Gunshow

The day I saw a darker side to my childhood culture, and a convergence of weird nerds.

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I loved the Gunshow.

We rarely did outings when I was a child. There were family events and political meetings, yes, but they were too structured or went on for much too long long, while Stewart gathered an impressed coterie and basked in the Supply of praise and acknowledgment. With family, one had to be on their best behavior until Grandma's drunken pool party started to get weird and it was time to go, or else chattering about the Federal Reserve until we got kicked out of auditoriums 2 hours after closing. The political events were the worst, at family revels the current (but never long lasting) uncle might sit on a cousins lap and pinch his nipples while offering to assassinate Hillary Clinton in character as Santa Clause; Political meets peaked at standing around in the parking lot conversation circle for hours after event staff kicked us out, or worse tagging along to a Caucus. The Gunshow was just fun.

Going up to the ticket counter was always a little nerve-wracking, it felt vaguely like a checkpoint if for no other reason than the kind of vibe that makes you feel inherently guilty. Or, maybe, check in stands make a kid feel inherently guilty if they have childhood convention security trauma: On one of my first visits a family friend had reacted with mock horror to a small child Dakota pulling out a 5$ bill forgotten in jeans put through the laundry, informing me very seriously that washing money was called 'money laundering' and, being illegal itself, was only ever done by hardened criminals for nefarious transactions. Taking a laundered bill into a gun show was a sure sign of criminal intent, perhaps terrorism, and could land even a child in prison, but there was no time to divert now without giving myself away.

Nothing makes the puffed-up mall cop self-importance of a ticket booth man feel more intimidating than walking through casually with a Felony Five burning a hole in your pocket.

The Man never did catch on to me, and I always passed front door security without incident. Inside was a wonderland for a kid who rarely ever left the four walls of his house except for carefully scripted and generally boring social settings, a kaleidoscope of unrecognizable mysterious stuff in Woodland Camouflage, Olive Drab, Desert Tan, gunmetal gray, and cardboard that seemed fascinating and magical to someone who hadn't yet spent a decade living in a similar looking pile. While the surplus remained mostly outside of my home, it was an undiscovered country.

Most tables didn't catch my eye, you could find ammo cans and surplus Swiss army knives anywhere. The clothes I gave a very wide berth, in case I should run back into my father and have to spend 30 minutes playing G.I. Joe dress-up doll (I dare you to find a child that will patiently endure modeling 19 identical Army surplus outfits at a stretch). Time wasted trying on wool pants or being pressed into a search for cheap boots that fit my enormous feet was time that could be spent looking through Hungarian Army infantryman's periscopes, examining bear traps, checking over collections of old coins, or watching a knife sharpener work at his booth. A bored child could make a game out of collecting the various pamphlets set out on the tables, ranging from the now infamous Grandpa Jack to internet staple Chick's Tracts, and arranging them in a rainbow of colored pages screaming at you about Hell and the Second Amendment.

As fun as that sounds, a good Show could offer much more. The best were in Las Vegas, perhaps one of the great secondhand goods centers of the western world. Vegas had an early in on the Swap Meet scene, the odd transient nature of the town with here-and-gone desert mobile home communities, itinerant workers, show business hopefuls, and faux wealthy fed a national hot spot of pawn shops and unparalleled thrifting. The detritus of curio shops, barter markets, garage sales, and repo'd storage units were sorted and sifted so that the most tactically cool, or tacticool, would end up on Gunshow tables.

This meant the very best and the very most eclectic, with any other random variety of goods salable to preppers and paranoiacs on display. A Las Vegas Gunshow could have an odd character in an out-of-season windbreaker walking the isles advertising his slung SKS rifle with its shiny bayonet for sale or trade on a cardboard sign hung around his neck, passing on his salesman's circuit a polished booth of antique six-shooters and restored black powder rifles run by a reputable dealer. I was drawn to oddities, knick-knacks, tables of used books on Jeet Kune Do and the history of swords, that one dude who always turned up to sell replica Lord of the Rings weapons and 'zombie survival' branded machetes next to the crossbow booth. Watering a seed planted by my father's boyhood collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks and hardcover Silmarillion, I gravitated more and more to the odd corners of the Show that catered largely to huge nerds.

Just as varied as the goods, of course, were the people. A good Las Vegas Gunshow with a swollen weekend crowd drew a variety of citizens you really can't find anywhere else, save certain Wal-Mart locations in the AM. You could have a drawn out conversation with the old guys who claimed to be ex CIA and all seemed to have the same speech pattern, the conspiracy theorists distributing DVDs on the truth about Waco and the knife guys who seemed to feel some inner intellectual superiority to the gun-obsessed masses (Every attempt to question their martial arts systems met with “Have you even seen Surviving Edged Weapons?”). You could meet the Evangelicals who would try to hand you a magnetic 10 commandments decal for your car door, ATF agents and cops trying to get a feel for gun culture and learn to blend in, and the muscular young men with their invariably blonde wives in matching black combat boots who were probably white supremacists.

Then one year an oddity occurred, the Gunshow was held not in a single enclosed space but in a larger center with a divider set up straight down the middle. On the other side, brushing up against America's cultural manifestation of the paranoid style, was an anime convention.

This was in the old Vegas convention center on Desert Inn road, a massive space that often hosted multiple events but not often to such an eclectic crowd. Other Gunshows must have shared space before, but whatever obscure trade shows or business conventions they were slid off my child's attention span with dim impressions of white collared shirts and name tags on lanyards in the parking lot. All interest would have flowed one way, a collage of camouflage surplus and patched streetwear parading past onlooking knots of cookie-cutter professionals; Men at the loading doors laden with gun cases and heavy metal boxes, with their noses turned up at the mundane vendors with mundane wares who constrained themselves within the system. The Anime con was something else entirely, every bit as outwardly unusual as my own crowd. I recall being stuck on this, seeing the other distant line of colorfully dressed people snaking its way towards the entrance, and was struck by this entire other odd world happening just on the other side of the vast trade floor. Were there people over there who saw their convention as a mystical half-treasurebox-half-junkdrawer, the way I saw the Gunshow? Were there parents over there dragging their children along to meander the tables while they socialized and circulated?

Inside, the presence of the Anime con quite literally hung over my usual treasure hunting experience; The temporary divider thrown up down the middle of the building had a wide gap between steel roof and rolling wooden wall, letting sounds from the gatherings of two disparate subcultures mingle. I kept straying close to the tables by the divider, even the boring ones, listening to the overlapping convention chatter. I had only the dimmest idea of what the Anime scene in the US was like, or really any contact with Japanese media after a childhood obsession with Godzilla and Akira Kurosawa, so the bright colors and costumes I'd seen in the parallel line outside were nearly all I had to go one. It seemed strangely enticing, this idea of a gathering with its own entirely new set of hidden treasures and strange encounters just out of sight. I followed the wall the back of the building where, united by the universal lure of restrooms and overpriced pretzels, the crowds merged.

The differences were easy to spot at first, a solemn Asian man in a business suit with a bunny ear headband over perfectly slicked hair, towering over the almost entirely white-bread Gunshow attendees in high platform shoes. The rangy, scratchy-bearded guy in a surplus forest camo shirt with its sleeves cut off was easy to peg, the type who would make a huge production about his military service without ever quite lying about it ending when he cycled out of basic with an ankle injury. Ditto for the guys with over-developed biceps in pricey 5.11 branded shirts, although some of the gym bros were a bit harder to place. The people of color in line for upcharged salty snacks were generally an easy guess, and it struck me for the first time how very lily-white all my family's circles were in a diverse major city. I saw many times more black people on the sidewalk in any busy section of town than at any event where we actually socialized, but at the time that observation didn't really strike me as important. More of a stand-out than ethnicity was the fact that, bewilderingly, this line had girls in it.

Gunshows, in my experience, might have been mostly white as a rule, but they were almost universally male as an immutable law. There were some people who brought families, some younger men with spouses in tow like the bottle-blonde Neonazis trailing their shaven-headed opposite number, but the largest demographic by far was young men and the smallest by far young women. Directly ahead of me in line was a group of teenage girls in dark blue and purple school uniforms with matching cat ear headbands, exceeding by themselves the total number of women anywhere close to my age I had ever seen at a Gunshow, and they weren't even the only ones in line! I suddenly wondered, for the first time, if I was on the wrong side of the divider.

My fascination was held for a long moment while the gaggle in front of me waited irritably for the line to inch forward. I had only recently started feeling my attention drawn to the strip club billboards on the main roads, the cheaply printed escort catalogs available next to every newspaper stand across the city, and surreptitiously slipping business cards into my pocket from the booths that used scantily clad women posing with rifles and tactical vests to advertise. Those cards I kept tucked into my pillowcase, only sort of knowing why I liked taking them out to look at them, or why I had so much more difficulty talking with strange girls than strange boys at our sporadically attended homeschool meetups. The teens in moderately short skirts and cat ears in front of me consumed my attention totally, older, confident, and mysterious in their quiet conversation and bored expressions. It took a long time for my attention to slide away, almost feeling that my line of sight was intersecting with someone else's, and made eye contact with another surprise.

The man back and to my left, hefty and neckbearded, of indeterminate age in a washed out Transformers shirt a couple sizes too large, didn't seem remarkable at first. The girls he was looking at with me were a little too old for me and a lot too young for him of course, but wasn't the main thing that struck me.

I couldn't place him.

The longer I looked at him, distracted from skirt hems and curled hair, the more annoyed I was that I simply could not sort him. Even people I couldn't place with certainty, I could place in a likely category of Anime con or Gunshow. Not this guy, a true 50/50 shot who could have been from either line. The more at looked at non-girls in the room, the more I saw: Nerdy, pasty, generic white guys filtering in and out from either side of the rolling wall, utterly indistinguishable from each other once they joined the line if they weren't wearing some cultural identifier. Half the crowd, homogeneous and anonymous from either door.

If I could only ID half the attendees by their outliers, the Gunshow with its squirrely weirdos and the Anime con with its animal eared costumed oddballs, bearded conspiracy theorists on one side and actual women on another, if the core demographic was so similar that a life-long Gunshow veteran like myself could not accurately call who was who, were they actually that different?

I watched the sharply dressed man with his bunny ears and platforms stride out, saw stringy desert dwellers in many-pocketed vests smirk at him a little. I thought that if both sides of the building were collections of weird nerds with froot loop add-ons, sprinkled in for taste and color, I might be on the lamer side of the partition.

I wavered for a long moment with my pretzel, considering going out the wrong way and suddenly very conspicuous. I was now dying of curiosity, girls with cat ears and all kinds of people in home-made costumes of wildly varying quality vanishing back into an unknown country past the men's room door. I was tempted to slip in, pretend like I belonged and wander as casually as if I'd meant to be there the entire time. Fear slipped in, the specter of convention security who would fixate on trespassers, the ghost of little-kid panic over walking past officials with an illegally laundered 5$ bill. I hardly ever left the house unsupervised, and certainly never went anywhere on my own. Yy sense of direction barely existed ,as the idea of walking a few streets away from my home and finding my own way back was nearly foreign to me.

The anxiety of wandering into a place I was technically not allowed warred with curiosity, and a preteen Survivalist, immersed in the ever-present looming end of civilization and all-consuming fear of the future, froze with panic on the verge of walking to the far side of a single large building where he was not supposed to be. It would have been the furthest I had ever been from my parents of my own volition, the first time I'd just decided to go off-plan and do something different.

I retreated to familiar territory with my pretzel. The idea of being in trouble for going to the wrong place, doing something not allowed, was horrifying. I was an easily frightened color-inside-the-lines sort of child, goody-two-shoes nature combined with terror-of-a-dangerous-world nurture. I felt just a bit defeated, but did not turn back to reconsider.

An early brush with another odd subculture, something beyond the binary of staid sleepwalking society and my paranoiac people, would have stuck with me for long enough on its own, the first time I'd been around people who were different from my bubbles of self-selected compatible misfits since early childhood in Yale's graduate student housing apartments. What happened next stuck with me for a long time on its own, nagging in the back of my mind whenever I was given some new cause to doubt my beliefs.

I was on my way back, along the divider again and considering tables as I passed. None of them seemed to hold my interest, and I listened with one ear to an indistinct over a PA on the other side. I stopped by a display of security cameras while an announcer hyped up the crowd, gun nerds laughing to each other under a wild cheer from over the wall.

“Do they have any idea,” one said, chuckling, to another in a trucker hat, “That we have actually actual real weapons over here, and we could... Like...” His sentence ended in an inarticulate hand gesture, but everyone laughed. Of course they were better, if they decided to kill people to prove the point they could. I chuckled along because it seemed to be expected that everyone would react that way, and I left.

It wasn't just that they had to keep up this air of smug 'I can do violence' superiority that bothered me, the need to remind themselves that if the two events got into some kind of gang fight for the venue they would win, not only that their reaction to hearing people having fun doing something different provoked a pathetic need to assert that the others were ridiculous and they serious and lethally manly: The failure to see themselves as huge dorks just like the people in the bunny ears and Naruto headbands, and to realize that there was absolutely nothing wrong with that, was just kind of sad and petty.

It was that everyone else should have known better, and been afraid of them.

The version of second amendment dogma I'd been raised with didn't enclose lording gun ownership over everyone, although the gun culture that enshrined it certainly did, and I'd never seen it on such frank display. The other crowd should have been quiet and subdued, intimidated by the ability of jackasses wearing army surplus wool beanies in a Las Vegas summer to kill them all if they were so inclined.

I realized that I was definitely on the lame side of the convention center.

The Gunshows started losing a little of their magic after that, the same piles of varying stuff that were so interesting laid out on tables was an annoyance when you had to step over them every day. Increasing paranoia manifested in more time spent assembling redundant first aid bags and endlessly trying on winter camo and secondhand MARPAT, turning every outing into an hours-long chore to be endured. I haven't been back since I became an adult, and if I can't help build a better gun culture than the one we have in this country I might never set foot in one again. The way I saw the shows is an artifact of a child's perception, a place that never really existed except in my own memory.

The world being what it is these past few years, and my responsibilities now as an adult man being what they've been since our escape in 2017, I still have not been to the other side of the divider.

1. Photo credit to arainofthought.com