"Instead, they have treated me and others like me with utter contempt. They have confiscated our property and put people like me in maximum-security prisons over ownership of fender washers, claiming they were unassembled silencer parts. Over pieces of muffler tubing. They have shot a man's wife in the head because his gun's buttstock was too short. They beat another man's pregnant wife until she miscarried, over a gun collection on which the guy had done all the stupid paperwork things the ATF wanted, but the feds temporarily lost the records. They burned ninety people alive over a disputed two hundred dollar tax.

"If you believe you have the right to buy, own and shoot small arms in a safe manner, as much and as often as you want, and you exercise that right regularly, our government has branded you as the enemy. They will pursue you more relentlessly and attack you more severely than they do the people who pick up teenage runaways in the bus station and torture them to death on camera for black-market 'snuff' films.

"These statist thugs are zeroing in on the most important thing in my life. Being able to exercise my right to buy guns and shoot them is more valuable to me than all the millions of dollars of mine they've taken. The federal and state governments are doing everything in their power to take away my most important right, and they are doing this every single day." Henry Bowman closed his eyes and shook his head. Ray Johnson scarcely knew what to say.

"What you are describing is much worse than anything I ever saw in South Africa," Ray said levelly. "I have not practiced law here for thirty years. But from a legal standpoint, I would think these things you tell me about would be utterly impossible in this country."

"They aren't," Henry replied. The anger had seeped out of him, and he was left with a pervasive sadness that lay in his body like a deep bruise. "I have never wished ill of anyone," Henry said softly, "but by God I hate these bastards. And there's not a damn thing I can do about it."

Ray Johnson stared at his friend, and his mind went back to 1978. Sixteen years ago, he thought to himself, / watched this man face down a stampede of buffalo with a bolt action rifle because he thought the herd was going to trample one of my trackers, and he did it with a smile. Now he feels beaten by his own government. Ray opened his mouth, and the words came out without conscious thought.

"When you get to where you start shooting them, give me a call." Jesus, where did that come from? Ray thought in astonishment.

"I'm sorry, Ray," Henry said after a few moments, not looking at his friend. "I just unloaded about twentysix years of anger on you, right there." He smiled and pinched the bridge of his nose. He laughed softly. "I'm not going to do anything like shoot anyone. And if I did, I'd hire a trial lawyer, not a contracts or personal-injury guy who's spent the last thirty years in African hunting camps. No offense."

"I didn't mean I'd represent you," Ray explained slowly. "I was talking about helping pull the trigger." Henry looked at his friend for a long time before speaking, and he chose his next words with care.

"Don't say things like that out loud. Ever. Everyone that's been charged by the feds with some stupid gunlaw violation has been slapped with a conspiracy charge on top of it, and that's the one they usually make stick. It's a hundred times worse than the airports-jokes really will get you sent to prison." He looked at his guest for a few seconds, then jumped to his feet.

"Screw it," Henry said suddenly. "I'm being a lousy host. Let's pretend it's 1963 again. I'll show you my shop, then we'll go to my quarry. I've got a gun you'll get a kick out of shooting. Come on." Henry got up and ushered Raymond towards the basement steps, his voice once again full of pleasure and enthusiasm.

"You're going to like my shop," he said happily. "It's one of the best I've ever seen, if I do say so myself." "What you got going here?" Ray asked as they stood by the smaller of Henry's two metal lathes, a 10"

Hardinge. Gripped in the machine's collet chuck was what appeared to be a steel cylinder about 3/4" in diameter with a copper ridge encircling it near the exposed end. In a cardboard box on top of the machine were several more of the cylinders. They were pointed on the other end, and Ray realized they were large bullets.

"Guy at the scrap yard called me when he got in a big pile of fired brass from some military installation. Wanted me to see if there were any I could use before he sent it to the smelter.

"Along with all the fired .50s and Vulcan brass were a couple dozen unfired rounds of U.S. 20mm he told me to take. I've never had a U.S. twenty, but if you pull the bullets and turn the drive bands nine thousandths in a lathe, you can load the U.S. projectiles in the bigger 20 x 138mm case and shoot them in Finnish Lahti or a Swiss Solothurn.

"I wasn't up on what the tip colors meant, especially the newest stuff. I thought these might be depleted uranium, but they're not dense enough for that. They're definitely not ball ammo-there's too many paint bands on the nose. I've been told that some of the newest rounds are spin-armed, and I heard that some of the new explosive rounds automatically detonate in the air after a certain number of revolutions, so our pilots in dogfights don't send stray explosive rounds into our ground troops by accident.

"That would seem to be a fairly complicated mechanism to put in a little 20mm slug, but I don't doubt it's possible. So I spun 'em real slow, like fifty RPM, when I cut the drive bands down."

"Prudent of you," Ray said drily. "So what do you think these bullets do when they hit?" Henry removed the projectile from the Hardinge's chuck, put it in the box with the others, and handed the box to Ray. "I thought we'd go find out. Take these over by the big loading press on the far end of the loading bench. Solothurn dies are in the rack bolted to the shelf. I'll go dig up some Solothurn brass and the right powder."

"Got it."

The two men began to assemble the ammunition for the old Swiss weapon.

"Got your ears on?"

"Have at it."

"Watch the middle of the big limestone boulder. Would look better at night, but let's see if we can spot anything in daylight." Henry Bowman wriggled on his stomach and fitted his right eye to the rubber eyepiece of the big gun's scope and aimed at his target three hundred forty yards distant. He squeezed the big trigger with the first two fingers of his right hand, and the fifty-five-year-old gun thundered.

"Cool," Ray said with feeling. "You got a whole bunch of little flickering things that showered the whole rock. Looked like a bunch of little fireflies. Made a big shower about the size of a one-car garage."

"I caught a little bit of it out of my left eye," Henry said as he turned towards his friend. "I think these must be the 'firestarter' rounds I heard about, from some guys in Desert Storm. They've got thermite particles in them, and burn real hot. Let me pop another one, then let you shoot a couple. After that, I'd kind of like to save the rest for the night shoot at Knob Creek. I bet they look great in the dark."

"You got a great set-up here, with this old quarry."

"Yeah, it's safe to shoot anything. Rock face on the far side catches any slugs that skip off the surface. That's what made me buy the place. Every serious shooter should have his own rock quarry." "Get any swimmers, or is it all fenced and posted?"

"No swimmers, and yes, it's posted, but that's not what keeps them out. Lawyers warned me about having an attractive nuisance, but it's a funny thing: nobody wants to trespass where there's machine gun fire." Ray and Henry both started laughing.

"Hey, I brought plenty of ball 20mm we can shoot up. Vulcan practice bullets with the drive bands turned down. That stuff's really fun to shoot into the water. We'll go throw some small logs in, see how far you can pitch 'em in the air."

"Sounds like a deal."

"Did you actually handload all of these?" Ray asked as he helped Henry collect all the banana-sized fired cases that lay strewn around on the ground.

"Had to. Original surplus twenty mil is almost all gone. Goes for twenty, thirty bucks a round now. I found a huge pile of it in Europe, like five hundred tons, practically for free. Nothing modern shoots it. Only guys can use it are the collectors like us that happen to have one of the few hundred old Lahtis and Solothurns brought in over thirty years ago. Could've bought it for a quarter a round, but Imports Branch turned down the application. Not 'sporting' ammo, that stupid clause they threw in in '68. So I use U.S. practice projectiles that end up on the scrap market after the government demils the ammo, and swage the drive bands down in a die I made. I didn't use the die on the ones today 'cause I wasn't too keen on putting an incendiary bullet under pressure.

"I also have to anneal the necks on the brass, 'cause it's fifty-five years old, and swage the primer pockets in a hydraulic press so I can use .50 primers."

"You load and shoot it a hell of a lot more than I ever did," Ray said, "but did you ever stop to think about how much time and money people like us spend, scrounging components and reworking brass and machining new parts and shit like that, just so we can make the best possible ammo for every different kind of gun we happen to come across, just to blow it out the barrel?"

"Only three or four times a day," Henry said with a grin.

"It's cultural. That's what I keep telling Henry," Thomas J. Fleming explained as he cut into his steak.

"What do you mean?" Ray thought he knew what Fleming was talking about, but he wanted to hear the man's rationale for what he said. The three men were eating dinner at a private club where Henry was a member. The mounted head of one of the buffalo he had shot sixteen years before hung on the wall over the fireplace.

"People who don't shoot guns have this image of a fat guy in overalls with a sixth-grade education, drinking a six-pack of beer in the front seat of his pickup while driving back from a wedding where two of his cousins married each other. That's what some people think of when they hear 'gun nut', or 'NRA'. Or alternatively, they envision some moron with a shaved head, wearing camo, distributing Klan literature and bragging about how he's going to shoot any colored guy he sees with a white girl. To many people, those two stereotypes represent the gun culture." He took a drink of iced tea and went on.

"Now there are a few of those stereotypes around, but they're just a handful compared to the rest of us. The real members of the gun culture are the kind of people that are sitting at this table." Fleming paused a moment to let that sink in, and then went on.

"You might think Henry here is an extreme example, but you'd be wrong. There are a lot of guys like him. You know what IPSC shooting is, don't you? They hold the world championships in South Africa."

"Sure," Ray answered easily. "Before that, they were in Rhodesia." Fleming and Johnson were referring to the International Practical Shooting Conference. It was an established series of handgun matches where competitors ran through a course and encountered both 'hostile' and 'friendly' targets, designed to simulate real-world situations.

"Right," Fleming said, raising a finger. "Well, there are over fifty thousand registered IPSC competitors in this country. Typical serious competitor shoots between forty and a hundred thousand rounds a year practicing, and his competition gun costs two thousand minimum. You shoot IPSC, Henry?"

"No."

"Me neither. So Henry and I aren't part of that fifty thousand." Fleming raised a second finger. "Handgun silhouette, there's between thirty and forty thousand competitors. They shoot almost as much in practice as IPSC guys. You shoot silhouette, Henry?"

"Entered a couple matches a few years ago, but there's no range around here."

"No to that one too, then. Me, I've never tried it." He raised a third finger. "PPC, Practical Pistol Competition. At least as many competitors as IPSC, at least as much practice, guns are cheaper. You shoot PPC, Henry?"

"Never tried it."

"Nor I. Next we got bowling pin," he said as he raised a fourth finger, "which I know Henry's done, and those guys practice all the time. Then there's bullseye competition, rimfire silhouette, cowboy shoots for black powder guns, and a bunch of other stuff different organizations have dreamed up.

"Mind you now, that's just organized competition involving centerfire handguns. Now we move to rifles," he said as he folded up his fingers and started over. "We got twenty or thirty thousand bench rest shooters shooting dime-sized groups at two hundred yards. We got almost that many in rifle silhouette. We got high power shooters and DCM shooters lying on their stomachs shooting prone. We got a ton of smallbore shooters using rimfires, and we got more rimfire shooters in the GM Sportsman's Truck Challenge. Then there's the centerfire action matches for the semiauto guys, just like IPSC."

"I won one of those with a bolt action last year," Henry said with a smile.

"Show-off. We've also got a bunch of long range black powder shooters like in the Coors Schuetzenfest, plus frontier competitions, and even black powder benchrest.

"Finally, with shotguns, the numbers really go nuts. Skeet, trap, and sporting clays, well over two billion rounds fired last year. There's also crazy quail, plus bowling pin and other combat matches held with shotguns. How many rounds of shotgun ammo did you fire last year, Henry?"

"None."

"How much hunting?"

"None."

"So what we've got to look at now," Tom Fleming went on, "is the biggest part of all: the people like me or like Henry who shoot just to keep their skills up. People shooting just because they like it, without any particular interest in competition." Fleming took a breath, then saw that Henry was about to take over.

"Tom's exactly right," Henry jumped in. "Last year the ammo manufacturers sold over three billion rounds of rimfire ammo. Centerfire rifle and pistol was about two billion. Imports another billion.

"Then there's reloads. I don't have the figures from component companies, but I can make a fair guess. Almost nobody buys U.S. commercial centerfire ammo several cases at a time, but everybody buys primers a few thousand at a whack. I bet there's three or four rounds of reloads shot, minimum, for every factory metallic centerfire round fired downrange. And I haven't even considered shotshells in that estimate.

"So that's-What? Fifteen billion rounds of ammunition fired every year?" Henry asked. "Sounds right," Tom Fleming agreed. "And this lisping moron in the U. S. Senate wants to put a ten thousand percent tax on it." He shook his head.

"It isn't out-of-work high school dropouts firing all that ammo. It isn't guys with maxed-out credit cards who drink beer and watch sports all the time. It's educated, serious guys just like you, and Henry, and me. We've all got high incomes, or we wouldn't be able to afford to shoot all that ammo. None of us are on the dole. A few gun guys drink, but I don't know a single one that goes to football games or eve n watches sports on television. Do you, Henry?"

"Nobody I know."

"And if you think back to when you were a kid, I bet almost all your best memories are of when you were out shooting, or talking about it when you were done."

"You're dead-on on that one," Ray admitted.

"Boy, that's the truth," Henry broke in. "I went out to Reno with my uncle when I was in high school. Best time I ever had. Those live pigeon shooters all watched me shoot trap with my .375, and then went with us out in the desert to a cannon shoot. Had a hell of a time. They never shot anything but shotguns up until that day, and I bet a bunch of them now shoot big rifles.

"See what I mean?" Fleming said. "We're all the same. And the kicker is, every single one of us believes that as honest adult citizens, we have the absolute right to own any and all small arms and shoot them just as often as we want. We have a specific culture. Guns and shooting are very important to us, just like living as nomads and hunting buffalo was important to the Indians. We are willing to work hard and have the government confiscate half our money and use it for things we never get any benefit out of, if only we can continue to buy our guns and our ammo and our components, and shoot a lot.

"Our culture is important, and we're willing to pay for it. We have above-average educations, aboveaverage incomes, and almost nonexistent criminal involvement. We pay far more in taxes and receive virtually no subsidy payments. You'd think Washington would be happy, but instead they are doing everything they can to destroy our culture.

"In the '20s, soldiers sat on their bunks in the cold at Camp Perry, cleaning the handmade .22 target rifles they would compete with the next day. When the President proudly announces that today, seventy years later, he is ordering these same guns thrown into a blast furnace, we in the gun culture feel powerful emotions. They are the same emotions a Native American would feel if the President proudly ordered the destruction of war clubs and other sacred tribal artifacts. They are the same emotions that Jews felt watching newsreel footage of Nazi Sturmtroopen gleefully burning intricate copies of the Torah.

We offer to buy the government's surplus guns, and instead they pay to have them cut up. We offer to buy their surplus military ammo, shoot it, sell the brass to a smelter, and give the government the proceeds, and instead they pay to have it burned.

"These government slugs ban our guns and they ban our magazines and they ban our ammo. They ban suppressors that make our guns quieter and then they ban our outdoor shooting ranges because our guns are too loud. They ban steel-core ammunition because it's 'armor piercing', then they close down our indoor ranges where people shoot lead-core bullets because they say we might get lead poisoning.

"The people in the gun culture have a better safety record than any police department in the nation, but in several states actually prohibit us from using guns for self-protection, and in all the other states except one they make us buy a license. They tax us so we can have more cops, and when crime still goes up, they tax us more and ban more of our guns.

"People in the gun culture endure waiting periods that no other group would stand for. We undergo background checks that no legislator, judge, doctor, or police officer has to tolerate, and we submit to it not once, or once a year, but over and over again. Then, after we yield to this outrage, they smile and forbid us from buying more than one gun in a 30-day period.