﻿ONE NATION UNDER GUNS
MY INDUSTRY HAS PLAYED A LEADING ROLE IN FOMENTING the division of our nation, one aspect of which boiled over and into the streets of cities across America after the cruel murder of George Floyd in May 2020. In rural cities like ours these protests were met with angry White men who were encouraged and incited to exert the power of their privilege with intimidation and firepower.
In my job as Kimber's vice president of sales, I often reminded other gun executives that the worsening cultural divide had become a game of Russian roulette. I had watched as incidences of school shootings increased along with the national obsession over offensive weapons of war. As I became increasingly alarmed, I made the fateful decision to try to use my leadership position in the industry to convince those in power that someday soon a chambered bullet would tear America in half.
Those warnings all seemed strangely distant now, as if I had been observing the war in a planning room on impersonal maps with plastic soldiers to represent real people. Now the war was here, and my family was on the ground, alongside me. There were no more plastic figures, just us and the angry armed men my industry had empowered.
Kalispell, in the northwest corner of Montana, is home to a concerning number of White supremacists but also a growing number of people who feel called to stand up for higher principles. In many ways our town, like many other small cities across the country, is a microcosm of the nation's cultural identity crisis.
As I prepared to join Kalispell's Black Lives Matter rally in June 2020, I knew that my family and I would experience the culture war close-up, on a personal scale, and it troubled me. I felt guilty because I was still in the industry—although by that point I'd made a plan to get out. Nonetheless, I had built a successful career selling tools designed for a single, ultimate purpose: to take lives. But I believed that the guns I sold were different: they were used for self-defense and for hunting and target shooting, which were indelible parts of my childhood. I spent a career focusing on those other purposes. I believed I was different from those who actually wanted to use their guns for deliberate killing. And of course I was, but I was also tied to them whether I wished to be or not.
When I started in the industry, it wanted nothing to do with extremism. I stayed as long as I did because I believed in the ideals and values that I learned growing up as a ranch kid, as a hunter, and as someone who still appreciates the craftsmanship of well-built firearms. I thought I could keep the industry from changing, and then I spent years fighting to hold a battle line within it. By that day in 2020, I had begun the process of getting out of the gun business. But as I thought about the company I helped build, the countless guns we sold, and the question my son had just asked me, I kept telling myself, I hope none of them are using a Kimber.
I had worked hard during my career to help build a company that sold guns I would be proud to own. To me and many others, the lines between different types of firearms were clear. I was frustrated when cable news shows glossed over the differences between guns and the differences between gun owners because I knew it just played into the National Rifle Association (NRA) plan. The powerful organization was just starting to reel from self-inflicted wounds and would eventually file for bankruptcy. Despite those setbacks, the country was living through chaos, which proved that our nation had already been transformed by the NRA and that there was no going back. The NRA had succeeded with a plan that required all gun owners to appear identical and march in lockstep. I wanted people to know that no matter what the NRA said, I was not like the men who would confront my family. I was one of the millions of gun owners who were disgusted at the thought of being lumped in with those who use offensive weapons to threaten and intimidate.
As we approached the rally, we joined up with a group of high school kids chanting, "No justice, no peace!" A few minutes later we stood with a local pastor. He and I actually had something in common. He also spent much of his time fighting against powerful societal forces unleashed by those who had appropriated something important to him. The look of anguish and guilt in his eyes felt familiar.
More than a thousand people had gathered downtown, and the protest grew tense. The dozens of armed men we knew would be there hovered behind us. They stood in a line, stiff, looking like out-of-shape military guards waiting to shoot an escaping prisoner. All of them were White. Most had beards and military boots. Some wore MAGA hats and Oath Keepers or "3 Percenter" patches, which signified membership in a growing radical militia organization founded around the concept that only 3 percent of American colonists were bold enough to fight the British. One man with a bright-red Marine Corps cap walked through the crowd, glaring at us with a baseball bat over his shoulder, his grip on it tight. He looped through the high school kids, then returned to stand with the armed men, who were all carrying loaded AR-15s with thirty-round magazines.
For decades my industry accepted and preached the rules of basic gun safety. Through a network of thousands of safety classes for hunters and gun owners across the country, the industry had long mandated avoidance of confrontation. Guns were to be used for defense and only as a last resort. The men at this protest dispensed with all those safety norms. Their loaded rifles hung from three-point tactical harnesses, muzzle down, on the front of their chests: each rifle a flashing neon sign of offensive intimidation. They had come here looking for a fight.
These men were, after all, amateurs, with one thing that unified them: assault rifles, which are anything but amateur. They had accessorized their guns with quad rails, electronic red dot sights, folding stocks, muzzle brakes, and a litany of other modifications—all designed to make the guns more lethal. These were the same specializations that elite military units use to increase efficiency in the heat of war. The soldiers in those units go through extensive training and use these weapons as unforgiving killing machines.
The amateurs at our protest were not from any trained unit. They had probably met one another through such booming social media sites as AR15.com, Funker Tactical, Demolition Ranch, and the Military Arms Channel. For years prior to this protest, advertising executives in the gun industry had been encouraging the "tactical lifestyle" by spending millions of dollars with these websites and influencers, who, in turn, cultivated millions of followers. The resulting feedback loop powered a culture that glorified weapons of war and encouraged followers to "own the libs." The more extreme the posts, the more followers they gained, and the more guns we sold. Eventually, those followers began showing up at the capitol buildings in Virginia, Michigan, and Kentucky with loaded rifles. Despite the fact that their aggressive actions violated all gun-safety norms once mandated by the gun business, I never heard a single gun-industry member criticize them or worry about the repercussions.
As I turned back to our group of protesters and toward the busy street, a large truck revved its engine to blow a cloud of black diesel exhaust into our faces. Men standing in the back of the truck began taunting us. One held up a large Confederate flag, and Lander shot me a look. Then the line of armed men behind us shook their fists and yelled back in approval over the top of us. They had just surrounded our group of protesters. I looked back at the armed men in disgust. Our country had arrived at the point where military guns were the symbols of an entire political movement.
The NRA and the firearms companies had long ago harnessed this fear and hate as fuel, then dropped a match into the middle of it. The sparks and the kindling for the blaze had been stacked since the beginning of my career in the gun business, and now it exploded into a national inferno from which emerged the angry MAGA Man who had pushed his fat finger into my boy's chest.
After I told the guy to keep walking, his buddies stepped in to challenge me. One carried an AR-15 loaded with a high-capacity magazine. Another held a tactical shotgun slung over his shoulder; this is a preferred weapon in close combat, designed to be quickly fired in tight spaces and to deliver a wide spray of deadly shot. Professional military officers and tactical law-enforcement units use these short-barreled weapons to clear entire buildings and to shoot multiple assailants in moving vehicles.
The tension diffused just enough to avoid disaster, but it all could have gone so wrong. People around me at our local protest were shocked by the amateur militia and the unhinged man who screamed at my twelve-year-old son. I wasn't shocked. I had seen this coming.
I studied these men now, disgusted but also curious. I saw a man I thought I knew as he passed by. Our eyes met, and he nodded at me as if to say, "Thank you." Then I looked at his hip. There it was: a holstered Kimber pistol. My stomach dropped. But I wasn't surprised.
Over the previous twenty-five years, I had worked hard to keep Kimber from jumping on the exploding AR-15 bandwagon. Despite immense pressures, I had succeeded, and Kimber stayed out of that market. I wanted a company that was more focused on what I believed to be a defensible and sustainable approach, not on the commoditized "black guns" that fed the tactical lifestyle. Our products were based on century-old designs and featured exquisite craftsmanship. The Kimber pistol I saw that day was proof that I could do only so much in the face of a wave of radicalization. The industry I once loved and helped build was now almost unrecognizable to me.
Had the men who just confronted me known about my day job, they might have done a double take. The day before this protest I sat in my comfortable office, directing the sales of guns and marveling at the effects of an unprecedented sales boom. We started the day with an impromptu sales meeting. Allen, our longtime manager of sales operations, arrived at work, bursting through the door with his usual intensity.
"Just about everything in California is still shut down," he said. "People can't buy a hamburger, but damn, have you seen the pictures from Turner's?" He showed me the photo of long lines of customers waiting to get inside the gun store. "It's like Black Friday times five!"
"I mean, what does it say about our country that we've been hoarding toilet paper and guns?" he added. "NICS is going to be off the chart again!"
A federal law named after President Reagan's press secretary, who had been wounded in an assassination attempt, created the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) in 1998. The Brady Act mandated that all gun sales by licensed dealers require one of these checks before finalizing a gun sale. The initial purpose of the system was preventing criminals from purchasing guns, but it also served as the closest thing to an official record of gun sales in America. After some data adjustments, the firearms industry generally accepted that one NICS check equals one gun sold.
Each month, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reported NICS numbers for the previous month, and the gun industry dutifully studied and mined these data for indications about market trends.