Gun culture isn’t necessarily what we think it is. Brent Wheat got an unexpected education
at a recent gun show. Photo illustration via Google Gemini
I’ve been going to gun shows for a long, long time. I’ve bought guns there, sold guns, worked, written and generally spent enough time wandering their aisles. I know the territory. I knew the sights and sounds, the merchandise and the characters.
I have talked to the guy with the old Winchester for sale, the collector looking for a particular Colt and the bargain hunter who wanted to dicker over two dollars. I’m not exactly a tourist.
This weekend, however, I felt like I journeyed someplace I’d never been. The building, tables and guns were familiar, but the people, the language and the overall vibe felt totally foreign. I had the odd sensation of visiting the place I grew up and finding they’d bulldozed it flat to build an amusement park.
At the show there were a surprising number of young people attending, and after a few hours, I began to realize it wasn’t simply a newer generation of the gun culture I knew. I was looking at a completely different universe.
Sadly, because I wasn’t selling anything of interest to this crowd, I had plenty of time to observe. True fact: my total gross sales on Sunday amounted to $33. You can understand why I spent a lot of time watching and listening.
The first thing that caught my attention was the hardware. There were AR-15 pistols everywhere, including some so short that calling them firearms seemed almost laughable. Most were dressed up in ways I considered unusual (for me, anyway): bright red muzzle devices, gaudy buffer tubes and gold or other flashy Cerakote finishes and accessories chosen as much for appearance as function.
GLOCKs were everywhere, too, stuck down the front of low-slung pants or sometimes carried under shoulders on elastic cord. Nearly all of them sported long stick magazines, and I soon learned white 33-round magazines have become something of a major status symbol.
None of this is particularly difficult to understand from a purely commercial standpoint. If somebody wants a red muzzle device or a GLOCK drum magazine and is willing to pay for it, there’s a market. In fact, the guy across from me was selling extended magazines faster than he could operate his cash register.
Hardware Just the Beginning
For most of my life, firearms have generally been an extension of an existing interest or identity. A hunter buys a shotgun because he hunts, the collector buys an old Colt because he’s fascinated by Colts and the competitive shooter buys equipment because he wants to shoot faster.
However, what I saw was something different — the gun was more of a symbol of the identity, a significant artifact, rather than a means to an end.
Granted, there was a fair amount of what I can only describe as posing. Some of the young guys were clearly trying very hard to look hard, adopting street language and mannerisms that seemed slightly disconnected from the suburban environment from which they appeared to have emerged.
We overheard a couple of conversations that were so obviously performative we had to laugh. There is something almost endearing about a kid trying desperately to convince the world that he’s a dangerous hard-bangin’ street tough when his private speech and mannerisms suggest he is addicted to Starbucks caramel mocha latte with extra sprinkles.
But even this illustrated something important: the guns weren’t simply being purchased as a vehicle to accomplish something. They were part of building a certain persona almost every young person desperately wants to advertise to the world.
Some of it was harmless. Unfortunately, I’d wager some of it wasn’t.
Cop Talk
This is where I have to acknowledge my own bias. I was a police officer for 30 years, and cops develop a pretty strong radar for people who are up to no good. It isn’t magic, and I’ll wholly, completely admit it isn’t infallible. It’s a collection of observations: clothing, speech, body language, associations, how someone handles a firearm, how they react to other people and what they say when they don’t realize anyone is listening.
Any one of those things by itself usually means nothing. But, put enough of them together, and it usually means quite a bit.
I saw people with possible gang affiliation and young men handling guns with very little apparent familiarity or discipline but much overt bravado. I overheard countless conversations — using language I couldn’t even begin to print on this website — that didn’t sound anything like the traditional gun-show crowd discussing hunting or the relative merits of a 1911 versus a 2011.
And I wasn’t the only person noticing. My booth partner quickly observed it, too, as did several other vendors. Granted, nobody was standing around making grand declarations about criminals taking over the show. The comments were quieter — the kind of knowing observations and glances exchanged between people who were seeing the same thing but didn’t need to explain it to one another.
I don’t know what crimes any of these people may or may not have committed. I don’t know what they intended to do with the guns they bought and carried. I won’t turn a haircut, a bandana or a manner of speaking into evidence of criminal activity.
But I also refuse to pretend that 30 years of law enforcement street experience suddenly became worthless because I can’t put a name and case number to something I saw for two minutes.
I witnessed some people who looked like they were playing a part, some who appeared to be perfectly legitimate young gun owners and some whose combination of behavior, conversation, appearance and equipment gave me a very strong feeling that their reasons for acquiring firearms weren’t particularly wholesome.
I trust that assessment, though you should never confuse it with proof. Having said all that, I came away from the gun show with a generally bad feeling.
Trouble Brewing?
One of the more memorable moments involved a boy who appeared to be about 12 or 13 years old. He picked out a 33-round GLOCK magazine and his mother (who seemed much more concerned about her phone conversation than Junior’s intended purchase) paid for it. There was nothing furtive about it, and nobody seemed particularly concerned. To them, this was apparently a normal Saturday activity.
I’ve been around guns long enough that a kid being interested in firearms doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, it usually inspires me a bit. I was interested in guns as a youngster, and most people reading this were, too. But I found myself wondering what this particular kid believed the magazine represented and why Mom showed zero interest.
Maybe this kid was a graduate of a 4-H shooting class or hunter education and was simply fascinated by extended magazines for the pistol he could someday legally own. But based on my observations, I don’t believe this was the case.
What disturbed me most were the two people with brass catchers attached to their “pistols.” Now, a brass catcher isn’t inherently suspicious. Competitive shooters and reloaders use them; heck, I’ve got one around here someplace. Anyone who has spent an afternoon crawling around a range looking for spent cases understands the appeal.
However, context matters.
These men weren’t competitive shooters, as far as I could tell, and they weren’t standing around discussing reloading or buying powder. They were part of a group of questionable-looking young men who had already caught my attention for all the wrong reasons.
Maybe there was an innocent explanation, and I hope there was. But I would be lying if I said I didn’t wonder whether those pistols were intended for some future unsavory purpose.
Maybe they didn’t want to leave evidence behind after a crime or maybe they simply wanted to be like their video heroes; I have no idea. Either way, it was disheartening.
Hard Questions
Unfortunately, I can’t magically divide these people neatly into responsible gun owners and potential problems. There is no algorithm to tell us which ones will become the next generation of hunters, competitors, collectors and responsible gun owners, and which ones will become the people the rest of us have to answer for.
But there’s another question at work: If firearms are increasingly becoming identity markers rather than tools — objects that tell the world something about who you are — what happens to the culture that traditionally gave those tools their meaning?
For most of us who grew up around guns, the firearm was the beginning of the conversation. What came next was the important part: hunting, competition, collecting, training, craftsmanship or simply the pleasure of shooting. The gun was a tool that connected us to something else.
What happens when the gun itself becomes a prop?
What I do know is this: this weekend represents how a number of younger people view firearms, whether traditional gun people like it or not. They view firearms primarily as props, status symbols, emblems and even tools of intimidation. Whether they intend to commit crimes or simply want to look the part, the effect is the same: it throws gun ownership in a negative light.
I’ve never seen a gun-owning group quite like this.
Ignoring or overlooking it won’t make it disappear, and pretending it isn’t part of gun culture doesn’t make it any less real.
I don’t particularly like it. I don’t endorse a lot of what I saw, and some of it genuinely concerns and angers me. I’m not going to profess otherwise just to make this piece more politically palatable. But if the firearms industry and shooting community want to understand this generation, we’d better start paying attention, even to the parts we want to ignore or pretend don’t exist.
The uncomfortable truth is that gun culture doesn’t belong exclusively to the people who built the version I grew up in. If people use firearms to construct identity, project status or signal affiliation, that’s part of the culture too, whether we approve of it or not.
And before anyone (inevitably) accuses me of being an old guy complaining about young people, let me acknowledge every generation has its own version of such things. Young men have always used clothes, cars, music and other objects to announce who they think they are. What’s different here is the object and its potential for destruction.
I walked into the gun show thinking I generally understood the gun world. I walked out realizing I only understood my corner of it and for that weekend, I was clearly a stranger in a strange land.
But, then again, maybe I wasn’t visiting a strange land at all — maybe I was getting a glimpse of the future, at least one possible future.
On any given Saturday in Alabama, a man can leave his driveway, gas up, run by the gun shop for ammo, shoot all morning at the range, and be home for lunch. He hasn’t broken any law or bothered a soul. And in more of our towns than you’d guess, a camera on a pole photographed his truck at every stop and filed it in a searchable database owned by a private company in Atlanta.