Book of the week: Gun Guys: A Road Trip by Dan Baum

(Knopf, $27)

“Dan Baum may be exactly what America needs right now: a liberal journalist with a gun,” said Michael Merschel in The Dallas Morning News. A New Jersey native and self-professed “gun nut,” Baum serves as “an intelligent and entertaining battlefield guide” to the true dimensions of the nation’s gun culture. Seeking to explain the appeal that firearms hold for America’s 70 to 80 million gun owners—himself included—Baum spent 18 months traveling the country to visit scores of fellow enthusiasts. In this literate, funny, and candid group portrait, he “captures the frustration gun lovers feel” when gun-control fanatics seem not to know them. “Armed,” it seems, “does not necessarily mean dangerous.”

Baum treats his subjects sympathetically, “but sympathetic doesn’t mean airbrushed,” said Daniel Akst in Newsday. Some of the gun lovers he meets do resemble the kind of grotesque caricatures a gun hater might imagine: paranoiacs who scream about President Obama and a U.N. takeover; underemployed youths addicted to playing Call of Duty. Yet he also encounters an affable couple who shoot together recreationally and an African-American engineer in Detroit who bought his first gun after being mugged. Such gun owners might even welcome some regulation, said Craig Seligman in Bloomberg.com. But “what about the genuine wackos out there?” Baum’s “delectably written” book is “likely to deepen anyone’s thinking” about the issue. But by failing to address the problem of gun owners who snap—or who didn’t ever deserve to be entrusted with such killing power—“he has left a hole in his defense.”

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“The real story of Gun Guys, though, is that of social class,” said Jeff Sharlet in Bookforum. Baum doesn’t seem to see the whole picture, but he does notice that the ranks of gun owners are thick with white, blue-collar traditionalists, the kind of people who haven’t fared too well economically in recent decades. He also suggests that his fellow liberals’ pursuit of gun control might be their way of avoiding the greater challenge of ensuring that no class of Americans gets left behind. For that unarmed elite, Baum offers crucial insight into an aspect of gun-owning too often overlooked—that guns are fun to shoot. But he’s as drunk on that pleasure as any other gun owner. “A bullet’s flight is too easily mistaken for freedom,” and that’s Baum’s biggest mistake here.