Gun Guys: A Road Trip

By Dan Baum

Dan Baum is a gun fanatic. He is also Jewish Democrat who grew up in suburban New Jersey. In Gun Guys, he takes us on a guided tour of gun stores and gun shows, shooting ranges and festivals, contests and auctions, trying to figure out what draws so many of us to guns in the first place. Is it just part of being American?  Introducing a wide cast of characters, Baum shows both sides of the gun culture in America, bringing an entire world vividly to life, and in doing so helping to find a middle ground in the gun debate, where actual conversation can take place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9780307962218

Reviews for Gun Guys

[knfmn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book was interesting to read. It was written by a Democrat who happens to like guns. (He must be the one! :) ) His experiences throughout the book in traveling around the country and exploring different parts of the gun culture were fun to read about, although bearing no resemblance to my own experiences. I kept feeling throughout the book that he was missing the big picture overall, though. He wants gun owners to try to be nicer about things and yield "just a little". He does note that gun owners are vilified in this country and charged with having the blood of innocents on their hands, but doesn't seem to understand why that would make a class of people angry.

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An investigation into gun culture in America. The reporter spends time inside the gun culture and tours the country being easily identified as a member. He analyses the divide between the two groups, and many of the problems of the gun owners are explained. They are ageing, and their lives often came a good deal short of their expectations. The effect of actually wearing a weapon, concealed or openly, are shown, and such effects can be far more far reaching than one expects. The statistics are also more equivocal than one might expect....And the USA may have reached the tipping point of it being a good idea to rely on one's own set of weapons for self-defense. But it is chilling to discover the immense holes in the social fabric that the last twenty years have torn.

[dickmanikowski · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I deplore stereotypes, but I'll admit to being what I perceive to be a typical liberal. I didn't grow up using guns. I've never been tempted to hunt (though various relatives do). And I have a knee-jerk reaction when the term "assault weapon" comes up.But real issues are never as black-and-white as we would like them to be. This book exposed me to various aspects of America's gun culture, and I can understand why all sorts of activities that don't interest me absolutely fascinate others.The author (who describes himself as a New York City Jew who was totally lost at summer camp until he discovered he had a talent for target shooting) is a gun collector and occasional shooter who managed to get a book proposal accepted to examine our country's love affair with guns. This book details his year-long exploration, visiting gun stores and gun shows across the country and delving into related areas. Hunting. Machine gun enthusiasts (yes, it's possible to obtain a license for them). Gun collecting. Competitive target shooting. He even visits an armorer who rents firearms to movie studios for use in their films (and carefully supervises their use).As part of his research, he applies for and receives a CCW permit and carries a concealed handgun most of the time for several months.Finally, near the end of his oddyssey, he visits the headquarters of the National Rifle Association and of the Brady Center to End Handgun Violence. At the end of the book, he presents his take on the pros and cons of various aspects of gun control.It's both a fascinating and an illuminating read.

[st5croixsue · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

For starters, I have little to no interest in guns and have generally gravitated to the anti-gun side of the argument, but this book was a paradigm shifter for me; an introduction to all aspects of gun culture presented in a reasoned, sane, humorous, and intelligent fashion. I have a much better understanding of guns, gun people, guns in the media, and the politics behind it all. Each chapter unfolded to reveal a new aspect and another view that I had never considered. If all polarized political issues were presented in such an engaging fashion, we would be living in a more harmonious world. I hope that a lot of people read this one.

[randystafford · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dan Baum has spent a lot of time trying to reconcile his two halves and, in a sense, two halves of America. There's liberal Jewish Democrat Baum and there's Baum who's had a love of guns and shooting since he was five years old. He thinks the rift in his soul is a rift in America, that, if he can explain why guns are important to so many of us, maybe he can get his friends, family, and political allies to understand and accept - as in not trying to ban and control - guns. And, maybe, those of us who like guns will become less suspicious of his politics. We'll all unite in attacking the future in a Progressive way.Gun lovers and conservatives really aren't the target here for this book. Stereotypical liberals are.This is not a book retreading criminological statistics (a brief chapter of footnotes covers that). Baum talks to people, except for members of the military or police, to whom guns are important.I'm not a hardcore gun enthusiast, but I am a lifetime NRA member and have hung out at shooting ranges in three states. Many of the encounters Baum describes remind me of people I've meant then: hunters, competitive shooters, those interested in the technology of guns, preppers and survivalists, doctors - perhaps learning another way to "manage death" as one puts it, and guys who let complete strangers fire their new $9,000 gun. He also talks to four types of gun guys you would not readily think of: a weapons master for Hollywood productions, an engineer who became an evangelizer of gun ownership to his fellow blacks after he was robbed at gunpoint, a former Chicago gang member once jailed for shooting a man (and the only interview subject who has actually been shot), and a Jew who published academic works showing the direct inspiration of Nazi gun control laws on American gun control legislation and the role of gun control in fostering genocide in several countries -works pretty much ignored by every side of the gun debate. This is an honest, thorough, fun book.These aren't dry interviews. Baum is funny and knows how to tell a story. Maybe, since he already related his own hunting stories, the "Hogzilla" chapter about hunting wild pigs in Texas wasn't strictly necessary, but it's the funniest of the book. He careens across the country starting out enthusiastically (and legally) packing a pistol in the Whole Foods Market in Boulder - and disappointingly noting no reaction - and ending up at NRA headquarters.The matter of the NRA brings up one problem of the book. Baum constantly harps on people wanting to arm themselves out of fear of crime - even while crime rates are going down. He sees the NRA as exaggerating crime for political ends instead of concentrating on useful gun safety programs. The importance of maintaining a legal right and ability of armed self-defense no matter what the level of present personal danger is doesn't seem to occur to him.Baum also spends a lot of time pointing out that Democrats and the Obama administration have given up on gun control. Indeed, he points out the Obama administration's only action on guns was to make it easier to carry concealed weapons in national parks. While he does acknowledge the futility and ignorance behind the Feinstein "assault weapons" ban, he says that's in the past. Obama and his political allies don't want to confiscate guns and restrict Second Amendment rights. That's just NRA fear mongering to get donations.Of course, history has invalidated that viewpoint post-Sandy Hook. The NRA's fears turned out to be entirely justified. Gun-grabbing is in the DNA of many Democrats though, in fairness to Baum, I have met other Democrat and Obama supporters who like guns. I would dearly like to know how Baum would revise his book in light of recent history. His Democrat party has made gun control a priority again. His native state of Colorado has passed significant gun control legislation.To his credit, Baum, at the end, begins to maybe see that many people in America are feeling "overmanaged and under-respected" in many areas, that their exasperated rhetoric often sounds like gun owners. Will he have a change of heart? I'm afraid that, like one of his interviewees, I think most political opinions are almost genetic, emotion based, rationalized with a patina of reason and very refractory. That goes for opinions on guns.To be honest, while I'd like to hope Baum will change the minds of his fellow liberals, I don't think he will. I think gun guys will be the ones that most enjoy this book.There is one theme running through this book which is interesting no matter which side of the debate you are on. Baum says that the experience of frequently carrying a weapon calmed him, made him more observant, and even more eager to avoid a confrontation. It seems that there might be something to be said for managing death, truly and practically considering the consequences of that power. One of his subjects thinks this is what links the place of the gun in American culture to the respect and mythic place the samurai has in Japan or the medieval knight in Europe.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Baum is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, except that he loves guns. And he agrees with gun guys that liberal distaste for guns is a matter of taste, since he argues that the effect of guns on crime can’t really be proven. (He has less to say about the effect of guns on suicide and accidental death, where he agrees that gun guys have fallen down in promoting responsibility as a gun owner’s social duty; he argues that social pressure should make poor gun storage socially unacceptable, like smoking at someone else’s house. He doesn’t mention “like driving drunk,” because of course that was both a social and a legal change, though he does suggest that rational gun owners ought to support the criminalization of reckless failure to secure guns.) I feel some sympathy for his ‘don’t target responsible gun owners’ (but for what? What exactly are they being targeted for?) position and for his argument that supporting gun restrictions has put a barrier between many lower-middle-class (white) voters and the Democratic party they should naturally support. But I feel like I’m being asked to make yet another deal with the devil (since the Democrats’ pact with Wall Street has gone so well), and I wondered why in his road trip to talk to gun owners and figure out what was up with them, he never did seek out the irresponsible ones whose kids shoot themselves or other kids. He did randomly encounter a guy who was put in a wheelchair by his own gun (his girlfriend shot him with a gun that he thought didn’t have a bullet chambered), and he sought out a former gang member who’d been shot, but he never manages to integrate these people or the “irresponsible” gun owners he generally condemns (including the drunken shooters who ricochet bullets down on him and his wife during a rafting trip as they shoot bullets at a rock face) with his insistence that carrying a gun makes him a more responsible, careful individual, always aware of his surroundings. I accept that this is true for him (though not for the security guards who leave their guns in restrooms, or the firearms instructor Baum encounters who forgets that her gun is loaded, or for that matter my brother-in-law whose friend accidentally discharged his gun in my brother-in-law’s apartment).But that very fact—that carrying a gun changes a person—is another way of saying that a person with a gun is a different socio/cultural/technical entity than a person without a gun, and not always for the better; because of this, regulating the gun can change how the person behaves and even how the person sees him or herself. He imagines how guns can fend off crimes—for example inducing carriers to deescalate and avoid confrontation because any confrontation could become deadly—but never how they could make crimes worse. Baum ultimately argues that we need warriors—sheepdogs, is his other term—in our culture. But why do they need so many guns? If the argument is that Americans, unlike, say, Japanese or Australians, need lots of civilian guns to make each other behave, then shouldn’t we be taking a harder look at what we might be doing differently so that this need would diminish?