Let It Bang Read online

  Therefore, it surprised none of us—Lizzie, Jimmy, and me—to hear that Charles had been talking on his phone and not giving his undivided attention to the road ahead. That makes him like almost anybody else with a mobile phone, four wheels, and a steering wheel, of course. The rub came when the fella in front of him jumped out of his vehicle at a stoplight and started waving his hands and shouting, “Get off your phone! Get off your phone!”

  From a white man’s perspective, this was unusual, a little surreal. As a black man, I would’ve taken it as a fairly common part of life; a white man shouting demands at me is at the same time nothing new and an adrenaline-pumping potential crisis.

  Then Charles said, “I had to put that gun underneath my leg.” This time it was the .38 snub-nose revolver that he kept in a small purse, along with his wallet and keys. Turns out Charles’s truck gun—the one you leave in the truck not because it’s cool or collectible but because when you need to do a job, that sumbitch will get her done—was a .38 snub-nose. I realized then he didn’t mean to tell this tale to be funny so much as to convey that he’d felt threatened and that reaching for a handgun in that instant made all the sense in the world.

  CHASMS STILL EXISTED between Charles and me, and I was still determined to use guns to bridge them. Charles’s gun of choice was a revolver. He respected the Glock enough to pick one up when he needed a semiautomatic for absolute certainty that his gun would fire. But, given a choice, he preferred a revolver. “Doesn’t jam,” he said. I wasn’t interested in revolvers, though, except to know how they functioned and how, in the evolution of guns, revolvers had led to the advent of semiautomatic pistols. A revolver is the kind of handgun John Wayne carried.

  The handgun that captured my attention was the Glock. All over the country, this gun appears in silhouette on the doors of movie theaters, restaurants, and almost all government offices as the symbol on the sign that says NO GUNS. Glocks are layered over movies and literature. In The Fugitive, Tommy Lee Jones plays the US marshal Sam Gerard, who tells Robert Downey Jr., playing special agent John Royce, “Get yourself a Glock and lose that nickel-plated sissy pistol.” Having a little fun with the white-machismo-oozing protagonist who pollutes Hollywood action movies is Will Smith, who, as Detective Mike Lowry, throws off his Klan bed sheet, points dual two-tone Glock 17s at criminals, and yells, “Blue power, motherfuckers! Miami PD!” That’s just the kind of scene that makes an impression on a sixteen-year-old black kid in Oklahoma.

  AFTER THREE DECADES in manufacturing, Gaston Glock saw his opportunity. By the early 1980s, he’d worked his way into a contract to make knives and bayonets for his native Austria, and had spent considerable time around the decision makers at Austria’s Ministry of Defense. There, he learned that the military needed a new sidearm, something to replace the Walther P-38, by then a relic of World War II. Officials literally laughed at him when he requested permission to enter the bidding for the pistol contract, and for good reason. Who the hell was he then, but a railroad worker’s son with a metal shop? The ministry heads could not imagine that designing a gun from scratch was in his repertoire, but they didn’t say no.

  Glock immersed himself in pistols, including the Walther P-38. He examined its mechanics. He traveled back and forth to the country’s patent office to learn more about the inner workings of pistols and the changes he would need to make. He sat down with members of the country’s military establishment and learned from one Colonel Friedrich Dechant exactly what kind of pistol he envisioned—one that could “withstand extended contact with snow, ice, and mud,” according to Paul Barrett, in his excellent history of the Glock. Furthermore, “it should fire ten thousand rounds with no more than one failure per thousand. The figure 40,000 was recorded that evening, referring to the goal that the ideal pistol should have a long service life, of forty thousand rounds.”

  Fourteen months after asking to enter the Austrian government’s bidding process, Glock filed his first pistol patent. He called his pistol the Glock 17. It was his seventeenth invention. The Glock 17 magazine could hold up to seventeen rounds. As with the other pistols tested during bidding, the Glock 17 was shot ten thousand times. It failed to fire exactly once. In late 1983, the Austrian government bought twenty thousand of Glock’s pistols.

  IN THE UNITED States, it started with a 1984 magazine piece. Well, a gun-magazine piece, which is a great vehicle for ensuring that one hand washes the other if you’re a gun manufacturer. When Soldier of Fortune’s technical editor, Peter G. Kokalis, was told he could be the first gun writer in America to shoot a Glock 17, he couldn’t wait to pull the trigger—pun very much intended. “Five thousand miles [to Austria] is a long way to travel just to shoot another 9 mm pistol,” he wrote in the October 1984 issue. “But the Glock 17 is not just another pistol.” He didn’t hide how smitten he was: “Safe, reliable, accurate, instantly ready, easy to maintain, a minimal number of parts, light, compact, durable (almost indestructible), low felt recoil, a large capacity magazine, simplified training, and natural, instinctive pointing qualities—the Glock 17 possesses every single characteristic anyone has ever dreamed of having in a combat pistol.”

  His only real criticism, in this feature adding up to more than two thousand words, was that the Glock was not available for purchase in the United States. Truth is, it wasn’t available to civilians anywhere. But by the time Kokalis’s article appeared, members of the US Department of Defense were already considering it for military use. Folks in the Secret Service were given a few Glocks while in Vienna in 1985. As the gun was quietly making the rounds among folks in Washington, Gaston Glock and his lieutenants were setting up Glock Inc. in Smyrna, Georgia, just north of Atlanta. This while the gun was being introduced to a veritable who’s who of international leaders, including Hafez Al-Assad, the father of the current Syrian president, Bashar Al-Assad, as well as Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. It was catching the interest of virtually every world leader with an army. And that’s when the proverbial shit hit the proverbial fan.

  In January 1986, the Washington Post ran this headline over the columnist Jack Anderson’s byline: GADDAFI BUYING AUSTRIAN PLASTIC PISTOLS. Anderson reported that Gaddafi had bought a hundred Glocks and was planning to arm terrorists with them. Gaston Glock refuted this piece of information, and so did high-ranking employees in his company. But it was clear that Gaddafi surrogates had visited Glock’s operation in Deutsch-Wagram, Austria, where the pistols were manufactured. The New York Times ran an editorial a month later, with the headline HIJACKER’S SPECIAL, about how easily the gun might get through airport security.

  Time magazine surmised that the gun could give would-be airline hijackers “an edge that officials are finding increasingly difficult to counter.” This “edge” was an allusion to the plastic parts of the gun—only the barrel was metal. By May of that same year, congressional hearings were held to ascertain how dangerous Glock handguns could be in the hands of terrorists.

  By 1988, the Associated Press spotted one on the hip of then police commissioner Benjamin Ward. Many federal, state, and local police forces were inquiring about samples of the Glock 17. In some cases, after obtaining one for the purpose of examining it, the recipient would send Glock a check and keep the gun. That same year the New York Post called it a “super gun.” Articles about the Glock and the handwringing that ensued among elected and appointed officials amounted to the kind of publicity that a gun manufacturer could only dream of, and it did little to curtail sales of the gun on American soil when it made landfall in 1988. And that was before Gaston Glock and his compatriots started to aggressively recruit law-enforcement tastemakers and decision makers. At a time when most folks thought the Internet was a tennis term, gun enthusiasts were coming around to wanting a Glock—as the thinking goes, if somebody wants it banned, it must be good.

  At this time, many police departments still issued revolvers. But firearms instructors were coming around to the Glock. Gun aficionados respected these instructors (as they stil
l do), and once the instructors got past the ugly look of the gun, which is made of polymer where it can be and metal where it has to be, they began to see the advantages of the Glock 17. For starters, the Glock doesn’t have a safety. This means it does not have to remain in a cocked position to be ready to fire at a moment’s notice. At the time, the Colt 1911 was the most popular semiautomatic pistol. With this and other semiautomatics, accidental discharges were just a fact of life. Glocks are in this way like many revolvers; they don’t have a safety. But one real advantage of a Glock was that it had fewer parts than most revolvers—by half. As a comparison, the Smith & Wesson 645 has more than a hundred parts. The Glock 17 has just thirty-four. You can literally take apart several different Glock 17s, jumble the parts, and reassemble the original number of guns. All of them will fire. This structure makes it much easier to maintain a Glock.

  The Glock 17’s most significant advantage becomes obvious when a shooter switches from squeezing off a revolver to squeezing off a Glock, especially for repeated rounds. In many cases, the hammer of a revolver remains de-cocked, which means the first squeeze must be especially forceful, but subsequent ones less so. But the hammer remains cocked for another blast after the initial round is fired. With a revolver the shooter must remember to use less force for the following shots. Most people, including members of law enforcement, don’t practice enough with a revolver to know the amount of pressure they need to place on the trigger for the gun to fire. Indeed, one of the first lessons you learn about shooting a pistol is that when the gun fires, it should be a surprise to you—don’t anticipate the recoil. Many people who shoot a revolver shoot low and then high, in many cases wasting two of a maximum of six rounds. With a Glock, the trigger pressure remains the same, whether it’s the first shot, the second, or the seventeenth. That matters, particularly for law enforcement.

  Also, in a firefight, the person with a Glock 17 has a three-to-one advantage over a shooter with a revolver, which has only six rounds of ammo. And yes, there’s a myth that Glocks jam—Charles bought into that myth—but they don’t do so regularly. Finding a Glock that jams is like finding a Toyota broken down on the side of the road.

  The ease of use, of learning to be a good shot, comes easier with a Glock 17 because its recoil and return to target are fluid. You don’t need to worry about smacking yourself in the nose because the caliber of bullet, the gun itself, or both, are just too powerful to control. The nine-millimeter rounds the Glock 17 fires are cheap and abundant. It’s much easier, as we gamers say, to Get good, son, when you don’t have to fight the equipment you’re using or, more to the point, when it’s not fighting you.

  All of this led me to believe the Glock was the most efficient, easy-to-use pistol in the world. When I was finally ready, and told Charles I’d decided to get my own gun, and that I thought it should be a Glock, he thought about it for the length of time it takes to squeeze a trigger. He didn’t ask me for my reasons. He didn’t tell me I was wrong to want a Glock. He simply said, “We need to go to the gun show.”

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  Obama Ain’t Gonna Know

  AT FIRST I wondered why we needed to go to a gun show to buy a gun. After all, Charles lives about three miles from a store called Frank’s Gun & Repair. It’s at the corner of Highway 51 and 121st Street, just north of the Phillips 66 and across the street from the railroad tracks. Can’t miss it. Can’t mistake it, either, with its red-and-black-lettered sign spelling out 486-GUNS just below the word GUNS (again), in obstinate Republican red. Plus, Charles and the store owner, Frank, were downright social.

  Indeed, Charles could buy, sell, or trade any one of the guns he owns there. I knew that Frank had recently serviced a handgun for Charles, after Charles had claimed that it wouldn’t fire and was probably a piece of shit. Frank took a look at it. Cleaned it. Lubed it. Rubbed it down and had the pistol firing like new.

  So I thought Frank’s is where we’d go when I told Charles I had come around to the idea that I needed a Glock. But I soon came to learn I’d given Charles too good a reason to do what many gun owners do for fun: go see what somebody else has got. Guns are apparently a lot like baseball cards. Folks are in love with their own collection, envious of somebody else’s, and willing to shell out an obscene amount of money to get to brag about owning some rare specimen.

  There’s not a whole lot Charles will travel for. Only recently has Nancy convinced him that staying a night in Branson, Missouri, or Memphis, Tennessee, ain’t gonna hurt him or the cattle. But if there’s a gun show in Tahlequah, about an hour east of Coweta? Or if the Oklahoma Rifle Association is having a meeting in Oklahoma City? He’ll set right out.

  Finally, a couple years into my relationship with Lizzie, when we were engaged to be married, he’d begun to think of me as something like a son. That’s what this trip was—a father and a son going to buy the son’s first gun, at the world’s largest gun show. Truth is, without Charles, I had about as much chance of walking into a gun show all by my lonesome as a Carnival Cruise liner would have docking in Antlers, Oklahoma.

  IN OKLAHOMA, THERE’S a gun show almost every weekend of the year, which is right in line with the national trend. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives estimates there are more than two thousand gun shows held in the United States annually. But the National Association of Arms Show puts that figure closer to fifty-two hundred, or a hundred gun shows every weekend of the year.

  Wanenmacher’s Tulsa Arms Show occurs twice a year; the show organizer claims it is “the World’s Largest Selection of antique, collector and modern firearms, knives, and accessories.” Usually lasting a weekend, the Wanenmacher’s show, located at the Tulsa Fairgrounds, covers eleven acres and boasts more than forty-two hundred tables and seven thousand vendors. Nearly forty thousand people visit the show on a given weekend. There’s parking for RVs and scooters for rent.

  The first gun show put on by Wanenmacher’s was sponsored by the Indian Territory Gun Collectors Association in April 1955. A small group of avid enthusiasts met at a sportsman’s sporting-goods store called, I shit you not, Sportsman Sporting Goods. It was located in what has become midtown Tulsa.

  The idea of holding a show came about as a means to compare notes on what other gun collectors across the state had in their gun safes. When Joe Wanenmacher became club treasurer in 1968, he also took on the responsibility of organizing the semiannual gun show. In 1968 Wanenmacher counted 117 tables at the show. Then, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Gun Control Act of 1968. This act was the federal government’s attempt to regulate the sale and transfer of firearms in the United States by requiring gun sellers to be licensed and by banning some small firearms. Attendance at the gun shows exploded the next year.

  Two years in, Wanenmacher told the club he couldn’t run the show for little to no payment anymore. That’s when the club members asked him to take over the show permanently. The bargain was this: the show would retain the original club name, but all the profits would go into Wanenmacher’s pocket. Eventually, the club name—Indian Territory Gun Collectors Association—gave way to a new one: Wanenmacher’s. This was, perhaps, because the reference to the state’s theft of territory from whole nations of people—which happened twice—felt awkward, but most likely, Wanenmacher just liked his own name. A petroleum engineer by trade, the man sensed he was about to strike oil.

  Over the past forty-eight years, the show has achieved international acclaim because Wanenmacher willed it so. He traveled widely, recruiting collectors and salesmen from three continents and every state in the Union. The NRA’s National Firearms Museum took a spot at a Wanenmacher’s show in November
2014, to display guns owned by President Theodore Roosevelt and Annie Oakley. The actors Dan “Grizzly Adams” Haggerty and Lash LaRue have signed autographs at the show, as have members of the crew of the Enola Gay. According to Wanenmacher, the actor Tom Selleck once dropped by the show, in secret, to make a purchase. Fewer than 20 percent of collectors and salesmen at the show are Tulsans.

  Wanenmacher also changed the direction of the show. The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act went into effect in 1994. This law, supported by President Bill Clinton, banned semiautomatic weapons as well as high-capacity magazines. It also amended the Gun Control Act of 1968 to establish a five-day waiting period for unlicensed gun buyers. But, as with the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968, the Brady Act of 1994 only brought more customers to Wanenmacher. Then the Federal Assault Weapons Ban expired in 2004. Four years later, a black man was elected president, and gun owners, mostly white ones, headed straight for the nearest gun show.

  “Our good president probably has been the best gun salesman we’ve ever had, even better than Bill Clinton,” Wanenmacher said in 2014. “I think . . . it’s the fear of what he could do and knowing that we have a president who is the most anti-gun president we’ve ever had that motivated people to hoard even though now it looks like those things won’t happen—at least not very soon.”

  CHARLES AND I visited Wanenmacher’s show in November 2014, the year before the show turned sixty. Charles was dressed as he usually is. His polo shirt was tucked into his blue jeans, which he had pulled over the top of his cowboy boots. I was dressed as I usually am, in black hoodie, blue jumper jeans, and Jordan high-top sneakers. Charles took me around to the vendors, pointing out guns he thought were exciting or peculiar and stopping to chat with vendors whenever he felt gregarious. Whether my sense of vigilance was paranoia is debatable. I was painfully aware of how few black people I’d seen at the show. I didn’t need all my fingers to count them.