Dan Baum’s busy doing the full court press tour for his recently released book, Gun Guys: A Road Trip. In an interview at theatlantic.com yesterday, he’s asked by Hope Reese how he was affected by toting a heater (sometimes openly, sometimes concealed) every day during his journey of discovery. “It was…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.” An answer which, to those with the hair-trigger outrage gene, might seem less than politically correct . . .
If he’d been talking about Jehovah’s Witnesses, bowlers or the Irish, more than a few might have thought that answer bigoted. Just what does a gun owner look like, Mr. Baum? Then again, stop into your LGS on any Saturday afternoon and you’d be forgiven for wondering if the guys fondling the ARs (if there are any in stock), those looking at shotguns and the dood buying a refill of Hoppe’s are all members of the same extended family.
But as Dan so ably points out in the interview, there are all kinds of gun owners out there these days. Which, you’d think, would make them more than a little difficult to readily ID in the crowd on any particular street corner. How ’bout you? Can you tell a gun owner when you see one coming the other way?