by Megan Pugh
The middle-aged woman at the door to the Memphis Gun Show stamps your hand with a friendly purple ladybug to show that you have paid the $6.00 entry fee. She tells you that you'd better get that hair outta your face and put it behind your ears for your Momma, wherever she may be, because you need to clean up and follow the rules, and she knows your Momma would want you to do this, because she is a Momma herself. Then she reminds you to check your weapons at the folding table behind you, because even though you look too small to be packing much of anything, loaded guns are not allowed on the premises.
The Memphis Gun Show, after all, values safety, particularly this October weekend, when sniper John Allan Muhammad has just been caught, and the nation's anxiety about firearms runs a little higher than usual. To make sure that there's no call for nervousness here today, a lone security guard patrols the room with his mouth half-open. He shuffles absently past folding tables with orderly rows of Winchester Rifles and Colts and Glocks. Vendors are happy to sell you boxes of bullets so you can load your gun and shoot.
One man, who wears a top hat over his long brown hair and a tuxedo vest over his purple silk shirt, sits in a wheelchair behind a table and says that he can help you. That gun that John Allan Muhammad used? You can't buy that here, but you can get a fancier sniper gun that's even better. And under what the liberals like to call "the gun show loophole," he says, you don't even need to fill out the paperwork that recent legislation requires from real firearms stores. All that stuff is stupid anyway. Criminals will break into your house to steal your guns if they can't buy them themselves. And if you can't buy a gun to feel safe, how will you sleep well at night?
Gun show attendees just want to protect themselves. Many of these lone menthey are mostly menwear camouflage jumpsuits, no doubt to disguise themselves in the urban jungle. They look through stacks of army surplus clothes and Confederate bumper-stickers and magazines that instruct them in how to survive in the face of widespread Y2K-like disaster. They pick up how-to videos and books with titles like The Colt Peacemaker Encyclopedia, vol. 1 and The Ultimate Sniper and How to Get Anything on Anybody: Secrets of Surveillance.
Book vendor and gun show organizer Chuck Kelley knows how to keep close surveillance on his own merchandise and isn't shy about confronting people who might be dangerous. Chuck, an older man with bits of thinning white hair escaping from under his U. S. S. Rory baseball cap, has had enough life experience to know how to weed the good from the bad, the with-us from the against-us, the God-fearing from the pinkos.
That's why Chuck Kelley walks over and stands next to you. He knows better than to trust any would-be snoops scribbling down the titles of books on his table, even small young women. Chuck knows that anyone can be bad news if they've got too much schooling. There was that time his wife Linda took that English class down at L.S.U. during Vietnam. She wrote a paper in support of the U.S. Military and got her first "F." This from a pansy professor who would squat on top of his desknot stand, not sit, but squat.
"Why, that's crazy," you say. Chuck starts to warm up to you then, but he knows better than to let his guard down too far. Right now, with everyone in a huff about that sniper in Maryland, trying to give gun owners a bad name. . . He has to be careful. That's why Chuck makes you sit in a chair half the height of his own: to show that he is in charge, on top, in control, able to see everything from your ponytail to your feet, especially what you might write in that little notebook of yours.
Chuck says that most people don't even bother to learn about the real snipersarmy guys in books like The Best of the One Shot Brotherhood or Carlos Hathcock: White Feather, USMC Scout, about the one-time nominee for the Congressional Medal of Honor (though there was no way he was ever going to get it from Slick Willy). The North Vietnamese had a bounty on Hathcock, but they never got him. One time he shot one of their snipers, 2500 feet away or something, right through the scope of his gun, into the guy's eye.
You mumble something enthusiastic about the symbolic power of that storyhow the bullet was a reversal of the Vietnamese sniper's own eye and Chuck seems pleased, like he's glad to be entertaining a little lady. He shows you a video where you could see an African buffalo being shot right at a hunter's feet. "Now that's action."
Does Chuck Kelly enjoy hunting? He did as a younger man, but nowadays he's too old and too busy and only has time for hunting targets. The best-selling target this year is a white paper silhouette of Osama bin Laden. You worry that the silhouette doesn't differ from any other traditionally-clothed Arab man and that this simplified shape just might send a dangerously simplified message. But you just nod. "Oh, of course."
Why should you question the men at the Memphis Gun Show? They are red-blooded Americans who care about their country and they want it to know their version of the truth. That's why Chuck Kelley is ready to fight the lying liberal media. He gives you his card (can you call him with any other questions? No) and sends you across the room. Chuck thinks you'll be amused down there, where you can see those funny guys in the Scottish Guard wearing kilts. Plus he needs you out of his hair. No more questions. He's got work to do. The gun show needs watching over.
Chuck Kelley is in charge, but even his eagle eyes cannot catch everything. He doesn't seem to notice the small boy, who must be five or six years old, sitting on a gray plastic chair nearby. The boy raises a plastic handgun to his right temple, where he holds it for a few seconds before pulling the trigger. You can hear it click from fifty feet away, but no one at the Memphis Gun Show pays any attention. He rubs his head, as if he's making sure a bullet hasn't gone in, and decides to try again. He holds the gun in place, firing and firing and firing.