Gun Guys: A Road Trip

Publishers Weekly

To explore America’s gun culture, Baum, a former staff writer for the New Yorker and author of Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans, traverses the country talking to gun owners, shooting instructors, gun advocates, gun control supporters, and even a former gang member who used a gun to kill someone. As a “stoop-shouldered, bald-headed, middle-aged” Jewish Democrat, Baum isn’t your typical gun owner, but he admits to having an “obsession” with guns and has one on his person for much of his road trip. Crisscrossing America he finds a lot of inconsistencies, like gun owners who think the government is coming for their guns despite the fact that “guns laws were getting looser everywhere” or gun control groups pushing for new legislation without understanding how guns work or the historical ineffectiveness of gun control. Though he tries to find diversity among the gun owners he interviews, many just spout antiliberal dogma or “play the role of victim,” so these encounters become repetitive. It’s when the tone of the book shifts from travelogue to narrative, with stories like those of Tim White, who “used a gun in his criminal undertakings”; Rick Ector, an industrial engineer who turned gun carrier after a mugging; and Brandon Franklin, a young New Orleans man who was shot while trying to defend the mother of his children, that Baum’s skill as a writer and journalist is revealed. Overall, this is a very balanced accounting of both sides of America’s gun issue, and while Baum doesn’t have all the answers, his solution that both sides come together to promote gun safety is both admirable and prudent. Baum can be lauded for trying to find an accommodating solution to the problem of guns, but no doubt gun lovers and gun haters both will vehemently disagree with him. (Mar.)

From the Publisher

 
“Dan Baum armed himself with an open mind and a .38 Detective Special to see what the armed lifestyle is about. Taking participatory journalism to a debate that rivals abortion as a hot-button topic, he emerged with observations that need to be read by both sides of the highly polarized issue.”
—Massad Ayoob, author and use-of-force instructor
 
“You don't have to agree with Dan Baum on everything; perhaps a gun-loving self-described liberal Democrat from Boulder is so unique nobody will. But he has written the most original book on the gun culture yet, fair, funny, and as informed as it is iconoclastic. I urge all my friends, both those in the NRA and those who think guns are evil, to read, learn, laugh, and recognize themselves. Gun Guys is an unlikely bridge for our too-polarized time.”
—Steve Bodio, author of Good Guns Again, and An Eternity of Eagles.

“Dan Baum’s curiosity about guns and his passion for them pull you deep into this book before you even know how you got there. He has put in the heft of a firearm and the smell of gunpowder and the heedless pleasure of shooting, and has produced a beautiful piece of writing.”
—Ian Frazier, author of Travels in Siberia

"Engrossing . . . a thoughtful corrective to the mutual ideological hysteria surrounding the issue of guns in America."
—Kirkus Reviews

“[A] well-written, thought-provoking and often humorous account of [Baum’s] road trip through America’s gun culture . . . Gun Guys is the sort of readable, information-rich book that could change minds and help bridge the huge national divide over guns. Let’s hope it finds the readership it deserves.”
—Alden Mudge, Book Page

Publishers Weekly Top 10 Choice in Social Sciences

“Baum’s skill as a writer and journalist is revealed . . . [A] balanced accounting of both sides of America’s gun issue, and while Baum doesn’t have all the answers, his solution that both sides come together to promote gun safety is both admirable and prudent.”
—Publishers Weekly
 
“Dan Baum may be exactly what America needs right now: a liberal journalist with a gun . . . [F]or those who prefer humorous, literate and honest discussion about [guns] to frothy ranting, Gun Guys will hit the spot.”
—Michael Merschel, Dallas News

“The gun issue is about to find a new ambassador in Dan Baum . . . [Baum is] the perfect tour guide for a well-timed trek through gun culture in modern America . . . an insightful exploration that brings some much-needed humanity to gun lovers and gun haters . . . a thoughtful, well-reasoned antidote to the polarized hysteria that currently passes for a national gun debate. By the end of the book, Baum arrives at something that feels truly fresh: a middle ground on guns.”
—Lily Raff McCaulou, San Francisco Chronicle

“Vivid . . . Baum can still shoot, as demonstrated by a riveting chapter on some arduous gunfight training he endures. But more important, Baum can write. Schlepping among the gun lovers with this guy is unfailingly diverting as well as illuminating.”
—Daniel Akst, Newsday

“[Gun Guys] is interesting and funny. But most of all it is enlightening.”
—Beaufort Observer
 
“[S]mart and informative—an education for anyone the slightest bit curious about why gun owners are so passionate about their guns. Dan Baum's stories are alive, engaging, and earnest.”
—Geri Spieler, New York Journal of Books

“[A]n evenhanded and witty exposé of hardcore firearms culture and gun control controversies . . . [B]aum hones and polishes his investigation like he would an antique Winchester.”
—Ethan Gilsdorf, Boston Globe
 
“As a writer, Baum doesn’t have it in him to lay down a dull sentence. His sketches of the people he meets (not all of them white, and not all of them guys) are charming and funny . . . [W]ise, considered, delectably written, fun to read and wholly lacking in tendentiousness, and thus likely to deepen anyone’s thinking on the subject.”
—Craig Seligman, Bloomberg News

“[P]itch-perfect . . . a thoughtful, even-handed look at a subject that tends to raise the hackles of people on both sides of the gun-control debate . . . Baum should be applauded for his intellectual honesty.”
—Doug Childers, Richmond Times-Dispatch

“[A] provocative, probing and frequently funny journey deep into the mentality of the approximately 40 percent of Americans who own guns . . . Strong words from a strong writer, straddling a great divide and maybe through this book helping to bridge it.”
—John Wilkens, U-T San Diego 
 
“[T]horoughly entertaining and provocative.”
—Bill Eichenberger, Cleveland Plain Dealer
 
“[A] wonderfully guileless and open-minded guide to American gun culture . . . Baum, a fearless reporter of sharp eye and witty phrase, has done a public service.”
—Carlo Wolff, The Christian Science Monitor

“[F]ascinating, intelligent . . . a necessary, insightful dose of down-the-middle reporting on a debate largely defined by extremes.”
—Chuck Leddy, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Kirkus Reviews

Engrossing social study from a rara avis: an East Coast progressive who's also a gun enthusiast. Former New Yorker staff writer Baum (Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans, 2009, etc.) wonders at the vast gap between his social peers, who tend to abhor every aspect of firearms culture, and the "Red State" demographics that embrace it, particularly as a response to the perceived effete social meddling of liberals. He is also curious as to his own lifelong fascination with the forbidden, masculine allure of guns. For this project, he pursued a "gun-guy walkabout" through parts of the country where guns are beloved (the Southwest) or, in some cases, problematic (Detroit, New Orleans). He first obtained a concealed carry permit (noting how easy this process has become in many states), then tried to find pro-gun academics, industry types, gun-store owners, hunters and other firearms enthusiasts to share their views. He heard from many thoughtful individuals on gun culture and the social value of self-defense, though he also documents an undercurrent of embittered paranoia among "gun guys," which he shrewdly connects to the hard economic times he observes in the working-class regions that skew pro-gun--e.g., Kentucky or Nebraska. Baum summarizes this complex effect of the gun issue on American politics by noting, "It was hard to think of a better organizing tool for the right than the left's tribal antipathy to guns." The author develops well-shaded character portraits, including wealthy machine-gun enthusiasts, an African-American self-defense advocate, aimless young suburban men growing up on gun-oriented video games who've embraced the now-notorious AR-15, and his own fish-out-of-water adventures among more conservative gun enthusiasts. Baum's road trip into gun culture taught him about self-reliance, but he admits his core questions about firearms' easily politicized allure remain slippery. Though many liberals will dislike Baum's conclusions (and gun rights crusaders may distrust him regardless), he offers a thoughtful corrective to the mutual ideological hysteria surrounding the issue of guns in America. The book should gain further exposure and/or controversy following the tragedy in Newtown, Conn.

The Barnes & Noble Review

I've fired a gun on just one occasion, in college, skeet shooting with my roommate and my then-girlfriend. New Hampshire supplied the kaleidoscopic fall foliage; my roommate, clad all in Barbour, supplied the shotgun and expertise; my girlfriend supplied the imperative not to embarrass myself.

I raised the Benelli over-and-under, squinted, introduced a clay to its Maker. And it'd only taken me a dozen shells! My roommate offered to make an adjustment to the gun. I let him fiddle with it and squeezed the trigger again. My shoulder rocked backward with the full force of — expectation. That is to say, I flinched.

He'd switched on the safety. "I knew it." He grinned. "You're gun-shy."

Incurable, he said. (I couldn't help thinking of Jake Barnes.) My then-girlfriend later became his now-wife. Still, I bore no grudge against the Great Equalizer, and late last year I started to contemplate a hunting permit. Dan Baum's Gun Guys: A Road Trip came to my attention. It seemed as good a way as any to learn about what is called, derisively, America's "gun culture." Baum's book is less about the guns themselves than about the people who love them — the human element all but missing from a debate undermined by mutual caricature and hostility.

I say "all but missing" because just days after I began reading, Adam Lanza committed the crime so ghastly that it was soon known the world over by the metonym "Newtown." For many, victims like Lanza's are the only human element worth knowing about. As for the fact that Lanza is an outlier, that he represents a negligible sliver of gun users, many would say, "So?" When it comes to their children's safety and their society's security, they're happy to let the exception dictate the rule. For others, the debate is a proxy for a culture war that is eroding Americans' curiosity, empathy, and trust.

Baum, well aware of this trust deficit, presents himself as a bridge between the "gun guys" and polite society. After describing his "personal Big Bang," the summer camp rifle range triumph that turned him into a "gun guy," Baum reassures us that by voting age, he'd "begun to perceive the gun lover in me as some kind of malevolent twin." A New Jersey Jewish Democrat, he holds liberal views on everything but guns. It's a desire either to exorcise or to make peace with his "malevolent twin" that sends Baum on his tour of gun-toting America.

This setup may sound condescending, with its suggestion that only a liberal could really be honest or reflective about a passion for firearms. Pro-gun readers may be dismayed that the first subject Baum interviews, at a private range near Denver, does little to contradict the stereotypes. He's underemployed, he lives with Mom and Dad, and he spends every penny tricking out his AR-15, the same type of rifle Lanza used. "It was Call of Duty 4," Baum reports, that piqued the man's interest in the weapon; he tells Baum, further embarrassing himself, about accidentally firing a nine-millimeter pistol through his ceiling.

But Baum doesn't force this portrait to serve a rhetorical purpose; he lets it speak for itself. It answers, for instance, a perennial (and often rhetorical) question of the anti-gun set: What does anyone need a gun like that for? The answer is almost always: target shooting. This use is, in fact, so much more common than hunting that gun activists even have a slang term for hunters: Fudds. For other enthusiasts, it is largely the mechanical complexity that captivates. The young man, more nerd than nut, tells Baum, "I really like the engineering — the springs, the detents, the catches. I sometimes think, Hmm, this piece hangs a bit, or This roller pin wobbles."

Baum's other subjects represent a more diverse and intriguing cross-section of America's gun guys. In Wikieup, Arizona, he mingles with collectors of historic machine guns. A trip to Glendale, California, occasions an audience with Syd Stembridge, current proprietor of the legendary Hollywood rental armory Stembridge Gun Rentals. (This chapter is loaded with great trivia, from the cinematic to the macabre: "People don't fly backwards when hit with bullets," Syd offers. "You crumple up around the wound.") Things get weird for Baum at a gun show in Grand Island, Nebraska, where he learns just how deep anti-government and anti-UN paranoia run — underground, in fact, with some conventioneers purporting to bury spare rifles in waterproof PVC piping.

Still, most of the people Baum meets seem passionate, not crazy. They are adrenaline-addicted sportswomen like Marcey Parker, who competes with submachine guns; crime victims-turned-activists like Detroit's Rick Ector, whose hope is to make legal gun ownership appealing to his fellow African Americans, and self-defense advocates like Aaron Zelman, the founder of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. Baum attends a traditional German Schützenfest in Cincinnati, "three days of wursts, beer, oompah bands, and stylized target shooting that harked back 150 years or more." Elsewhere, he hunts deer and feral hogs.

Tradition is a constant refrain. Even that seemingly maladjusted AR-15-lover in the first chapter muses, "[F]irearms are something you can hand down for generations, right?" Baum seems to agree. He's an evangelist for responsible gun ownership. Experimenting with both open and concealed carry, he decides that being armed and trained fosters a combination of sheepdog vigilance and scrupulous self-control. Why not hand down traits like those for generations?

Baum's thorough attention to studies and statistics will rankle some on both sides of the debate. Gun owners passionate about self-defense tell Baum repeatedly that crime is "out of control," but Baum knows that crime has dropped at a startling rate over the past decade. By that same token, he knows that there is no epidemic of "assault-rifle" violence; statistics show that rifles of any kind were never involved in more than 3 percent of homicides between 1993 and 2004. Waiting periods for firearms purchases, per the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, have caused a "statistically significant reduction only in suicide among people over age fifty-five." Gun registration hasn't been much of a help to law enforcement: people tend not to commit crimes with registered weapons.

Baum wants his "gun guys" to be safer, and to try to understand and respect their gun-fearing fellow Americans. In a postscript written after Newtown but prior to publication, he bemoans calls for new anti-gun legislation — not because they will inconvenience gun lovers but because of what he terms opportunity cost. "If we did the instinctive thing," he wrote, "and made gun owners the enemy, we couldn't do the smart thing and make them allies in the struggle against gun violence." Greater respect for gun lovers might coax from them a greater willingness to adopt commonsense measures.

Baum is a fine writer, a bold advocate for gun rights and responsible firearms use, and a keen observer of people. His portraits of extraordinary Americans, gun guys and gun haters alike, are what make his book such an illuminating read. But he also comes off as something of a naïf. He takes for granted that the antipathy between "gun guys" and their opponents is genuinely about firearms. Of one interviewee, he writes, "[T]o Herpin, the pro-gun-control position felt like an attack on his tastes, on who he was as a person. Maybe he was wrong, but that was how he heard it." Don't overthink it. He wasn't wrong.

It cuts both ways, of course. The people who rail against "gun nuts" surely know that legal gun owners are responsible for an insignificant portion of all crime. And the AR-15 lovers who claim to fear Obama and the UN probably aren't really stashing away thousand-dollar rifles in their backyards, at least not in great numbers. Baum notes that TEOTWAWKI, an acronym meaning "The End of the World as We Know It," sounds "like an upstate New York summer camp." Yes, and that hints at something important: both sides are, to a degree, playacting. An unpleasant fact of life in a country where the discourse has soured is that people will make outrageous claims about their opponents and even about themselves, all in the name of antagonism and provocation.

Baum's book has the potential to remind readers how fruitless that antagonism is, to show them that if we're honest about all aspects of this issue, we can save lives while bridging a cultural gap that only seems to be widening.

A writer living in southern Connecticut, Stefan Beck has written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Sun, The Weekly Standard, The New Criterion, and other publications. He also writes a food blog, The Poor Mouth, which can be found at www.stefanbeckonline.com/tpm/.

Reviewer: Stefan Beck