Outside the world’s largest gun show the flag flies at half-mast, but it’s unclear for which catastrophe. The most recent mass shooting, at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, California, was on a Wednesday and Wanenmacher’s Tulsa Arms Show is three days later, but the shock of mass shootings and the periods of mourning which follow ebb more quickly now than even a few years ago.
The nightmare has woven itself into the everyday informational stream: the stock market rises and falls, one team beats another team, restaurants open and close, Apple announces a new phone, a man enters a public place with artillery and massacres a bunch of strangers. It’s news but not shocking news. There is a mass shooting – more than four people not including the shooter – nine out of 10 days in America.
Inside Wanenmacher’s Tulsa Arms Show, the sheer scale amazes. The event fills the Expo Center on the Tulsa fairgrounds, all 11 acres of it, with more than 4,200 tables. It takes five and a half minutes, at a brisk pace, to cross from one end to the other, eight hours simply to wander through the stalls. You could argue that the annual Shot Show in Las Vegas is bigger, but that is strictly for industry professionals, law enforcement and dealers. Wanenmacher’s is where the ordinary American gun culture is on its most expansive display.
The guns are as varied and as beautiful as human experience itself, in every shape, color, price point and for every purpose. There are rifles and pistols and semi-automatics, by brand, by type, by cost. There are worn old .22s you might give a kid to shoot squirrels. There are long-barreled old Colts out of westerns, and neat little Glocks that possess the slick smoothness of MacBook Airs. There are new concepts in barreling, targets, silencers, laser sights, armor, customized hearing protection, triggers that are not in violation of the ban on automatic weapons. And those are just the dealers’ wares: individual sellers wander the stalls with little flags on sticks, detailing what they offer for sale or trade: a left-handed Sig Sauer or a Ruger EC9s, say.
At the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, near Los Angeles, ex-marine Ian David Long used a .45 Glock 21 with an extended magazine when he murdered 12 people. In the history of mass shootings in the US, the Thousand Oaks massacre is not just one among the now hundreds a year. At least 30 people at the bar that night had survived, a year earlier, the mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas, in which a man with no criminal record or mental health issues or apparent motive, armed with 10 AR-10s and four AR-15s modified with bump stocks among other weapons, killed 58 and left 851 injured.
A mass shooting is no longer a once-in-a-lifetime event in the US.
The morning after Thousand Oaks, Lonnie Phillips woke his wife Sandy with the news. They were in Long Beach, working with grassroots organizations supporting survivors of gun violence. “We don’t have far to go for the next one,” he told her. By noon they had arrived at the scene.
Since their daughter Jessica Ghawi, a young sports journalist, was murdered in the 2012 Aurora, Colorado, shooting, Sandy and Lonnie have lived out of a 26ft-long tagalong trailer, a Rockwood Ultralight that’s somewhat worn. “Quite honestly, we need a new one,” Sandy admits. They’ve put the machine to good use. Thousand Oaks is their 11th shooting, if you include their daughter’s at Aurora, which Sandy calls “our shooting”.
“We kind of got it down to a loop,” Sandy says. “We’ve done the west loop several times.” They’re working on an east loop. “That’s what we do. We keep moving.” How did Sandy and Lonnie decide to do this with their lives? “That was easy. That was so easy.”
In July 2012, Jessica was killed, and in December of that same year, there was Sandy Hook, where 20 children and six adults died. “We walked into the community center and some of the families were walking in,” Sandy says. “And I turned to my husband and said: ‘Oh my God that’s what we looked like five months ago.’ And I wanted to run up to every one and put my arms around them and say, ‘You feel like you’re not going to live through this but you will. Honest, you will.’”
In the past six years, Sandy has spoken with more than 1,000 victims of gun violence. Mass shootings have become so common in the United States that they now have regulars. “We do see the same Red Cross people, and sometimes the same Billy Graham people.” Sandy says Greg Vanis, an Illinois man, sets up “crosses for losses” at the memorials for the victims. They’ve come to know him, too.
At the Santa Fe, Texas, school shooting in May, they ran into several reporters who had been at Parkland, Florida, prompting a reunion of sorts. “I’m glad to see you but I’m so sick of seeing you this way,” Sandy told them.
There are two gun cultures in America now, not just one. The first is a celebration of weapons and of the freedom weapons promise, a culture of resistance to government, of revolutionary individualism, a culture as old as the country itself, and the other, much newer, a perpetual caravan of mourning for senseless death. These cultures coexist but do not coincide. The political divisions in Washington, as vicious and irreconcilable as they may be, are not accidents of process. They are only signs of the far more profound divisions that lie beneath.
The beauty of the guns for sale at Wanenmacher’s is undeniable. The Barrett .50 caliber with night vision and thermal scope is iconic, pure power in physical form. “He’s light there. Pick him up,” the dealer purrs. She’s right. He is surprisingly light. The Winchesters from the 1880s are more distinctly American in their design than the Capitol building, and more refined, more elegant. The presentation boxes from the 19th century are simply fabulous works of craftsmanship and art, like Wes Anderson made a violent lunchbox set.
Everywhere at Wanenmacher, there are the conversations one hears among collectors, gun people telling gun stories to other gun people. “I told him if you come to the gym with me, I’ll go to the gun show with you,” says a long-suffering wife to the equally long-suffering friend she meets only at events like these. A wry smile passes between them. “We all know the gun guy who never fired a gun because getting to the range is a pain in the ass,” says a customer to a dealer from whom he has just made an extravagant purchase, as a kind of justification, to demonstrate that he’s not the kind of gun owner he’s describing. A sign in a display case makes a cute in-joke: “For an additional $4.95 I will provide a receipt that matches what you told your wife you paid.”
Suddenly, it strikes me who the gun people remind me of. They remind me of readers, book people, my people. Half of these guys, it seems to me, are out here buying guns they’re never going to use, buying them just to have them, just like book people buy books to be around books. They possess the same crazy passion, the same sense of community, the same belief in the sacrosanct nature of the product. And just like book people, the crowd at Wanenmacher’s believes the product is good in itself.
How would you feel if the government came for your books? How would you feel if the government wanted to restrict dangerous books?
One of Sandy and Lonnie’s main tasks when they talk to survivors is to prepare them for the self-righteous fury of gun rights advocates. “They need to know they’re going to be used and abused,” Sandy says. Survivors need media training at the most devastating moments of their lives. “We tell them about the people who say this never happened. Your daughter is an actress,” Sandy says. “It’s so horrible and it happens every single time in a mass shooting. And they believe it. They truly believe. That’s the insane part.”
The same day of every mass shooting in America, conspiracy theorists actively promote the idea that it is a “false flag”. It’s one of the reasons the Phillipses keep traveling, talking to victim after victim. After Jessica died, “we started to experience some pretty ugly things, and we wondered ‘is this normal?’ and then, yeah, it is normal”, Sandy says. It is now normal to have your children murdered, and then be told they never existed.
Only in America is the gun a totem, a sacred political object beyond the realm of argument. The gun laws of every other country provide a balance between public safety and the rights of people to own weapons. In some places, like Canada, gun ownership is relatively easy. Over a quarter of Canadian households own some sort of firearm. In other places, like Japan, while gun ownership is possible, it’s barely so. There are only 210,928 citizens licenced to carry firearms in Japan out of a population of 127 million.
In all these other countries, some people think the rules are too strict, others think that the rules are too lenient, but the general idea that guns should be regulated is not disputed. Every other machine is regulated, so why not guns? Gun politics is esoteric everywhere else. Only in America is the fascination so total that it defines politics. The symbolism of the gun is vastly more powerful that any discussion of policy.
There is politics at the gun show, without a doubt. If you sign up for a National Rifle Association (NRA) membership at one of their many booths at the entrance, you don’t have to pay the $10 admission fee. A sign at one booth does read, like a kind of accidental poem:
No sales to
Obama
or Clinton supporters.
Get lost.
You are too dumb and irresponsible
to own a gun.
But, I bet if you showed him the cash, he would sell. The room is full of fantasies of defiance, political fantasies of historical memory. There are fantasies of the old west, embodied in those long-barrel colts, fantasies of the civil war by way of gorgeous cartridge cases or terrifying battlefield amputation equipment. There are fantasies of the Vietnam war, too, in a strong market for original unit patches. There’s an awful lot of Nazi paraphernalia, too, far more than the usual pins and cigarette cases you might find in musty army surplus places.
Also on display was a slave shackle and a bill of sale for a 13-year-old girl named Delilah, aged 13. She cost $75. “You need any Negroes?” the dealer, a warm gentleman with facial hair modelled on old paintings of Robert E Lee, asks. “I’m afraid those ones are all dead so you’re going to lose on that deal.”
A regular customer drifts by and commands his attention. “You staying out of trouble?”
“Well, I got married.”
“Lets just leave that there. It’s coming.”
Mostly politics at the gun show is assumed, the way dealers or hunters or the NRA activists refer to everyone, without thinking about it, as “responsible gun owners like us”. A grandfather and a granddaughter laugh together as they polish medals. A new father comforts his crying baby in his arms while an AR-10 rides in the stroller.
To them, guns represent something larger than mere machinery. They’re an entire aesthetic combining the love of the wilderness, the camaraderie of military service, the fear of crime, the distrust of government, the sheen of naked power with the history of the original settlers, the ideal of self-reliance and the authenticity of rural life into a vision of what it means to be a free person, an individual. The love of guns has so much influence because it is so primordial, so far below the surface of rational decision-making.
Sandy Phillips does not despair, traveling from massacre to massacre. Washington makes her despair. “When we go to lobby, or when we talk to elected officials, then I get discouraged,” she says. “Let’s take someone like Ted Cruz from Texas, who will lie to you to your face, who will tell you things that you know are not true.” Sandy and Lonnie had a private meeting with him once. “I think he just expected to pat us on the head and send us on our way,” she remembers. “He found out we had done our research, and he didn’t like that very much. That’s the kind of guy he is.”
The Phillipses tried other methods. They tried to sue the gun dealer who sold their daughter’s killer 4,000 rounds of ammunition, but the case was dismissed due to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. The couple had to pay $264,000 to the other side’s lawyers and filed for bankruptcy in January 2017. That’s what it’s like to oppose guns in the US.
If Sandy were in charge, what would the gun laws look like? She would put semi-automatics, such as the AR-15 or the various semi-auto pistols, under the same classification as machine guns, which you can still own but only for a price and under certain conditions. She wants to ban any accessories that allow semi-automatic to function as automatics, such as bump stocks. Then “the easy stuff”, expanded background checks, which 90% of Americans, and 69% of NRA members, support, yet which remain politically impossible.
So, to sum up, if Sandy Phillips, implacable advocate of gun control, had her way with American policy, the US would still have the most permissive gun laws on earth by a large margin.
All reasonable compromise is, needless to say, impossible. It’s America in the 21st century. The drive to intellectual purity is total and dominates. If guns are good in themselves, then more guns are the answer to public safety not less. (Besides, swimming pools and cellphones result in tragedies but nobody wants to ban them.)
If guns are good in themselves, we should want them in our churches and our legislatures. If guns are good, when the government decides to ban them, you should buy more. (Nothing leads to sales spikes for weapons more than even a hint of an assault rifle ban.) You need guns for self-defence because the police will fail you, that’s why everyone needs a gun. This process by which the love of the gun becomes a value unto itself, happens bit by bit, conversation by conversation at Wanenmacher’s.
At one of the booths, a company called US LawShield offers “the original and best legal defense for self defense program”. There are several plans, starting at $10.95 a month, promising “ANYTIME access to our Emergency Hotline answered by an attorney not a call center”. “Why do you need a plan?” their brochure asks. “There will be an investigation if you use a gun, whether you pull the trigger or not, or any other legal weapon to stop a threat. The legal system can be hostile, even if you did nothing wrong.”
Americans are purchasing access to emergency legal advice in case they happen to shoot somebody. They are paying $10.95 to imagine a story playing out in their lives, a continuously looped fantasy that they might need to kill someone in self-defence and the government not only wouldn’t keep them safe but also wouldn’t understand. No politics can hope to compete with an inner monologue like that, a movie playing on repeat in the collective mind.
By now, Sandy and Lonnie have more of less broken down how to deal with a mass shooting. “We’ve been doing this long enough to know how it works,” Sandy says. They make phone calls immediately, on their way to the scene. They visit the memorials, which are always haunting.
The sight of pictures of the victims going up “takes me to my knees”, Sandy says, because it’s the moment when the death becomes a face, a story. They attend the vigils, even though “they have become, I hate to say it, somewhat routine”. Then they head to the “reunification center”, a term with evil irony since it is the place where people go to find out there will be never be any reunification with the people they love. They tell the authorities that they’re there to support whoever needs their support. “We keep the politics out of it,” Sandy says.
Somewhere between Wanenmacher’s gun show and the rituals of mourning for mass shootings sits the question of the second amendment. By this point, the matter has been chewed to death with no satisfying conclusion. Not since the medieval scholastics debated how many angels can dance on the head of a pin have so many brilliant minds been engaged in answering such an irrelevant and impossible question: what did a collection of 18th-century geniuses mean by “a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed”?
The debate over the meaning of those 26 words has raged over dinner tables and in bars and in the op-ed pages of newspapers and in courts for a hundred years. Legal scholars have teased out every feathery trace of original intention. The real problem though is that the meaning of the words couldn’t be any clearer.
“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” If you read those words outside the political context of the moment, without knowing the history of the debate, their sense is plain. But no one, not even extreme pro-gun advocates, are willing to take them at face value. There are slightly less than 300 federal gun laws in the US today, and thousands of regulations. They all infringe the rights of the people to keep and bear arms in some way. If you take the sentence from the constitution for what it means, why can’t any American own an Apache helicopter? Or a nuclear bomb?
A constitution exists to bind a country together. At this point in history, 240 years after its composition, much of the US constitution is sheer nonsense. Democrats and Republicans alike worship the document as a sacred text, indulging a delirious sentimentality which was the precise opposite of what the framers envisioned as the necessary basis for responsible government. During the 2016 election, gold star father Khizr Khan waved a pocket constitution at a Clinton rally like a talisman to deflect Trump’s insults; the New York Times reprinted the whole thing, with commentary, like Talmud. The reverence is insane. The document says right on the first page that every African American is three-fifth of a person.
Guns just point out an obvious reality. The entire practice of constitutional law in the US is an absurdity. It gives absolute significance to meanings that have long since vanished into history. Jefferson himself believed it was the “solemn opportunity” of every generation to update the constitution “every 19 or 20 years”. Before Trump, and anything he may or may not have done, there was already a constitutional crisis. There is no way to govern effectively when your foundational document is nonsensical and you worship it anyway. Look at what happens when you base your gun policy on the writings of a bunch of guys who had never seen an integrated cartridge, never mind an automatic weapon. You get mass murder nine days out of 10.
The number of guns in the US is somewhere north of 393m. Americans buy 12bn rounds a year, and a solid estimate of how much ammunition is in private hands is more or less impossible. The number of live rounds is literally inestimable. There is little point comparing gun violence in the US to gun violence in other countries. There are 57 times as many school shootings in the US as there are in the rest of the industrialized world combined. The reason for the difference is simple. When other countries faced mass shootings, their systems of government had the ability to take measures in response. The US doesn’t.
The rash of mass murders points to a broader crisis: American politics is reaching a post-policy phase. It is a battleground over identities rather than over strategies for public management. These identities are in conflict, and growing more conflicted, while there is no functioning mechanism for reconciliation. America is splitting at the heart.
On Sunday, the gun show winds down, and the Phillipses are preparing to leave Thousand Oaks. “I usually fall apart when we’re leaving,” Sandy admits. “I know that this is just the start of their pain and it goes on forever. The void is always there.” The booths empty one by one, with just enough enthusiasm remaining for a couple of last-minute deals, a few tired goodbyes.
The partings are only temporary, at Wanenmacher’s anyway. The next show is only six months away. The flag outside will almost certainly be hanging at half-mast.
Photography from Reuters, REX/Shutterstock, AP, Getty Images