Gun Buyers Follow Heroes

Gun ownership in the United states is strongly influenced by "Hero Worship." This is not a bad thing, but is a thread of human nature to elmulate the lifestyle, tastes and action of people we admire. This identification extends to things as well as people. Trend setters and trend setting products affect our lives; which is also an important guide to successful advertising. Own a hot car, dress in a cutting edge fashion outfit, play tennis with a carbon racket. Race car drivers plug hot cars, sophisticated models wear sharp designer clothes and athletes get the most out of sports technology.

Gun owners are no different. We have heroes who have championed a variety of firearms depending on the media that influences us. In TV and the movies, Steve McQueen was cool with his sawed off Winchester "mare's leg." Clint Eastmood made the .44 Magnum Smith & Wesson desireable. World War II and police battling gangsters have used up arsenals of high tech weapons to great visual effect. And the latest video games offer super realistc combat and civilian warfare depictions.

Today, every time a soldier returns from Afghanistan, out come the flags, motorcycle honor guards and crowds lining the street to welcome home the young warrior. Our troops are our latest and most closely held heroes because they come directly from us, not from some author's imagination. Every night we see them on the news patroling dangerous ground in foreign lands, and we remember these are volunteer soldiers, not draftees. Our hearts go out to them. Now, look at what weapons they carry.

A story: When I was a little kid, I had no sports skills and only held my place in my neighborhood gang by being the "goofy guy" who could always make the other kids laugh: with me, at me, I didn't care. I got the laugh and was accepted. We used a lot of toy guns in our play what with WWII just ended and the Korean conflict just amping up. I wanted a machine gun. Instead, my Dad managed to get me an actual Model 1903 Springfield bolt action training rifle. The bolt worked, the trigger clicked, but the breech was welded shut. The first day I went out the door and into the park next to our apartment, chaos erupted. I was looking for my pals, walking along with this real rifle on my shoulder. I am nine years old and this rifle is almost as long as I am tall. The park is now empty except for this Park District Cop watching me from behind a tree. He is not alone. I walked over to a tree and crouched down, trying to see what they are looking at. They are all looking at me. A cop called out, "Kid! Put down the rifle!" I did and very soon thereafter I was surrounded by a forest of blue pantlegs. I was spared a savage beating or a soul-sucking prison sentence. One of the cops walked me and my rifle home.

We love to emulate our heroes and assault rifles are the latest extension of that hero worship. The
M-4 is a "weapon." Any assault-style firearm based on their respective combat version is a weapon. To me, walking around with that very real rifle gave me the self -esteem I so lacked. It was way too heavy to play with. The bolt action was clumsy for small hands -- and it was sure no machine gun. Later, when I was in a real combat zone, surrounded by lethal weapons, or when I carried a gun for a living in Arizona, I discovered how careful you have to be in life when threats are a 360 degree consideration. The sport of marksmanship is a character builder and a demanding skill, but weapons should be left to our military and police.  

Firearm violence- how we got here

Firearm violence – How We Got Here –and What Do We Do? A historical perspective

Our current pro and anti-gun situation didn’t just rise up and bite us. We set up this scenario when the Industrial Revolution, from the mid-18^th Century to the 1850s, made possible the mass production and increased efficiency of firearms. The Civil War used those arms to preserve our Union by shedding a generation’s worth of blood. After the war, we were gunned up, had a chip on our shoulders and wanted a fresh start for our “Manifest Destiny.”

            Our present problems started with a weak post Civil War military, downsized to fight the sporadic Native American Wars and policing the Westward Expansion. Without military contracts, the firearms market was flat. Many civilians were former soldiers and familiar with military pattern weapons that became adapted to civilian needs: hunting, target shooting and self-defense. Cheap handguns glutted the eastern markets due to the low quality of politically-based police departments. Long guns reached out for the plains buffalo, marauding predators, and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans. Led by politicians, our military was poorly trained, poorly armed (troopers had to buy their own ammunition if they wanted to practice), and underfunded. The firearms manufacturers had to funnel their military-tested wares directly into civilian hands.

            Long guns as survival tools were in every wagon headed west. Pistols were virtually useless except in barroom brawls and to bolster the low self-esteem of flawed sociopaths. The six-gun toting myth of the gunfighter was born in the pens of the 19^th Century “penny-dreadful” novel writers, many of whom never left the East. The large cattle outfits often didn’t permit their cowboys to own a revolver, because six-guns encouraged trouble and most cattle towns had tougher gun laws than we have today.

            But firearms technology belonged to the military contractors as rapid fire weapons designed to kill as many enemy as possible became a reality from civilian designers like John Browning. The main shift in military weapons came with the 1903 Springfield that went to France with our soldiers in 1917. They were the last military weapons that found a well-suited market in civilian hands. Trimmed of extra wood, the Springfield rifle became a standard on target ranges and in the hunting field.

            The M1 rifle that helped win World War II was the first semi-automatic standard infantry rifle. Built to rugged military specifications, it was too heavy for hunting and was only suited to military rifle competitions. Fire suppression – “spray and pray” tactics --reinforced by studies of World War II conflicts and low training standards needed to pump out maximum troop numbers,  became the military dictum. High capacity clips, high rate of fire, cheap to build, designed for field modification depending on combat mission – all these requirements were met by Eugene Stoner’s M-16 assault rifle and later models built on the same platform. They have also been applied to civilian versions from Colt, Bushmaster, Rock River Arms, LMT, Sig Sauer and others.

             From 1967 to today, military weapons – modified for law enforcement – have been designed for military missions and civilian use. Firearms manufacturers have forced advertising, video games, movies and heroic military imagery into a civilian demand. These manufacturers have turned fear of attack, fear of confiscation, fear of your neighbor and fear of government into selling tools.

Civilians who want these assault rifles (“modern sporting rifles” in manufacturer-speak) have bent over backwards to justify their purchases. Manufacturers justify sponsoring “Three-Gun Matches” (fast-paced rifle, pistol and shotgun) which are great competitions, but serve more as advertising while factory teams compete and gun brand loyalty is trumpeted. The assault rifle is a klutzy hunting companion to lug around all day tricked out with laser sights, bi-pods, flashlights, and interchangeable barrels. Anyone who needs a 30 round clip to bring down a whitetail deer should be spending more time on the range learning to shoot. For decades, we’ve survived with 3-shot maximum capacity magazines on shotguns and nobody complained. Anything more than a five-round magazine is a weapon. The archers and black powder muzzle-loader hunters have the right idea. Learn to hunt as well as to shoot.

Handguns have faced the same marketing of military technology. At one time, the revolver was queen of the side arms. Today, it is a quaint relic – except for the Taurus blasters that fire shotgun shells as well as large caliber pistol rounds. It is the small, flat, semi-automatic pistols by Glock, Baretta, Kimber and others that pack the heaviest loads in the lightest, hard-recoil weapons. Extended 15 round instant-changeable ammunition clips are big selling points as are laser beam and see-in-the-dark sights.

“Be prepared – whatever your mission,” has become the firearms manufacturers’ mantra. Leaving the house to go to work, or shopping, or to the barber, or to relax at a spa, or to find a job – or go to school – has become a gun buyer’s  “mission.” Until you’ve carried a gun for a living, you have no idea what a responsibility that extra weight on your hip or in your purse represents. A poorly aimed shot can kill an innocent bystander 5,000 feet away. There are an estimated 300 million guns in the United States. The most guns are owned by people for “self defense” with the least training. Low self-esteem kids are promised the power of their “heroes” though the magic of firepower. This is where we stand today. What to do?

Dial back the “mission-oriented combat fear mongering” in advertising. Civilian handguns can have a six-shot magazine. Rifles are limited to five-shot mags and shotguns stay at three-shot capacity. Manufacturers shift to target and hunting markets by spending ad budgets promoting local rifle, pistol and shotgun ranges for kids and adults. Make shooting a spectator sport once again with innovative designs, competitions and venues along the NASCAR model.  

American sport shooters are tired of being lumped in with the crazies on both sides of the firearms issue. You don’t take hammers away from carpenters who build a bad house. You train better carpenters. Kids and adults live in a tougher, media-centric world that can be a pressure cooker without understanding and mutual support. Lack of understanding breeds fear.  People build their own personal bunkers against all the bad stuff “out there.” Shooting sports are social recreations like golf, tennis, or running in the morning before breakfast. Homes, schools and workplaces are not supposed to be bunkers. Our society should be worth more than that.

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Gerry Souter, Author of American Shooter – A personal history of gun culture in the United States, Potomac Books, Dulles, Virginia, avril1grp2@comcast.net, www.avril1.com, 

847-398-1087

Exaggeration and Credibility

Rub dirt in your hair. Rend your garments. Curse the heavens. Stand on a street corner with a battery bull horn and proclaim the end of the earth. Or just join the Tea Party, or other bloviating collection of gas bags and erase what marginal vestige of credibility they might have had when they woke up this morning. This is the patriotic bullies' end of the world, who see themselves as the saviors of our ability to own firearms and enjoy shooting sports.

These folks lost the election. The American people did not buy their over-the-top rabble rousing, appeal to the lowest common denominator of uninformed voter style of presenting the pros and cons of an issue. They helped sink the once Grand Old Party with their crude rhetoric, their tragic comprehension of history and their prognostications of things to come that any high school debate team could render moot. Instead of leading the discussion, they herd their acolytes and believers, sweeping along the confused and undecided into what appears to them to be a consensus.

While grown-ups (mostly) debate our financial future in Washington, these single-issue ideologues hop from one foot to the other preaching doom. They are not alone, of course. On the other side of the issue, the equally silly "gun grabbers" who doggedly follow the path that gave us Prohibition in the 1920s, plan and connive to remove all firearms from civilians -- 300 million firearms -- to make our world a safer place. That might have been a swell idea back when the Chinese were still tinkering with gunpowder, but 1100 years later, things have gotten out of hand.

All of the chest beating on both sides has done nothing to ease the burden on the average gun owner who must explain themselves as a sportsman and not one of the aluminum foil hat people whenever they let slip their sport of preference in a conversation.

Compromise Should Call the Shots

It's a whole new world out there. A fresh rain has washed all the soiled PAC money off the streets into the gutter where it belongs. The American electorate has once again cut through the ideologues' rhetoric to weed out the gasbags and constipated bloviators. The woof and stomp drum beat of the tragically off-track, out-of-touch Tea Party silliness has been given the boot for at least four years when the burrowing insects will emerge once again to plague the democratic process.

There, that was fun. I wish it was that clear cut. Like dogs yapping at the wheels of progress (what an image), we will continue to have skulkers loping along bleating doomsday forecasts, claiming election fraud, rubbing dirt into their hair and rending their garments. In the halls of the National Rifle Association PAC, we can imagine lamp cord nooses being fastened to light fixtures above teetering chairs atop tables, and bereft ideologues imploring their Conservative gods for a sign that this betrayal is all part of some mystical plan in the coming post-apocalyptic world. Or maybe not.

Maybe, just maybe some closet moderate might propose that the question of America's firearms tradition will be better served if the hierarchy in their fused vertebrae rigidity, peering out at the real world of shooting sports and our gun culture considers exploring...compromise. Of course the
"C-word" requires at least two parties. Those ultra-liberals perched on the lofty heights of moral righteousness who hide behind pages of slippery statistics and employ the same tactics to remove guns from the American populace as did their predecessors who championed Prohibition and the 18th Amendment have to pull a chair up to the table.

The tradition of firearms ownership and shooting sports should not be the ideological playground of  blustering patriotic bullies, nor the dry and barren desert of sweaty-palm statistic jugglers. There is a middle ground that removes the stigma and celebrates the accomplishments of shooting sports while abstracting the concept of "weapons" for their narrow and necessary applications. Give the C-word a chance and take the majority of American sportsmen and women off the hook.

Post Election Promenade

With the election concluded and Barack Obama back in office for the next four years, we can look forward to enjoying the following results: an end to those lying vicious PAC commercials that most people muted on sight --except for the knuckle-dragging mouth breathers who are today rubbing dirt into their hair, rending their garments, beating their breasts in lamentation and seeking solace in watching Honey Boo-boo reruns. We can also listen to the damp hiss that is the air leaking from Far Right Republican Lock-step Ideologues as they and their agenda for ruling the world behind the trenchantly gullible Tea Party cannon fodder -- who would have us return to dial phones, round-screen TVs, ice boxes and an Apple II in every home playing Space Invaders and featuring Visicalc --- quietly steal back into their bunkers smelling of freshly poured concrete to await the Black Helicopters coming for their guns.

A visit to the NRA Web site reveals tragic wreckage, abandoned conference rooms, shattered IPads and empty paper towel dispensers in the men's room. Champagne bottles sit warm and uncorked in shallow pools of melted ice. Boxes of cigars with open lids are untouched and the 60 ring gauge churchill stogies are drying out. Fox News plays old George Bush press conferences on overheated 55 inch screens while ignored desk computers endlessly scroll Romney Wins! in a for-next loop on their green screens.

As the disco rock band in the rented hall down the street packs up its rotating mirror ball and caterers chip loose ossified chocolate mousse from little cups next to cooled plates of chicken fricassee that imprison forks in gummy puddles, the victory dance is over beneath the now blank video projection screen and the centerpiece of dripping ice sculpture depicting Romney and Ryan giving everyone the "V" for victory sign -- but the index fingers have already melted away, leaving behind no doubt about the message.

It is a time for healing and taking down from the bathroom medicine cabinet those suppositories marked "compromise" and "common sense" and the really big one designed for ideologue acolytes who still believe the world is truly flat and every hunting rifle needs a 30-round magazine.

The NRA spent decades as the confident steward of our sport and now it has a chance to serve its members more than the thin gruel of right wing, cynical propaganda, take self interest off the table and return to advance the sport into national recognition and respect.

Whatever Your Mission

"Whatever Your Mission…” Civilian Firearms - from Weapons to Sports 

(From an article published in the GroundReport blog. Sept, 2012)

In a gun magazine advertisement, a militia member, tricked out in copies of army “tactical” gear hefts an assault rifle with a 30 round magazine and strides forward above the text  “…Whatever your mission.”  Today, ads for military rifles and self-defense pistols have intensified, aimed at civilians with images of combat situations combined with text promising deadly capabilities.  

During the history of American firearms, muskets, rifles and shotguns won our independence, defended our lives and property, and put meat on our table. They accompanied our westward migration in saddle scabbards and wagon beds. Whole families learned to shoot as a matter of survival in the 18^th century and, as civilization and population growth caused social pressures, the civilian market for firearms shifted from tools and sport to weapons.

When armies and militias in the early 19^th century required more mobility and greater volume of firepower, the repeating rifle and the revolver became the cash cow of firearms marketing.  Multishot breechloader carbines and rifles from Sharps, Burnside, Spencer and Winchester joined Colt and Remington revolvers in the great land armies of the Civil War. Spencer, the first successful breech loading repeater, fired seven .52 caliber cartridges. Confederates called it, “That Yankee rifle you load on Sunday and shoot all week.”

            At the end of the war, millions of combat weapons found their way into civilian hands as the West opened up to settlers, speculators and the railroad. With the military downsized, gun marketing followed the westward migration with combat-proven, rapid fire weapons. The revolver and shotgun were touted as necessary for self defense in rough cow towns and the lawless expanses of the prairie. Actually, most cow towns and villages had tougher gun laws than we have today. Some of the large cattle ranches forbade their cowpokes from owning a revolver while on the trail, and many of the firearms displayed in period photographs of “tough waddies on the prod” are the photographer’s props. But the romantic six-gun myth grew.

World War I rekindled military arms development on a grand scale. The Thompson Submachine Gun, designed for fighting in France, arrived too late for the war. Instead, it was marketed to ranch owners for cutting down pesky cattle rustlers. This was the first automatic-fire battle weapon to find a civilian demand during Prohibition.  Murders on the city streets helped fuel a firearms frenzy and even National Geographic Magazine carried ads for Colt handguns, “…to defend your hearth and home.” Throughout the Great Depression, Tommy Guns and six guns flashed and boomed in the hands of motor bandits and peace officers across the country.

            Following World War II, the shooting sport market was flat. None of the conventional war weapons: the M1 rifle, carbine and automatic pistol were suited to civilian use. The Armalite all metal and plastic AR-15 rifle arrived in time for the Vietnam War. Essentially, it is three metal tubes machined from bar stock. This “assault rifle” became a cheap-to-build platform for a variety of military weapons from the M-16 to the current H&K416 Seal Team rifle system. Even with reduced firepower, it promises high capacity, deadly combat capabilities to any civilian shooter…”whatever your mission.”

            Real or imagined, this aggressive mindset has helped polarize the general public’s firearm attitudes and acceptance of sport shooting traditions.

Home, home on the Range

I love the smell of a firearms range in the morning. It smells like...action. Standing at the firing line and peering downrange at the waiting targets jumpstarts my motor. I was 12 when I first laid down on an old discarded mattress that reeked of dried little boy pee and dessicated mouse corpses in a crawl space under an old, old house and looked across the sights of a .22 rifle at a target suspended 50 feet away in a bullet trap, and pushed my first real cartridge into the rifle's breech. My very first shot drilled the center of the bullseye, as did my second and third shots. I was on my way to earning my Boy Scouts Marksmanship Merit Badge and discovering that I was not doomed to be an "also," or part of "the field" who always chases the winner across the finish line. My inability to clobber a baseball, throw a perfect football spiral, slapshot a puck into a net, sink a freethrow, or skate on wheels or blades was not going to keep me down. I could be a contender.

And that's how it all worked out. My shooting skills, resulting from hours and hours of practice and thousands of rounds blazed downrange punched my ticket. That golden time spent at the range allowed me to turn shooting skills into photographic skills ("hold...breathe...squeeze...") -- except with a camera, after I squeezed the shutter, my subject could walk out of the frame. From there, my shooting sports co-existed with my career as an international photojournalist, film and video documentary maker, television and video producer, director and writer -- and finally book author of U. S. Histories, military histories, biographies, fine arts volumes, auto racing and young adult books. In other words, a life of great adventure.

Shooting sports helped me bond with my father, crunching through the fall leaves in search of squirrels, rabbits or pheasants for the dinner table. The range provided a gathering place for some lasting friendships like Diane, the southpaw who could shoot rings around any guy on the line with .22 or a .30 caliber M1 rifle, who earned a Distinguished Rifleman's badge and had a great sense of humor. There was Gavin and Jim and Doc Meissner, the opthamologist and American Legion rangemaster who taught us all how to shoot and grow up while we were still in our teens.

I shoot casually with friends now, but I can still hear his voice, "Keep those muzzles pointed downrange! The longer you hold on a target, the unsteadier you get! Don't ever believe a gun is unloaded until you've personally checked it! More people get hurt on a tennis court or a golf course than on any well-run rifle range!"

Marksmanship is a gender-blind and age-proof sport that should be developed for spectator appeal and spun into the American Shooting Sport League with teams across the country. To realize that vision, we need more ranges and participation in a tradition that goes back to when our country was brand new and sharpshooters were held in high esteem.