when I WAS AT BIG SANDY, IT ALL SEEMED NORMAL. Even the guy who had mounted a machine gun along with a giant disco ball on the back of his boat, which he parked on a trailer overlooking a set of hills that had been seeded with sticks of TNT attached to glow sticks so that if you shot one of the glow sticks, it would explode. Sure, why wouldn’t you do that? I thought. This was the Big Sandy Shoot, where, it often seemed, anything went.
Or nearly anything. The rocket launcher affixed to the top of the Hummer, the very first thing I saw when I got up to the quarter-mile-long firing line, would not be fired, I was assured. Mikey, one of the shooters from Arizona Armory (a largely AR-15-oriented gun seller and gunsmith in Phoenix), told me they’d get in trouble if they launched rockets, so they wouldn’t do that, at least not this weekend. Of the thousands of other guns, though, all laid out on tables and tripods and gun racks, attached to trucks and boats and armored personnel carriers and antiaircraft turrets, pretty much everything would be fired—to spectacular and more than occasionally absurd effect. I would get to fire the World War II–era Browning .50 caliber, the M16, the Smith & Wesson M76 9mm, the MP5, the Uzi, the shorty M16, the Beretta 9mm, the Tantal 5.45x39, the PPSh-41, the Thompson .45ACP, and the AK-47, to start. It was loud as God. It was constant. It was definitely excessive.
The Big Sandy Shoot, “the largest machine-gun shoot in the world… a uniquely American event,” is held two weekends a year, in March and October, outside Wikieup, Arizona, a remote census-designated place halfway between Vegas and Phoenix on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Shooters pay $325 for a spot on the firing line; observers who aren’t local pay thirty-five dollars at the gate. Shooters, staff, and observers come here from all over the world. At the fall shoot, I talked with folks from Belgium, Russia, Mexico, the UK, and Australia, to name just a few countries, and nearly every part of America. Many have come for decades; at least one guy I talked to had been to every single event over the shoot’s thirty-five-year history. The shoot originally began as a group of friends looking for a safe and private place to fire machine guns north of Flagstaff, before wearing out their welcome and moving twice, before the partnership fell apart. They eventually found new partners, incorporated, and purchased the land out here at Big Sandy. I was told that at least a few shooters have received a gun burial here, out on the range, their cremains attached to explosive sticks and shot with the guns they loved, then scattered in the air.
I’m not new to guns. I come from gun country in Michigan, and I live in gun country in Arizona, so they’ve been a constant presence in my life. And as an American man in his forties, I’ve shot some: I’ve shot them a lot in games and occasionally in life. For the past five years, I’ve been writing about my obsession with the 1987 movie Predator and the men who love it, which meant writing about guns, the violent sublime, and the weirdness of American masculinity. Like many Americans, I’ve seen machine guns shot onscreen a lot, but I’ve never shot a machine gun myself. I was here to close the distance and try to understand those who shoot and stockpile these guns.
Many of the shooters were very happy to let
