Dan Baum is not your typical gun guy. He has a lifelong love of firearms he can trace back to the age of five. But he’s also a Jewish Democrat and a former staff writer for The New Yorker and feels like a misfit next to most gun owners, who identify overwhelmingly on the conservative side of the spectrum.
In order to bridge this gap, Baum set off on a cross-country journey, chatting with everyone from a gun store owner in Louisville to a wild boar hunter in Texas to a Hollywood armorer. The result is Gun Guys: A Road Trip. I spoke with Baum about his trek through gun country and why this issue is one of our nation’s most complicated and politically divisive.
You write that you didn’t want to be part of a gun culture, even though you were a “gun guy” yourself. Why did you feel this conflict?
How did the act of carrying a weapon every day affect you?
There’s a part of every gun guy that wants to carry a gun because you get to be with your gun all the time. I know that sounds weird, but not if you like guns, you like handling them. Most of the time you don’t get to. You take them out of the safe once or twice a year.
It was also a good way to camouflage myself. I don’t look like a gun guy, I don’t sound like a gun guy — I sound like just the opposite and I look like just the opposite. They can see me coming a mile away. But if I’m wearing a gun, I’m one of them.
by Hope Reese
