On the American gun as entertainment

1.

The National Rifle Association refers to itself on its website in several ways. In one spot, it's America's foremost defender of Second Amendment rights. In another, "the NRA has, since its inception, been the premier firearms education organization in the world." Also, "The National Rifle Association is America's longest-standing civil rights organization."

Whatever it imagines itself to be, the story goes that the NRA was founded on the gun club, a place to go to shoot with other people. The state of New York helped out in the early days. In 1872, officials gave money to the months-old National Rifle Association to assist with purchasing Creed Farm in what is now Queens, a spot just off what is now the Cross Island Expressway, alongside a road that is improbably named Winchester Boulevard. 

The Creedmore Rifle Range became an important location for the new NRA — the organization held years of international competitions on the spot and consequently earned worldwide publicity as it built shooting guns at things into a spectator sport. And then, the version of events breaks in one of two ways — either interest in the American gun dipped in the early 1890s, or political opponents drove the NRA out of New York in the same timeframe. Either way, or due to both to some degree, the organization re-sited to New Jersey. 

After the NRA departed, the Winchester Road parcel became the Creedmore Psychiatric Center, where Woody Guthrie died of Huntington's Disease in 1967. Bud Powell, the towering bebop pianist, died at Creedmore, too, succumbing to schizophrenia, alcoholism, and tuberculosis. Lou Reed spent some time at Creedmore, but he didn't die there. Now, much of the hospital that stood on the first NRA gun club site has been sold off or left to rot. Urban explorers report that some of the abandoned buildings now host giant piles of bird shit; some mounds have grown to several feet in height. 

2.

Stretching back to at least the 1790s, riflery matches that fueled the NRA's early days evolved from turkey shoots into other kinds of competitions. Barring a handful of exceptions in which women joined the group, such as when Annie Oakley blew away nearly 5,000 glass balls in a single day at one gathering, these were essentially men performing for each other, boys besting each other's bullseyes. 

Later, shooting contests joined the realm of more formalized sports. World competitions emerged, spread, and then, in a kind of full circle, the Olympics turned to the NRA in 1978 to run its shooting events worldwide. And so it would continue until 1994, when, during the push for a federal assault rifle ban in the United States, the Olympics parted ways with the National Rifle Association, citing the group's use of its position as equivalent to a private office for lobbying, patronage, and public relations.

Luckily for the NRA, the era of guns as objects for entertainment was marked by more than just public contests. Guns as spectacle leaped from the gun club and sporting events to the movie theater in a new and explicit fashion in the late 20th Century. Something distinct happened to guns on the screen in the 1970s and 1980s. In Hollywood productions, handheld ordnance began to include a new kind of montage — steroidal characters prepping for gun battles in sequences flush with sexual pressure, stroking and gripping and pumping their oily killing machines, draping themselves in ammunition, heading out to fire thousands of rounds at the other characters. You couldn't clear a sex scene with the censors if it featured as much closeup detail and dripping sweat.

This was new, by and large. No director in the decades prior, not the heads of the Westerns in the 1950s and 1960s, not even those who'd mastered mid-20th-Century bloodbaths such as Sam Peckinpah, spent as much time on the actual hardware of the shootout as the gun-movie masters of late 20th Century. The Schwarzeneggers and Stallones, the Bronsons and the Eastwoods — they became the runway models for muzzles and bullet belts.

It was business, and business was good. For the product marketers of the gun industry, Hollywood promised never-ending rewards. Smaller manufacturers courted the movie armorers with special prices and discounts on wholesale. Meanwhile, prominent gunmakers like Smith and Wesson didn't bother with the sales pitch. Hollywood took care of those brands on the big screen well enough. Their guns just appeared, sleek and fearsome, showering their love upon the dazzled audience, all of us paying the price of the ticket to witness these storms of lead. 

The movies gave some guns a new lease on life, starting in the 1970s and 1980s. Smith & Wesson was set to discontinue its Model 29 .44 Magnum, for example, until Dirty Harry caressed it on screen in 1971; after that, the manufacturer couldn't keep it in stock. Similarly, the Desert Eagle was a massive — and, it turned out, a hard to master — handgun designed by Magnum Research in the 1980s for the hunter who might want to kill animals with a pistol. Not a lot of people did, it turned out. The weapon had other ambitions, however. Cutting a sexy profile, the Eagle became an iconic object in one musclebound epic after another. Big action stars sported the giant hand cannon — from Arnold to Sly, Bruce Willis to Jean-Claude Van Damme — and so, Magnum found itself with a gun that experts said was too big and too heavy to be very practical for hunting, but to which fans of the movies said, "yes, please, let us shoot that gun like our heroes." 

Asked whether the Desert Eagle's popularity should be credited to its career in the blockbusters, Magnum chair and CEO John Risdall told a reporter, "Yes and no. The gun all by itself works. It does what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to shoot bullets when you want them." Risdall identified the three top uses of the Desert Eagle as "hunting, self-protection, and just going to the range and having lots of fun."

On the manufacturers' side, marketers and licensing lawyers watched for any signs that, say, kids might be targets in these stories — in the United States, the 20th Century was a time when the slaughter of children by gun-wielding individuals was unthinkable and unconscionable by even the makers of these weapons — but otherwise, the stream of unpaid publicity was entirely welcome. 

Hollywood's armorers had it pretty good, too, ultimately making the leap from imaginary outcomes to helping people kill people in the real world. Military firearms contractors learned they could stop off at the Tinseltown armorers to test things out; the exchange of access and testing for continued permission to feature the products in the movies afforded the manufacturers free but essential documentation. They could show their bosses whether a change to a weapon would work or not, the successful proof cases unlocking mass-production deals for new, lucrative and more lethal devices. Everybody won. 

These days, the NRA celebrates the silver-screen success story of the trigger and the muzzle. At its National Firearms Museum in Fairfax, Virginia, the Hollywood Guns exhibit is the NRA's most popular room in the complex. It's the last stop on the tour; Hollywood's guns are the cherry on top of the story of firearms as entertainment in the United States.

3.

Perhaps I don’t understand what it looks like to have lots of fun. 

I’m standing in a gun club in the desert, indoors at the end of a long soot-soaked lane ending in a pocked gray backstop. A 9-millimeter Beretta is cracking off in my white-knuckled hands. I hate the feel of it, the sound of it, and I hate being here at all. At the same time, on either side of me, across the span of lanes like mine, people are firing their guns. I am looking for signs of lots of fun.

Next to our little glassed-in box stands a massive man in a fitted white polo shirt who is working on his killing routine. He is shooting a very fat and very heavy-looking revolver. The fist-sized silver barrel discharges its load, a tongue of fire flashing from the front of the thing. Its report is phenomenal. The big brown cans that cover my ears seem to do nothing to buffer its blast. The man crouches slightly, draws again, yanking the huge gun from its holster, squeezes, straightens — repeat. As he chisels away at the routine, his upper body knotted, all of him focused on rehearsing these shots, he does not radiate fun. This is a man training to kill people.

At another stall, a man schools a boy on the best ways to put bullets into a human’s center mass. The kid shoots at the person-shaped sheet that hangs downrange. The man corrects the boy’s mistakes and addresses his failings. Class is in session, and the shooting, it seems, will continue until the boy’s lethality improves.

On the other side of the range, an older woman in the kind of dress you’d wear to a picnic fires a semi-automatic rifle. She squeezes out long bursts. It doesn’t seem to matter how well she aims; the entire paper target simply disintegrates with each barrage. This is the kind of gun that will be used at the elementary school in Uvalde, just a few years from the time I am watching her fire one. Also, the older woman has a gun-club helper, a lean man in a black gun-club shirt who seems to have the job of preventing the weapon’s kickback from spinning her around and spraying the room with bullets.

4.

Some of the money that gun clubs make flows to the NRA. Private clubs often require their shooters to be NRA members. In return, the Association gives them access to thousands in grant money, sanctions events to drive more revenue and provides legal help should something go wrong while members are having lots of fun.

The American gun club has become a $4 billion industry, or at least it was before the pandemic in 2020, and that was a year in which manufacturers such as Smith & Wesson saw a 40% surge in sales. The Brookings Institute measured a 3-million-gun sales spike, year over year, between March and June 2020, as the nation shut its doors for quarantine, watched George Floyd die on TV, and, as it turns out, increasingly armed up. This was the acceleration of a trend. Over the past two decades, range participation has increased by 28%. Outdoor facilities saw a bump from the pandemic in 2020, and overall the gun club industry saw a 0.5% revenue increase.

The demographics are changing as well: women’s presence at the range in the same period has grown 81% since 2001. The American gun club is not just a right-wing hangout, either. Shooters represent a range of politics. The Liberal Gun Club in Oakland, California, was born because its left-leaning artillerists found it challenging to find a place to shoot that doesn't require NRA membership, and they didn't like those politics. Pink Pistols, founded in Massachusetts by a libertarian activist named Krikket, teaches the LGBTQ community to shoot. Similarly, the National African-American Gun Association caters to a liberal and progressive Southern shooter (about 20,000 of them) who worry about the KKK in their Atlanta-area neighborhoods and, presumably, the overall shift of our national discourse in the early 2020s.

In this, there's another kind of full circle, ironic and somehow typically American. It was the Black gun owner in the 1960s and 1970s — especially Black gun owners returning from the Vietnam War with a head full of PTSD and a muscle memory of government-taught rifle expertise — that prompted a more explicitly politicized NRA to take action. 

However, back then, the NRA's message turned to regulation and control. After its leadership watched armed Black activists seize the California state capitol building with the help of long guns and sidearms, in 1967 the NRA helped Governor Ronald Reagan to ban open carry for Californians. It actually helped write the bill to stop people from wielding weapons in public. The NRA did not invoke the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution when it came to controlling Black Panthers and their access to guns.

5.

Pouring out of a stretch limo into the desert sun, the bachelor party burst into the gun club, swigging from red Solo cups and looking to unload long guns, on a mission to get shitfaced and shoot. The range worker at the counter of the store that wraps the interior lanes signs them up for hardware and ammunition. They aren't allowed to bring the booze into the lanes. Soon enough, they are in their stalls, just next to the old lady with her helper. The noise is bizarrely intense, even on the store side of the bullet-proof glass. Target paper twirls in the air like confetti. The boys hoot and yell. The old lady seems to double down, fire flowing from her muzzle in a sustained burst, and the boys hoot and holler for her as well. At last, everybody seems to be having a lot of fun.

Conversely, nobody had much fun, in the end, in 2014 on a hot August afternoon in the Mojave when a 9-year-old girl in White Hills, Arizona, squeezed the trigger on a fully automatic Uzi. The super-light machine, known by experts for kicking back under the power of its discharge, arced up and to the left, bullets spraying at 600 rounds per minute, cutting down her instructor and killing him. 

Nobody had much fun either, six years prior, in Westfield, Massachusetts, when an 8-year-old boy lost control of the Uzi he'd been handed and fatally shot himself in the head. In 2021, in Pennsylvania, the fun came to a sudden stop when what appeared to be reloaded ammunition — bullets repackaged by their owners, sometimes with extra gunpowder — caused the gun in its shooter's hand to explode. Pieces of the detonating weapon flew into the next shooting station, shredding a man's chest. The man died in surgery. 

The fun also stopped suddenly in Ohio, in 2021, when an ejected casing flew down one shooter's shirt. Jumping about, trying to get the white-hot metal off his skin, in the process he shot himself in the head with the 9-millimeter pistol he was still holding. The bullet passed through both of his cheeks — a lucky case of bad luck on the range. A sheriff on the scene later told reporters he hoped the man would get more training. 

No further training was possible for a 61-year-old man in Texas in 2021. It doesn’t seem that he was trying to have fun at all. His hometown paper described the gun-club death, which happened while he was alone at the shooting range, as a tragic accident. The injury was a fatal gunshot wound to the chest. Stats on incidents like these are are slim. One recent study shows that approximately 35 people commit suicide on the shooting range annually. They tend to go to the range alone (88%); most (86%) rent the gun they'll use. 

6.

Later, in the car, I ask my host what kinds of targets in the world outside the range we think the people we’d just seen shooting were training to hit. Some are cops, he says, and some are soldiers between tours of duty. That seemed plausible. What about us? Why were we shooting? Crack addicts, my host says; it’s about defending the family.

Last stop before dinner back at the house. We hit the supermarket, and out in the parking lot under the chrome-white light of the late afternoon sun, my host walks to the trunk of the car and takes the pistol we’d been shooting out of its black plastic carrying case. The gun goes into a holster, and then the holster goes around his lower back. This is to protect against its theft while we’re inside.

Now we are in the supermarket, and one of us is armed, and the place is mostly empty. We park our shopping cart at an end cap in the wine section and pick out reds and whites from the shelves along one wall. Behind us, a giant man with a wild beard starts smashing our shopping cart with his own. His lady friend is laughing while he does it. Every time he strikes our empty carriage, the lady friend bends over and laughs som more. Then they notice us. The man says he is sorry, and they wheel off into the aisles.

In New York, you’d have said something — the way you say something in New York when somebody’s slamming their shopping cart into yours. In the supermarket, out here in the desert, with your host strapped up and everyone else around you potentially armed, you don’t say shit. In a concealed-carry state, you realize pretty quick that it’s unwise to feel free enough to say anything you please.