On the way to the world’s largest machine-gun shoot, I drove up through the scrubby hardpan desert of western Arizona. I stopped in the middle of nowhere to photograph Nothing. Founded in 1977, Nothing once boasted a population of four, who described themselves on a sign as ‘staunch citizens’ and ‘dedicated people’ who had ‘faith in Nothing, hoped for Nothing, worked at Nothing, for Nothing’. Now it consisted of an abandoned, vandalised building and a sun-battered sign saying NOTHING.
Twenty miles up the road was Wikieup, population 71, unambitiously named after a style of temporary Native American hut. Eleven miles more and I turned off the highway on a dirt road, crossed the Big Sandy River without getting my tyres wet, and followed the signs to the Big Sandy Shoot. I tried to prepare myself for three days of violent aggression and what promised to be ear-splitting noise. For protection I had bought a pair of fairly expensive electronic ear muffs designed to mute the sound of gunfire and amplify human speech.
I felt uneasy and apprehensive. Thinking that writers might not be welcome, I had secured a vendor pass from the organisers under false pretences. What if angry gun enthusiasts asked me what I was doing at the shoot with a notebook and no machine gun? I drove through the entrance gate and up to a dusty, windswept, flattened ridge overlooking a canyon. A small mountain on the other side of the canyon acted as a backstop for the bullets. The canyon floor was littered with oil drums and wrecked cars and trucks – these would be used as targets.
More than a hundred motorhomes were parked along the ridge and many of them were fronted by vendor booths, selling gun parts, ammunition, military-style clothing, souvenirs, T-shirts. Along the rim of the canyon was a quarter-mile firing range with hundreds of perfectly legal, fully automatic machine guns set up and ready to fire, plus mortars, military cannons, grenade launchers and a great big Sherman tank. American flags were flying. Jimi Hendrix was blaring from the speakers. America was taking it to extremes. There was more than enough firepower here to annihilate a small army.
The shooters were mostly older white men with large amounts of disposable income. Some were dressed in military regalia, others in khakis and polo shirts, and most somewhere in between. Arizona was heavily represented but the shooters were from all over the country, and a few from Europe, Mexico and Australia.
I talked to a Jewish doctor from Dallas who withheld his name. He had approximately $100,000 worth of guns and was planning to shoot off ‘a good six figures’ worth of ammunition, which is extremely easy to do with a machine gun. A single round for the hulking .50 calibre guns, which are designed to take out planes and armoured personnel carriers, cost $5 at the vendor booths and the .50 cals, as everyone called them, could shoot up to 1,200 rounds a minute, or $6,000 a minute at vendor prices. The Big Sandy Shoot would go on for three days.
It began with a hats-off, hands-on-heart Pledge of Allegiance, and a safety talk by Ed Hope, the octogenarian general manager of the event. You could shoot handguns, but you couldn’t wear them. Ear protection was mandatory. When shooting at the model planes that would be flying through the canyon, resist the urge to keep following them with your gun barrel, so as not to endanger the shooting line. When shooting mortars and grenades, try not to set the mountain on fire – although there was a fire crew for that eventuality. ‘We’ve never had a serious accident and let’s keep it that way,’ he concluded.
Then the shooters went to their guns, a horn blared, a red flag was run up a pole, someone yelled, ‘Fire in the hole!’ and all the machine guns opened up at once. Even with ear protection, it was shatteringly loud. I could feel the concussive pressure waves from the .50 cals inside my lungs and my skull, which sent my body into clenched distress mode because it had never experienced anything like it. The loudest rock concerts were like lullabies compared to these war machines. The Miniguns, which can shoot 6,000 rounds a minute and are often mounted in helicopters, made a rude, dirty, outrageous sound like a massively amplified raspberry.
The boom from the artillery pieces was like getting punched in both ears at once and the howitzer seemed to jolt my eyeballs in their sockets. In addition to the oil drums and wrecked vehicles there were ‘reactive targets’ that exploded when you hit them with machine-gun fire. I took cover behind the motorhomes, where it was still loud as hell with ear protection, and looked at my watch. Three hours and 40 minutes to go until they took their first break.
I found Ed Hope and managed to interview him on the far side of the ridge, behind all the motorhomes and the catering tent. Conversation was possible there unless the .50 cals or the Miniguns were going off.
His hearing aid – all the older guys had hearing aids – was wirelessly connected to his mobile phone so he’d be looking at me, answering my question, and then he’d come out with an apparent non sequitur because his calls went straight into his ear: ‘The shoot has been going for more than 30 years, and we do it in memory of Bob Faris, who was an icon in this community, and hey, yeah, Kent’ll take care of that, sure thing, bye, now where was I?’
‘Bob Faris,’ I said.
‘Right,’ he continued. ‘Bob was an old gentleman and a bachelor with no kids because he was so completely focused on firearms. After he died we put him in a big green dinosaur full of explosives, set him out there on the range, and blew him into dust, which was his wish.’
‘It’s not as political here as I was expecting,’ I said. ‘Is that deliberate?’
‘Yes. I’m a liberal Democrat and nearly all these other guys are brainwashed Trump Republicans so we try to keep politics out of it.’
‘You’re a liberal Democrat? With machine guns?’
‘That’s right. I’m a retired schoolteacher. I have 36 machine guns and more than 300 other firearms. I hate the NRA [National Rifle Association], though I’m a lifetime member, because I want more gun control. If we keep doing nothing when a mentally ill teenager gets an AR-15 and shoots up his classmates, we’re feeding ammunition to the anti-gun people.’
‘What sort of gun control do you support?’
‘We need to start policing this, with strict gun licences and harsh punishments for gun crimes. Otherwise they’re going to start taking away our machine guns, even though they’re not the problem. These guns have never been used in a mass shooting, and they’re tightly regulated with background checks by the FBI, and fingerprinting, and a whole lot of paperwork, which is how it should be.’
‘Are there any other Democrats here?’
‘Let’s see, we’ve got about 150 shooters. I’d say maybe 20 are Democrats and they’re keeping it quiet. The guys who come here aren’t militia types. They’re dedicated collectors and most of them are professionals or gun dealers. Working people can’t afford the guns or the ammo. We estimate there are $10 million worth of guns at the shoot, and these guys will shoot about 3.5 million rounds. We have the shoot twice a year because it takes that long to accumulate the ammo. I’ll shoot $5,000 worth in a few minutes and I won’t even care. It’s just so much fun.’
I was astonished that the man in charge of the world’s largest machine shoot was a liberal Democrat, and it was true what he said: machine guns had never been used in a mass shooting. But what if one of these shooters got robbed?
A Minigun could take out thousands of people in a sports stadium in a couple of minutes. What if a domestic terrorist with no criminal record went through the process to get a .50 cal machine gun? He could take out planes coming in to land. The shooters seemed like a decent, responsible bunch, reminiscent of classic car collectors, except they were into hardcore weapons of war, but it wasn’t hard to come up with nightmarish scenarios involving legal machine guns in civilian hands. Only in America was it regarded as a constitutional right.
During the first break, I wandered the vendor booths. I was looking at a .50 cal SLAP round (saboted light armor penetrator) which, the vendor promised, would penetrate three inches of solid steel. She was a young woman, tattooed, brassy and talkative, wearing a tank top and a bandana in her hair. She was selling ammo, guns and gun parts with her husband, who looked wary and shifty. They were living in a slightly battered motorhome, travelling around gun shows, rallies and shooting events.
‘I like to blow s—t up,’ she said raspily. ‘I’d never shot a .50 cal before I came here. If I had a dick, it’d give me a hard-on. My husband is brilliant with guns. He can turn anything into a fully automatic.’
Her husband shot her a look that said, ‘Quit talking about illegal s—t.’
They were from Oregon, but they were spending most of their time in Arizona now, because it had so many gun events and such gun-friendly laws. It wasn’t everywhere you could drive around in a motorhome full of machine guns, ammo and gunsmithing tools without sweating a traffic stop. ‘We got pulled over outside Bullhead City and it was no problem,’ she said. ‘The cop thought our guns were cool.’
The tank had come to Big Sandy from Las Vegas, where it was rented out to tourists for rides and car-crushings. It fired massive 105mm shells, weighing 23lb each. The tank guys, who were young, friendly and dressed in military garb, invited me to climb aboard for a ride through the desert. Sometimes you wake up in the morning and have no idea what the day has in store for you. I had met a liberal machine-gun enthusiast, had my ears assaulted by the loudest noise I had ever heard, and was now riding on a tank that was demolishing desert vegetation and turning with impressive agility. When the tank ride ended, they offered me a blast on their Minigun. Considering that it burned through $100 of ammunition in a single second, this was a generous offer and it seemed churlish to refuse.
But first they loaded one of the massive shells into the tank’s main gun. Shooters and spectators gathered around for this Big Sandy highlight. When the ground-shaking boom came, the crowd roared. Afterwards I fired the Minigun and some other machine guns. The thrill of harnessing all that power, violence and explosive force was more than counterbalanced by the pain it inflicted on my ears and the inside of my head.
The night shoot was the most American spectacle imaginable, like the 4th of July combined with Apocalypse Now. The machine guns were shooting tracer rounds in red, white and blue at lit-up model airplanes and reactive targets that exploded with white flames. There were fireworks in the sky and grenade explosions, flares going off, fires on the mountain, fires in the canyon, smoke everywhere. Booming artillery, the murderous rattle of the .50 cals, the dirty thunder of the Miniguns, all-American cries of, ‘F—k yeah!’ and, ‘Dayum bitches!’ On and on, hour after pulverising hour.
The following day, a Saturday, the shoot filled up with hundreds of spectators. These were mostly working people from north-west Arizona, the Trumpiest part of the state. It was single men and families, with children as young as three and four, which I found hard to fathom. The majority of the men wore full beards, and T-shirts and caps emblazoned with slogans: ‘We The People Are Pissed,’ ‘Do Whatever Da F—k You Wanna Do,’ ‘I Smell Commies,’ ‘Zero F—ks Given,’ ‘Ready For War,’ ‘No One Needs An AR-15? No One Needs A Whiny Little Bitch!’ and, ‘Guns Don’t Kill People, I Kill People.’ A few wore the insignia of the Three Percenters militia movement. There were bikers and their old ladies, some old cowboys in Wranglers and straw hats, a couple of fantastically mean-looking ex-cons with Aryan Nations tattoos.
In the mid-afternoon they formed a loose crowd around the tank as it prepared to fire. I was in the back of the crowd, scribbling in my notebook. When I looked up there was a man in my face.
‘The f—k are you doing?’ he said.
We were both wearing ear protection, so his voice came through like a tinny recording. I ignored him and went back to taking notes, wondering if he would escalate or let it go, keeping my eyes on the page. Then came the cry of, ‘Fire in the hole!’ from the tank crew, followed by the colossal boom, which I used to make a swift exit.
I went to my vehicle, shut myself inside, ripped off my disappointing ear protection. I needed a break from the noise and the scene. I drove to the gas-station convenience store in Wikieup. It was busy on a Saturday afternoon. People were dressed much the same as the spectators at the machine-gun shoot, but with one significant difference. There was no rule against wearing sidearms here. About half of the men and women in the store, and getting in and out of cars and trucks in the parking lot, had semi-automatic pistols holstered on their belts.
On the way back to the shoot, I stopped on the dirt road, walked up a dry wash for a few hundred yards, sat down on a rock, and drank a cold beer with my ears ringing in the blessed silence. All around me were low desert hills with catclaw, creosotes, a few mesquites and ocotillos, and mountains on the skyline in all directions. A red-tailed hawk soared overhead and made its shrill cry. In the fine sand of the wash were the tracks of coyote, fox, rabbit, ringtail cat, kangaroo rat, snake, lizard.
If you turned the kaleidoscope of the Big Sandy Shoot, you could see a mutually supportive community of responsible hobbyists and collectors, a celebration of violence and war, an extraordinary freedom granted by a government to its citizens, an unparalleled method of converting money into noise, and the desecration of a place that probably looked like empty wasteland to most of the shooters, ‘nothing out there but desert’.
I thought about the kit foxes which had evolved their large, delicate ears to become acutely sensitive in the desert silence, and the unfathomable quantity of lead that had been blasted into the canyon and mountain, and was now presumably leaching toxic chemicals into the soil and aquifer.
Back at the shoot, I met a man wearing a shirt that said, ‘Happiness Comes From Guns Not Relationships’. He told me, ‘I’ve got ex-wives because of machine guns.’ Later I asked Mike Latham, the amiable Phoenix gunsmith who had first told me about the Big Sandy Shoot, if that was a common story. ‘Guns can definitely be an obsession,’ he said. ‘Especially when you get into World War Two and World War One guns, and the stories that go with those. My own collecting is pretty obsessive.’
How obsessive? ‘I have over 200 guns,’ he said. ‘My gun safe is a whole room that I built on to my house. I’m looking for a woman who won’t run from the guns, but it’s hard. Most of them see that room and want out.’
Mike started shooting guns when he was five. His father was a firearms enthusiast and had been a gunsmith. As Mike told me about his gun-centric upbringing, I thought: are we all just products of our environment with a few small variations and anomalies? ‘I wanted to get into the firearms industry but I couldn’t find a way. Then I found out about a two-year gunsmithing course, and I enrolled and became a gunsmith.’
He was stunned to learn that Ed Hope was a liberal Democrat who wanted more gun control. ‘That makes no sense at all,’ he said. Mike took the standard NRA position: any concessions on gun control would lead to more gun control. I told him my thoughts on that subject: ‘It’s possible they might raise the age limit on assault weapons to 21, and there might be more background checks, but America is still going to be armed to the teeth, and it’s going to keep getting mass shootings and a sky-high murder rate because of it. There’s 400 million guns in this country already. The government isn’t going to take them away from people, because it would be total mayhem if they tried.’
‘That 400 million figure is actually a very conservative estimate,’ he said. ‘The real figure is probably closer to 600 million. And now you’ve got the Ghost Gunner 3. How do you regulate a gun that anyone can build in their kitchen in two hours with a block of aluminium and a 3D printer?’
It was getting dark now and the night shoot was imminent. When it erupted, my jaws and body instinctively clenched against the violence and loudness of it, which was that of a pitched battle in wartime, but Mike looked perfectly calm and relaxed as he loaded up his machine guns and blasted away at the targets. He was in his happy place.
Later that night, sitting around a bonfire, Mike started talking about his big dream for the future, the thing he had always wanted, the reason he had to stop spending all his money on machine guns and ammo, and it struck me as a quintessentially Arizona dream: ‘I want a long piece of land where I can shoot by myself.’
Extracted from A Race to the Bottom of Crazy: Dispatches from Arizona, by Richard Grant (Simon & Schuster). Copyright 2024
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