and hideous diversity. Millions seem to appreciate the dark beauties of gun world. I’m not quite seeing them. I’m seeing mostly dangers. I keep asking myself: Surrounded by guns on all sides, why do I not feel safer?
With everyone else, I worry about the armed criminal, who can acquire guns with ease in the United States at legal venues such as gun shows. I don’t worry so much about the hunter, or the well-regulated warrior, or the sports shooter, or the collector. I don’t worry so much, either, about the fantasists … except for those who think they really are warriors when they are not, or those whose lives are ruined by their fears of the half-imagined or the utterly delusional. The latter harbor within their ranks the unregulated militias. These are the “survivalists,” and not the kind who plan and work together as communities to survive hurricanes.
Everyone wants to survive the hurricanes. I want to survive the survivalists.
http://open.salon.com/danagram
By Daniel Rigney
The Hunter. The Protector. The Warrior. The Sports Shooter. The Fantasist. The Collector. The Violent Criminal. These are among the many overlapping tribes of the gun culture in the United States today.
One way an outsider can begin to understand an unfamiliar cultural world is to participate actively and observantly in its public events – its conventions, its liturgies, its political rituals and other carnivals -- as a cultural visitor. Today I’m visiting and reporting on the cultural world on display at a large Texas gun and knife show. Here I'm a stranger in a strange land.
The Doors of Convention
Gun world is only one of many worlds we can enter through the magic doors of a big-city convention center. In the coming weeks I’ll be visiting a bridal extravaganza, a sports collectibles trade show, an art car exhibit, and what is reputed to be the world’s largest international quilting convention.
Entering each of these cultural worlds through the magic doors is like entering a fresh episode of the Twilight Zone. I’ll be keeping a hawkeye out for amusing and unexpected details as I visit these strange and diverse cultural worlds in my role as a mild-mannered reporter on the daily planet.
Today’s episode of the cultural Twilight Zone features a visit to the gun show.
The kind of cultural visiting I’m proposing is similar to what anthropologists call ethnography. Here’s how it works. Enter a milieu other than the ones you already know. Unfamiliarity is good here. You can try to defamiliarize yourself with a milieu you already know well, but it’s not easy. Participate in the public events of the host tribe in so far as you legitimately can, and be a thoughtful guest , even as you would have others visit one of your own tribal gatherings thoughtfully. Try to be what Saul Bellow called a “first class noticer.”
Notice especially the things that surprise or intrigue you about what you’re seeing and hearing. Attend to fine details. Make some notes. Interpret your remembered and recorded experience with whatever intellectual tools you have available to you. Write about this experience, and try to write clearly.
Make good use of the resources available to you. If you live in a large city, as I happen to, take advantage of its diverse multitude of public events . In this instance I’ll be drawing upon the resources of a major convention center that hosts an array of travelling trade shows and cultural spectacles throughout the year.
The big city convention center is a moveable feast, except that the center remains stationary and a different festival comes to town every week, like a traveling circus.
Here in Houston the opportunities for “conventional” research of this kind are almost limitless … and cheap. My total receipts at the gun show today come to $2.50 for round trip transportation on the Houston Metro light rail, $8 for a gun show ticket, and less than $6 for a package of Ken’s Real Pecan Smoked Spicy Pork & Beef Survival Sticks. That’s about $16 total, including lunch.
Plus, as a bonus, my wife and I also get to attend a hurricane preparedness program in an adjoining exhibit hall for free. It’s a twofer. Ten or fifteen dollars go a long way when you’re doing unconventional ethnography at a convention center in Houston.
Gun World: A Dispatch from the Front
This morning we’re riding downtown aboard Houston’s sleek Metro lightrail train to spend quality time at the monumental George Brown Convention Center. My wife is especially interested in the hurricane workshop in Exhibit Hall B, while I’m drawn by morbid liberal curiosity to the Houston High Caliber Gun and Knife Show next door.
A supporter of perennial far-right presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche has set up a table in front of the gun hall featuring a tastefully-understated picture of President Obama wearing a Hitler moustache. The activist is having a polite but deeply-felt conversation with a security officer about whether his presence there is legally appropriate. The two eventually reach some sort of compromise. I later see the activist passing out leaflets, sans table, and engaging passersby in earnest conversation about their shared commitment to the life of the unborn. Did I mention that this is in front of a gun and knife show?
Walking past the National Rifle Association political recruiting table and into the exhibit hall, I push my chapbook of Emily Dickinson poems deeper inside my pocket. I’m not looking for trouble here. A sign outside the entrance sternly but ironically declares “No Concealed Handguns….” Just inside the door, gun buyers and sellers are submitting their guns for inspection and approval to carry inside, unloaded, for sale or trade. I don’t see any background checking. I guess anyone can come in for any reason, including kids. I walk straight in, unarmed. Surrounded by so much protection, why do I not feel safer?
I’ve never been to a gun show, and I am no expert in the various family-protectors and safety products available here in the free marketplace of the gun bazaar. I’m a relative newcomer to gun world myself. I did once fire a round of .22 ammo into the nearby Gulf of Mexico as a kid, and I’ve known many people through the years who have been in serious relationships with guns -- and for whom, indeed, happiness is a warm gun -- so I’m not a complete stranger to gun world. But I am not quite prepared for the strangeness I’m walking into. To gun people, this is just another Saturday. To me it’s a twilight zone.
With fresh eyes, I’m probably noticing things in this streaming social video that would pass unnoticed by those who’ve lived in gun world all their lives. But they, in their turn, can spot details that I, as a naïve and culturally half-blind outsider, am oblivious to. I’m calling this the insider/outsider paradox: Each of us, as either insider or outsider, can see things the other wouldn’t normally notice. Consider, for instance, the gun lover at a quilting show. But more about quilting on a future expedition into another world.
Growing up in Texas , I’ve known many friends and neighbors of the gun-owning persuasion, but I’ve never seen so many gunthusiasts in one place and at one time in the surrounding presence of literally thousands of little mortality machines. Again I think: Surrounded by so much protection, why don’t I feel safer? I recall that years ago, in my undergraduate classes at a Catholic college, I asked students whether they would feel safer if everyone in class were packing heat. They laughed at the absurdity of the thought. I’m not laughing now.
Gun and Knifewear
But back to the convention hall. What does one wear to a gun show? Should I have worn cowboy boots, if I had any? A conservatively-correct T-shirt perhaps? If I had one? Luckily for me, I didn’t have to dress up in a special costume to pass as a rifle and knife shopper. The folks (mostly menfolk) at the show, though considerably whiter than the “average” diversely-hued Houstonian, are dressed in the standard casual summer uniform of Texas: T-shirt or open collar shirt with jeans or shorts. Political shirtfront slogans are quite acceptable so long as they are not offensively liberal, and they’re especially welcome when they show a decent regard for the second half of the Second Amendment. I don’t see any Obama paraphernalia here.
It may surprise some to know that virtually no cowboy boots or hats are in evidence. Urban Texans no longer wear the traditional cowboy ensemble and accessories except when they attend corporate-sponsored rodeos, which are essentially nostalgia festivals to commemorate a past that few living Texans actually remember at first hand, and that may scarcely have existed outside of Hollywood. Even John Wayne was a fictional character – played, as you probably know, by Marion Morrison of Iowa. When we lived in San Antonio, I saw more cowboy hats on the heads of departing tourists and conventioneers at the airport than I did in the rest of the city combined.
While cowboy garb is out of fashion at the gun show, paramilitary themes are still in. A few in the gun hall today are sporting camouflage outfits (camo T-shirts, cargo pants, etc.). Some fashions seem never to go out of style in the well-regulated ranks of the citizen's militia.
The favored footwear today is not cowboy boots, but athletic shoes. New Balance cowboys are everywhere, though I don’t hear any new political balance in their talk.
Many of these guys – the crowd appears to be 90+ percent male, 90+ percent Anglo – have grown up in the gun culture. The crowd skews older, toward what Southerners used to call “old boys,” but I’ll bet many of them have been in the gun life since they were young boys. I’m wondering whether their own children and grandchildren do most of their shooting now on video game screens.
Favored headgear this year is baseball or fishing caps bearing identity logos ranging from U.S. Marines and Vietnam Veterans to Jack Daniels and Texas A&M. (I even see a Red Sox shirt. I wish I’d brought my Astros cap.) But except for the slogans on their T-shirts, these folks are largely indistinguishable from the people at a suburban mall, or a baseball game, or at the huge event next door whose purpose is to raise the level of community awareness and prepared response when the next major Gulf hurricane inevitably hits. Not if. When. The Hurricane Next Time
At one of these two adjacent convention events – the hurricane preparedness workshop and the gun show -- I see a T-shirt with an unadorned peace symbol. At the other I see a peace symbol adorned with the words “Peace Through Superior Fire Power.” Can you guess which T-shirt I is displayed proudly at which event?
And can you guess in which venue men can be seen walking up and down the aisles between display tables offering for sale or trade an assortment of high-powered rifles, usually pointed toward the ceiling, that they had registered earlier with security? Thank goodness there are armed security guards at the gun show. What if some dangerous or deranged person had wandered in and gone ballistic?
The gun exposition and the hurricane exposition next door share a common under-theme of fear. At one event I see people expressing an understandable fear of natural disaster and making plans as a community to survive it together, mainly through governmental and non-profit agencies from the National Hurricane Center to local citizen volunteer groups. At the other event I see people expressing an understandable fear of crime (and for many, a love of sport-shooting and hunting as well). Judging from the inventory of tactical weapons and survival products for sale, some appear to be pursuing armed survivalist strategies, both parapolice and paramilitary, to protect themselves and their families with as little government assistance or interference as necessary in the event of political emergency. Communal Survivalists at the hurricane show vs. Individual and Family Survivalists at the gun show.
It occurs to me then that hunters, and those who feel hunted by intruders or invaders and seek superior firepower to protect themselves, may actually be two different but overlapping constituencies within advocacy organizations such as the NRA that serve as the political and lobbying arm of this particular special interest – i.e., gun ownership and use.
Of course, some may reside in the overlap -- identifying with both hunter and hunted, with both predator and potential prey. The worldview of the so-called “survivalists,” for example, seems built largely around the belief that it’s a kill or be killed world out there, and that our children must be protected, and prepared to take care of themselves, with home arsenals in the event of a personal or social hurricane.
Magazines in the Gun Rack
A few days after my visit to the gun show, I stop in at what must surely be Houston’s largest magazine rack, featuring some 350 titles displayed along 100 or more feet of shelving. I’m doing background for the blog, loitering self-consciously in the gun, knife, fishing, hunting, and war buff section of the magazine wall, as I furtively examine titles and browse content. I’m checking out the semi-automatic centerfolds. That sort of thing.
Later, safe at home, I venture casually into the vast gun-related periodical literature available online, where I do more personal reading. I have lengthy conversations with an old friend who has known the hunting and fishing culture since he was a young boy growing up in a town in Central Texas, and who was immersed in the military culture as a young adult. He and I have been talking for years – decades, actually – about gun world. I rely on him for deep background.
Later I spend a couple of days with this gun-culture guide in Wyoming. During my visit we stop by a gun and gunsafe store whose friendly and helpful floor salesman wears a hip pistol, a U.S. flag baseball cap, and a T-shirt that reads “Don’t Tread on Me.” He confides that his sidearm may help deter someone who comes into the store with a shotgun shell in his pocket and suddenly turns a display gun into a live weapon. “Unfortunately,” he confides, “there are a lot of crazy people that come into a gun shop.” You can’t be too careful these days.
Back at the bookstore in Houston, I’m counting nearly 40 magazine titles devoted specifically to guns and gun culture. I’m not even counting the knife, fishing and historic war buff sections. Gun magazines alone seem to account for more than ten percent of the bookstore’s entire periodical inventory. Bear in mind that this is Houston. I don’t recall seeing this many gun magazines in the bookstores I’ve browsed in Berkeley or New York, let aloneVancouver or London.
The Tribes of Gun Nation
What occurs to me as I graze the gun mags is that each seems aimed toward a particular segment of the gun culture, targeting various segments or niches of the arms industry market. Organizations like the National Rifle Association seem to provide a big tent covering many smaller, diverse and overlapping subcultures, and covering over potentially divisive differences among them.
1. 1. Man (or Woman) the Hunter. Among the several subcultures of gun nation are the hunters, mentioned above – perhaps the
largest of all the U.S. gun tribes. Often (but not always) growing up
in small towns and rural areas, hunters are proud of their links to the
past. Their proud carnivore heritage stretches back to a
time when our species relied on bows and spears to secure
life-sustaining protein. Even today I see several magazines devoted to
bowhunting, Arrowheads, both found and recently made, are exhibited for sale at the show.
Closely allied with the hunting subculture is the fishing subculture – fishing arguably only another
form of hunting, but in pursuit of aquatic game, and using rather
different predation technologies. The tools of both hunting and fishing include, of course, knives, which are prominently out for view and sale at today’s show.Purists in the hunting community reportedly resist the trend, promoted by gun manufacturers in search of new markets, to bring the latest in lethal technology into forest and field. Granted, tradition-minded hunters may spend good money on a technically-advanced gun sight, paying as much or more for the scope as they do for the gun. But traditionalists seem less keen on innovations such as computer-assisted hunting, which now includes the kind of remote hunting that turns one’s home video screen into a live video game, with real live game on camera at some distant location, locked in the digital crosshairs and ready to drop. Imagine the thrill of killing live deer roaming hundreds of miles away, using nothing more than your child’s computer and a joystick. African safari, anyone?
Some traditional hunters also disdain the practice of shooting game in a stocked preserve (fish in a barrel, fowl in a Cheney expedition). Contrary to stereotype, traditional hunters are generally conservation-minded and environmentally aware folk who respect their prey. (Mr. Cheney may have missed the memo.) Hunters are commonly called "sportsmen," but among some hunters there are lingering questions concerning whether hunting should be regarded as a sport at all if the hunted animals are not also armed. For these, hunting is a meaningful recreation, not a "sport."
2. 2 . Man (and Woman) the Protector
Another
tribe of gun nation, overlapping the hunters, comprises those
intensely concerned with issues of personal and home security –
stretching, at the far end, to “survivalists,” whose first and foremost concern is to secure their own family’s paramilitary survival in the expected event of a cataclysmic civilizational collapse. Their political backstories and fantasies are typically far to the right.The Protectors include, most obviously, constituted law enforcement officials who, in professionalized police agencies, are well-regulated and devoted to serving and protecting their communities. Protectors may also include private security personnel who, under ideal circumstances, are trained and restrained in their use of deadly force.
But there are also those individuals who, acting on their own, seek to protect themselves and their families from harm by keeping deadly force in the house, car, or even shoulder holster, with or without carry permit. I observe a wide assortment of personal security devices on display at the show. I see not not just gunware (especially concealable handguns, including pretty-in-pink purse pistols for the ladies), but also stunware, alarm systems, and a full panoply of other products designed both to create and to allay fears.
3. The Warrior. After hunters, the military sector of the gun culture may be the best-represented today. These are people, mostly men, drawn to patriotic and military themes, who are often (though not always!) rather vociferously conservatarian in their politics and rhetoric. These include not only professional soldiers but, at the margins, “soldiers of fortune” who are in the mercenary business in real life, and not just in their dreams. Some mercenaries, I’m told, really do love the adrenaline rush of war. But those who romanticize wars and those who actually fight them are not always the same people.
Several here today are dressed in camo. Some wear flags and combative slogans on their clothing, They don’t seem as interested in the deer rifles (though no doubt some are avid hunters) as in the automatic and semi-automatic black metal-stock assault rifles and grenade shells. These are the “tactical” weapons, and gun manufacturers are now trying to sell firearms of this kind not just as combat weapons but as hunting weapons as well, a cultural drift that some in the traditional hunting culture resist.
Particularly noteworthy in this group are those whose symbolic messages promote a strong alliance between religion (and not just any religion) and the nation-state. I’m reminded of the Boy Scouts of my youth, and its coveted God and Country Award. The religiously-armed would add a third term to the creed. Faith. Flag. Firearms.
4 4. The Sports Shooter. Still another overlapping gun tribe is the “sport shooters,” including those with an interest in trap and skeet, marksmanship and other forms of competitive shooting, whether athletic or sedate. My
native guide in all things ballistic tells me that social class
differences are most clearly visible in this category, descending from the polished Circassian-walnut-stock gun club shooters of the endangered skeet to the weekend pistol-shooting rangers to those in the country who enjoy blowing away beer cans and jackrabbits in the desert.
5. 5. The Fantasist: Flintstocks and Jetsons. Then there are those whom we may call “fantasists”-- not
in a pejorative sense, but in the sense that all of us, like James
Thurber’s Walter Mitty, have daydreams of one sort or another that we
compose and enact in our inner theaters. I know one person, for
instance, who ludicrously imagines himself playing first base for the
Houston Astros now that Berkman has gone to St. Louis. Similarly,
but differently, there are those whose fantasies feature the
brandishing of weapons in moments of high drama. Nearly all of us are
fantasists now and then – if only for the chocolate cake, or dangerous
thrill, we’re not supposed to have.
Those who fantasize about
firearms may project heroic scenarios onto their mental screens,
starring themselves – warding off the deadly intruder or the ferocious
grizzly, blowing up the enemy bridge, fighting patriotically for the
Confederacy, or the Union, or the Earthlings. Some at the gun show, for
example, are drawn to the 19th century rifles
(Colt, Winchester, etc.) that “won the West," while other romanticists
are drawn to the laser guns of the future. Re-livers of an imagined past include the revolutionary reeancters at Colonial Williamsburg (and at some Tea Party rallies) and the Civil War reeanctors, seen mainly in Southern states who, according to a national news account of one such event last year, extend hands across enemy lines at Burger King prior to their theatrical performances.
Specialized books, magazines and online niche businesses minister to the psychological needs of those who, for one reason or another, sentimentalize the wars of the past. I know of one used bookstore in San Antonio, for instance, that specialized in World War II memorabilia. In another tribute to the Big War, the cable History Channel (sometimes satirically called the “Hitler Channel” for its seeming preoccupation with World War II) produces a steady supply of heroic tales of past sacrifice and glory. I see little sign, however, of a Vietnam war buff culture. Maybe too many are alive who remember the actual war itself.
War buffs are not all history-minded, however. The Jetsons of the gun world, whose fantasies are ahead of them rather than behind them, seek instead the very latest new offensive and defensive technologies, such as laser sights and computer-assisted gun games and gadgets. They’re drawn to the hypothetical and ever more advanced and destructive weapons of the coming decades.
Historical and futuristic fantasists are, respectively, the Flintlocks and the Jetsons of the gun world. I’m going to call the bow-hunters honorary members of the Flintlock tribal group. (Arrowheads were, after all, often made from chips of flint.) But unlike the true Flintlock, who is nostalgic for the guns of agrarian times, the bowhunter yearns to go even further back in technological history, at least for an afternoon, to the legacy of hunting and gathering. The pre-agrarian fantasist procures protein the the old-fashioned way -- though today, perhaps, with the aid of a hyper-engineered bow and laser-crafted arrows.
We have not even begun to venture into the e-zone of the Virtual Jetsons, those in the gaming culture (sometimes disdained as “geeks” or “nerds” or “America’s Youth”) who play violent video games based on the notion that the goal in life is to rack up points by blowing away imaginary others, whether they be Nazis , auto thieves or Zorks. Real computer warriors in the armed forces are now trained on combat simulators and onscreen wargames of this very sort, and real drones are launched from remote screens by young men and women who may first have trained on Nintendo when they were younger.
How will the gun industry get real guns into the hands of America’s couch commandos, in place of the joysticks they now hold? America’s youth has an enormous and well-fed appetite for virtual violence. This thirst needs only to be captured and connected to instruments of real-world violence. One strategy for capturing this market, it appears, is to produce transitionally realistic games like laser tag and paintball, which combine the safety of video games with the simulated dangers of simulated combat.
But if the armaments industry is to secure its future in U.S. markets (supplementing the sales and profits it continues to make by supplying both sides of civil wars in developing nations, or by fortifying elites in oil-rich nation-states), the industry must devise newer and subtler strategies, and more innovative and seductive product ideas, to entice the emerging domestic markets of adolescents and, increasingly, of women.
6. 6. The Collector. Yet
another subculture of gun world comprises those who shop (or "invest")
with the aim of fortifying their personal or institutional collections
of guns, knives and other such instruments of persuasion. These
may include people who don’t have much interest in actually shooting
guns, but who have perhaps inherited guns from their ancestors and want
to pass these solemnly forward to future family generations as a way to
maintain cultural continuity and "heritage" through time. They,
like the overlapping community of fantasists, are apt to be history
buffs. Apart from historical and family interests, though, one may ask
why people collect guns in the first place, from muskets to AK47’s and beyond.
One may as well ask why people horde stamps, or dolls, or baseball cards. As
a baseball card collector myself, I can tell you that the world of
collectibles may spring in part from an aesthetic source. Not everyone
understands that baseball cards are miniature works of art – colorful
little portraits in the medium of ink and cardboard that capture
forever, through the magic of photography, the immortal greatness of
that guy who played first base for the Milwaukee Braves back in the late
fifties. I imagine that many gun collectors have analogous artistic interests. Indeed, I see several examples of admirable craftsmanship on display today, particularly in the metal engravings and wood carvings that adorn some of the guns and knives in this living gun-art museum.
There are surely other subcultures and sub-subcultures in the U.S. gun world of which I am unaware, and no doubt national variations in gun cultures as well. Buying and selling arms is by now a well-entrenched transnational and international industry. Gun-running to Mexico, for instance, which goes back at least to the days of Pancho Villa, is still in the headlines this morning.
Meanwhile, technologies of mass destruction, which rocketed to new heights during the Cold War, grow ever more sophisticated and destructive, and in some instances more portable and easy to transport across even the most secure borders. In the post-Cold War era, the United States now leads the world in arms sales, and the whole world is now a gun world. We live in explosive times.
In light of the growing sophistication of portability of weapons of mass destruction, I'm led to wonder: Would a strict and absolute construction of the second half of the Second Amendment protect the right of individual citizens to keep and bear nuclear arms? I'm no constitutional scholar. I'm just asking.
7. The Violent Criminal. Soon after I posted a draft of this article, I opened the Sunday, July 17, 2011 Houston Chronicle to read the following two front-page headlines: "Were Gun Smugglers Paid by U.S?" and, further down on the page, "Twisted Sisters to the Aryan Brothers: The stories of 'featherwoods' tell a tale of blood, beatings, and bad deeds and bad ends."
The first headline concerns a U.S. Congressional investigation of a controversial FBI "Fast and Furious" anti-gun trafficking operation in which at least six Mexican drug cartel figures involved in gun smuggling are alleged to have worked as paid FBI informants.
The second headline names several Texas women, known as "featherwoods" in their own twilit subculture, who have been linked by police to the criminal activities of white supremacist males with whom they have been involved -- activities that have included several murders. Criminal organizations throughout U.S. history have been well-armed, though not all have been ideologically-driven. We would be less than honest if we did not acknowledge frankly that violent criminals and criminal organizations are an unwelcome and unrepresentative, but nonetheless significant, component of the gun nation, and a not-so-unwelcome source of gun industry markets and profits.
Underworlds of the criminal kind represent a side of the gun culture that respectable gun owners are understandably hesitant to talk about. But clearly many, especially among the Protectors, live in fear of the predations of armed criminals, and have armed themselves accordingly. Organizations such as the NRA would certainly not claim these predators as their own, for both moral and political reasons, though they resist gun regulations that many law enforcement officials believe would assist them in their roles as community protectors. Meanwhile, the arms industry continues to profit from the lucrative sale of guns and ammunition to violent criminals.
Factions and Frictions in the Gun Community
The gun community, we have seen, is not monolithic. It contains an array of diverse subcultures and potentional factions. And where there’s faction there’s potential friction. Internal disputes among the tribes of gun nation, where they exist, could potentially flare into internecine tribal warfare if organizations like the NRA fail to maintain a solid front in defense of the second half of the Second Amendment. Imagine what might happen if the Hunters, the Protectors, the Warriors, the Sport Shooters, the Fantasists, the Collectors, and other tribes within the gun-owning community begin to split apart, forming shifting and competing coalitions, and taking up political arms against each other, metaphorically at least, even as the Un-Gun Culture continues to surround and attack the NRA's political fortress from the outside.
My guess is that the NRA would not like to see latent and nascent frictions among existing factions exploited as political wedges by outsiders for whom happiness is not a warm gun.
Enjoying Survival Sticks for Lunch
With the heat rising toward 100 degrees outside the convention center as we approach lunchtime, I decide to take a break from the hard work and deep play of urban ethnography. I head for a food booth and get me (as we say in Texas) some Ken’s Real Pecan Smoked Spicy Pork & Beef Survival Sticks – just the greasy energy food I need to survive another hour as a curious liberal nerd in this living munitions museum.
The Latest in Gunware, Stunware, and Field Cutlery
After lunch it’s time to inspect the hardware. The gun community, as we’ve noted, displays its own distinctive aesthetic sense in some of the items on show in this weapons gallery. Artfully-carved wooden gun stocks appear attractively in a choice of colors, including red, white, blue, and pink (for the ladies), with matching “pink widow” knives. The growing women’s market reminds us that guns are not just for theatrically hypermasculine men any more, and never were, really. Women, while tiny minority of those present today in the convention hall, are browsing or buying alongside the men. The segmented and diversified arms industry depends on them, and other "emerging markets," for its domestic and global future.
Folk-artistic leather goods, including wallets, belts and holsters with beveled western-style designs, remind me of the cowboy wallets and belts we made in my Texas junior-high leather shop decades ago. Arrowheads in a variety of styles, both found and recently made, are impressively crafted.
I walk around the exhibit hall inspecting the latest in gunware and field cutlery. Items of interest include a line of coal-black “Bad Ass” shotguns that resemble military-style tactical assault weapons. I’ll bet those bad boys could stop a man in his boot tracks. Then there are the grenades waiting to be filled with explosives. Remind me now: Which wildlife are hunted with grenades? And what intruders do they protect us from?
A fast talker is hawking the latest in stunware and imitation law enforcement badges affixed to genuine leather gun-permit card cases. I watch the salesman work hard to close the deal with a prospective female customer on a stun gun and a pseudo-cop badge.
“Most of your assaults,” he says rapidfire, “occur while you’re walking from the building to the parking lot, when you least expect it. [Savor that second-person “you.”] Flash this official-looking badge and a man will stop in his tracks. He’ll see it and know immediately that you’re trouble. When you call the cops on him, though, they’ll probably send you some guy who just got out of police academy, and when he arrives, if you move, he’ll pull his gun on you, thinking you’re the criminal. Pull out this permit badge and he’ll think twice. He’ll say to himself, ‘Could this be a fellow officer?’”
The salesman touts the virtues of a stun gun he's dealing, claiming that “this will fry a man through a shirt and a jacket. Not like the ones you see on You Tube.” I forget which ones I’ve seen on You Tube.
I wonder how many times this salesman has given these badge and stun gun pitches, to how many fearful women and men, at how many gun shows, in how many towns and cities across the country. His product is fear, and fear sells in the United States. Entire industries, from insurance to security systems to tabloid television, feed it, milk it, and live on it.
I overhear a conversation exploring alternative philosophies of parenting. The voices are coming from what sound like Dr. Phil’s id:
Vendor (older man): People ask me how I got my kids to behave so well. I beat the shit out of them, that’s how!
Middle-aged Woman at Counter: Yes! Yes! You’re damned right. They have to learn respect.
It would be easy for critics of the gun culture to see in this passing exchange an easy confirmation of crude cultural stereotypes. Crude stereotypes of the gun culture are just that – crude, like so much of our casual thinking about so many things. But it would be equally simple-minded to deny, in the face of overwhelming evidence to contrary, that deep undercurrents of violence are a serious issue in our national culture, and that these undercurrents may surface in many different and pernicious ways, both in our public lives and at home. Our culture of violence surfaces in our sports and recreations, our entertainments, our crime statistics, and even in our parenting.
As I continue to stroll through the aisles of the show, I see stacks of books and magazines representing printed expressions of the several subcultures of the tradeshow I’m visiting. One book title catches my eye: “Thank God I Had a Gun,” with a a cover illustration of a vulnerable woman defending herself from a dark-shadowy assailant.
I have a theological moment. I ask myself, “Am I among people here who believe in a God who loves guns, and who wants us to have one or many to protect our families and our borders from dangerous enemies, both foreign and domestic? I wonder again about our fears: The bigger the angst, the bigger the arsenal?
Magazines on display at the gun show have titles like “Combat Handguns” and “Gun World.” I look for, but don’t find, “Soldier of Fortune” and “Predator Xtreme.” I see magazines of a different sort as well -- short and long ammo clips (the latter known as extended magazines) that enable repeated firing without reloading.
Happily, I see no evidence here of incipient and potentially violent racial conflict. The crowd, overwhelmingly white-Anglo, is not visibly aggressive. Among the few African-Americans I see today is a group of five or six young men, wearing black clothing, who enter the show right behind me and proceed to examine merchandise together. Moments later I see a young white male wearing a T-shirt that reads: “I noticed that you’re gangster. I’m pretty gangster myself.” Was this a hip-hop fan expressing admiration for urban music? Was he a white supremacist making a confrontational statement?
Later I do some webwork and find online the T-shirt in question. Looking further, I learn that the phrase on the shirt, and similar phrases, are apparently in common usage across racial lines and in both urban and rural settings, and are usually used in a humorously good-natured, non-threatening way. Still, I worry about the convergence and possible collision of gun politics and racial politics. Maybe I shouldn’t worry.
Guns and Hurricanes
Earlier I mentioned that the Houston High Caliber Gun and Knife Show is occurring next door to an exhibit hall hosting a region-wide hurricane preparedness exposition. By the end of our visit to Houston’s convention center, I’m privileged to witness both cultural events, representing two cultural worlds and expressing starkly different messages.
The hurricane preparedness program seems to send the message “We’re all in this together,” while the gun show seems to say “It’s every individual and family for themselves.” Both represent a kind of survival mentality, but each approaches survival in a different way. The two events are a few feet apart physically but worlds apart culturally.
While most of the organizations represented in the booths and tables of the hurricane preparedness exhibition are from the public or non-profit sector (but with one large natural gas company helping underwrite the event), most organizations with booths in the gun show appear to be small and medium-sized private-sector businesses offering an array of small arms and security products for home and hunt, many of these manufactured by large corporations, including Browning, Colt, Remington, Smith & Wesson, Winchester, and Savage.
The big arms industry (missiles, tanks, fighter jets and the like), based largely in the United States, is notably absent from today’s gun show. I don't see display booths for Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics or Raytheon. The big boys wouldn’t waste their time on the small fish here today. They and their lobbyists and dealers are hunting bigger and more lucrative game.
Surviving the Survivalists
For better or worse, the High Caliber Gun and Knife Show and the cultures it represents are not isolated phenomena that will soon disappear as we leave our frontier past behind and venture further into the 21st century. With technological advance comes continual advance in the power and sophistication of tools of violence, both defensive and offensive. Tribal reunions celebrating these technologies and the cultures that surround them, such as this gun show in Houston, occur all over the country every weekend. According to http://gunshow.com, nearly forty such shows are scheduled to occur in the United States this weekend alone, and not just in Texas. In fact I’ll bet there’s a gun show coming soon to a convention center near you.
Some of the children I see at the Houston gun show today may well live into the 22nd century, and some will no doubt pass their family’s firearm traditions to generations yet to come.
I worry for future generations. I don’t worry about the children of the hunters and sports shooters and collectors so much as I do about those of the fear-stricken -- the ones who feel hunted and under potential assault, and whose fears are both created and allayed by the arms industry. And I don’t worry as much about the youthful first-person shooter-gamers (as distasteful and even horrifying as their enjoyments are to me) as I do about the fantasists who have some trouble distinguishing their dream lives from their waking lives, and about the passionate deep-enders who are even now teaching their children that it’s a kill or be killed world. In sociology there’s something called the self-fulfilling prophecy. You may have heard of it. It suggests, in this context, that living with gun loaded and finger on the trigger can make a dangerous world even more dangerous, especially when your adversaries are doing the same.
As I leave the gun show, a guy at the door stamps my hand (GUN) in case I want to come back in later. Not today, thank you. I walk away realizing more clearly than when I came in that Gun Nation USA, Inc. is a complex and multi-faceted world with many overlapping tribes. The Hunter. The Protector. The Warrior. The Sport Shooter. The Fantasist. The Collector. Many other subcultures and sub-subcultures also find a place under the big tent of the NRA -- although other, smaller tents, such as the Liberal Gun Club, the Blue Steel Democrats, and the Pink Pistols (a group of gay and lesbian gun owners whose motto is "pick on somebody your own caliber") -- pose a potential challenge to the NRA's fathership.
I have no doubt now, if I ever did, that gun world is an intricate and interesting world on its own terms. It clearly offers opportunities for “deep play,” in anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s phrase, not only to its native participants, but also to amateur urban ethnographers like me who are curious about how Earthlings live in all their glorious and hideous diversity. Millions seem to appreciate the dark beauties of gun world. I’m not quite seeing them. I’m seeing mostly dangers. I keep asking myself: Surrounded by guns on all sides, why do I not feel safer?
With everyone else, I worry about the armed criminal, who can acquire guns with ease in the United States at legal venues such as gun shows. I don’t worry so much about the hunter, or the well-regulated warrior, or the sports shooter, or the collector. I don’t worry so much, either, about the fantasists … except for those who think they really are warriors when they are not, or those whose lives are ruined by their fears of the half-imagined or the utterly delusional. The latter harbor within their ranks the unregulated militias. These are the “survivalists,” and not the kind who plan and work together as communities to survive hurricanes.
Everyone wants to survive the hurricanes. I want to survive the survivalists.
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