What is Gun Culture, Anyway?
My favorite Birthday, and I’ve had quite a few sad to say, was celebrated in a gun store.
The celebratory store in question is in a small town near Tulsa, Oklahoma… just far enough away that you wouldn’t drive into the city unless you absolutely had to, and just close enough that you could get there quickly if you absolutely had to. It’s the kind of town no mainstream journalist would be caught dead in, unless it was to report that it had recently been obliterated by a tornado.
This town has a “Main Street” that seems torn right out of Bogdanovich’s THE LAST PICTURE SHOW… a single wide avenue bracketed on both sides by low brick and wood buildings built at the turn of the last century.
It’s not hard to imagine that fifty years ago all of the town’s commerce happened on this one street. But not anymore… nowawdays all the action happens at the Wal-Mart Supercenter half a mile to the South. Main Street has been left (symbolically and literally) to rot, like a row of hollowed out tooth sockets. The few entrepreneurs still brave enough to try and live out their small business dreams along Main Street, to buck the relentless trend towards corporate homogeneity, never last long. The turnover in these Main Street commerical buildings is depressingly high.
Except for the local gun shop… which seems eternal and, as far as I can tell, has been there forever.
It’s owned by an older white-haired gentleman named Bill, gaunt with age but with a strong straight back born of pride in a lifetime of good honest work. Bill is always behind the counter, chatting up the customers and making the kind of down home country jokes that provide “local color” for those Mainstream Media “let’s visit the zoo” flyover country sneer pieces that show-up in outlets like The New Yorker whenever the editors want to say something nasty about disaffected Red State voters and their “boutique” concerns about liberty and patriotism
But back to Bill, whom I’ve gotten to know a little over the years. My Father-in-law, Brother-in-Law and I are all gun enthusiasts and we spend a lot of time at the shop. Bill is smart and clever and full of the kind of folksy wisdom that we need a lot more of in this country at this particular moment.
On one of my recent trips I was talking to Bill about his other business, a pawn shop where he also does a brisk side hustle in personal micro loans. Bill told me that the average amount of the loans he typically makes is about $20.
I laughed and said “who the hell takes out a loan for twenty bucks?”
Bill said “Someone who needs to buy baby formula on Monday and doesn’t get paid until Friday.”
Well, rarely have I felt like such a complete asshole. But Bill, to his credit, did not press his advantage… he’s too nice a guy. Having helped me learn something about people less fortunate than I, whose life experience I just did not understand, he was happy to move on to other subjects… like the racks and racks of super cool rifles on the wall behind him… “weapons of war”, in the parlance of our times.
Our intellectual “betters”, the ones like Taylor Lorenz, Don Lemon and Felicia Somnez who seem to be in charge at the great culture shaping institutions of current America… the Washington Post, New York Times and CNN… could learn a little something from Bill about forgiveness, grace and understanding.
But back to my favorite subject… me.
On the birthday in question, I’d brought my rifle to town with me, along with a small picatinny rail system that I wanted to attach to it. The problem is that gunsmithing is not a skill I possess, so I headed on over to Bill’s shop to see if he had a gunsmith on staff who could help me out. As it turned out, the answer was no, but there was a young man behind the counter who said he thought it was something he could probably figure out, and was game to give it a try.
So I pulled a stool up to the counter. This young man put my rifle in a brace, got out his tools, pulled up YouTube on his phone and we got to work. It took about two hours to get the rail system installed on the rifle… it turned out that it didn’t fit perfectly and we had to break the rifle almost all the way down and make some alterations to the hard plastic covering around the breach to make it fit.
It was a lot of work, but it was also great fun.
At no point during the proceedings, mind you, were we working alone. We were, at all times, surrounded by a crowd… sometimes it was a crowd of one and sometimes it was a crowd of three or four or ten… it was never zero. Someone would walk over and ask what was causing us trouble, and suggest a solution. Someone else would stroll by and suggest that we might try a different tool. Almost everyone who came into the store during those two hours was not only interested in what we were up to, but actually wanted to participate, to help out.
And that is the essence of gun culture… it’s a hobby, but it is one about which its enthusiasts are incredibly passionate. I find that most people who are an active part of gun culture have the heart of a teacher and love to evangelize about their “sport.” Not just because of what guns can do for their owners… harvest game, defend their families and property, protect our liberty… but because of what they mean. If you have a gun, you are by definition more self-sufficient than anyone who does not. You are less dependent. The list of things you absolutely need from Government suddenly gets a lot shorter.
And that’s why They hate them so much.
The Left uses the words “Gun Culture” as a pejorative… as an insult. They do this partially out of malice, to be sure, but much of the reason for this tactic can be laid at the feet of sheer ignorance. I wrote a piece a couple weeks ago that traced the most frustrating aspects of the gun control debate back to the fact that gun control activists don’t know anything, not one damned thing, about how guns or ammunition operate. But the same can be said about their lack of understanding with regard to “Gun Culture” itself.
Safety and education are a big deal in Gun Culture, it turns out. The NRA spends at least as much money on training and safety education as it spends on lobbying the Government, and the Glock Sport Shooting Foundation runs safety-focused shooting matches all over America every weekend of the year… to name but a couple of examples. I once experienced a series of malfunctions while shooting in a GSSF match. The guy in the lane next to me offered to take a look and found a carbon buildup in the barrell where I had been unable to see it. He took time out from his own shooting to run back to his car where he fetched a tool and ground the carbon off for me so I could rejoin the match.
That’s the essence of Gun Culture.
I think the average Progressive Gun Control Activist thinks of gun owners as a bunch of drunk rednecks riding broken down horses through the woods shooting their guns in the air and yelling YEEE-HAW!!! But as with just about everything else having to do with guns, they get that one wrong too.
Almost everyone you run into in a typical American Gun store, or at a range or a shooting tournament knows the five firearm safety rules by heart, even if they sometimes switch up the order…
1. ALWAYS KEEP YOUR FIREARM POINTED IN A SAFE DIRECTION.
2. TREAT ALL FIREARMS AS IF THEY WERE LOADED.
3. KEEP YOUR TRIGGER FINGER OUTSIDE THE GUARD AND OFF OF THE TRIGGER UNTIL YOU ARE READY TO FIRE.
4. BE CERTAIN OF YOUR TARGET, YOUR LINE OF FIRE, AND WHAT LIES BEYOND YOUR TARGET.
5. ALWAYS WEAR APPROPRIATE EYE AND EAR PROTECTION WHEN SHOOTING AND MAINTAINING YOUR FIREARM.
I’ve seen men accidentally “muzzle” (a critical violation of rule #1) other gun store customers and then spend twenty minutes personally apologizing to everyone in the store for doing so. We take this stuff very seriously.
Tips on gun storage, ammunitions selection and reloading, gun cleaning and maintenance, and productive hunting locations are traded like secret recipes at school bake sales.
Now sure, gun culture can get a little over-the-top and bro-y at times. Of course it can, but in that way it’s really no different than gym culture, or pick-up basketball culture. Hell, I’ve seen more shit talking at a pickle ball match than I’ve seen at a typical GSSF match.
When gun enthusiasts get together in large enough groups, there’s always a lot of talk about how each individual gun owner might react to an active shooter situation or to a global “shit hits the fan” scenario… it’s a bit like live-action roll-play… Dungeons and Dragons with rifles.
If you ask any of the people working at a gun store what they’re carrying, they’ll happily start pulling guns and knives out of their pockets and laying them on the counter. And under the Gun Culture theory that two is one, one is none, and three is for me, there will never be less than two of each lying on the counter when all the drawing is said and done.
So yeah… gun culture can get a little silly at times, but if you ask me whether I’d rather be in the middle of a crisis, any crisis, with three people chosen at random from amongst the customers of an average gun store, or all the “men” in this video of a woman being assaulted on a New York City subway where no one at all stepped forward to help her, or the SWAT teams from Uvalde, TX or Parkland FL, I’ll take the gun shop customers every day of the week, and come what may.
But, contra the reality of the New York City Metro system, to read the Mainstream Legacy Press or, God help us, Twitter these days is to believe that “Gun Culture” itself is the problem. That it is fundamentally responsible for all the gun violence currently plaguing America.
I recently saw a well-known Blue Check Mark Journalist on Twitter claim that there is a Right Wing insurrection coming, and to understand that fact, all you have to do is spend time in a gun store. Well… I’m reminded of a common Twitter joke construction that goes something like this… “tell me you’ve never been in a gun store without telling me you’ve never been in a gun store.”
It’s simply incredible how much of what they’re certain of, just ain’t so.
As the old saying goes, there are 55 million law abiding gun owners in America who collectively possess nearly 400 million guns… if Gun Culture were the problem, believe us when we tell you, you would know it.