Rockets' Red Glare

Sunburn crept down my unprotected scalp, its progress imperceptible save for the stinging pain left behind every time I wiped the sweat from my forehead. Shaving my head was a dumb idea this time of year; forgetting the sunscreen was even dumber. Just ahead of me, a man in full woodland camouflage struggled to walk -- likely a symptom of the enormous cantaloupe-sized growth protruding from his ilium. A combat shotgun hung taut on a strap across the cripple's back, and I absently fingered the .38 special on my belt. It felt strange to be envious of him.

Sharp, overlapping machine-gun blasts vibrated in my foam earplugs with regularity, but no one in this area was paying any attention. They were here to buy. A hand-drawn tag Scotch-taped to the leviathan rifle in front of me read simply "$56,000" and was set directly behind an upturned Nazi SS helmet overflowing with brass knuckles: "$6 each". A rack of silk-screened t-shirts caught my eye -- the classic Che Guevara design re-imagined with President Obama in relief and letters added to spell "douCHEbag". Noticing my line of sight, the vendor piped up, grinning with half his mouth as he drew me in.

"A colored fella' looked at that one earlier. He said he loved it! Said he hated liberals!"

I've no reason to believe the t-shirt and brass-knuckle salesman was in any way representative of the hundreds of friendly, freakishly-knowledgeable vendors hawking their hawk-wares at the Knob Creek (KY) Machine Gun Shoot last Saturday. In fact, beyond the anachronistic (and innocuous) use of the term "colored", there was nothing terribly offensive about his observation or his shirts. And while crazies were out in force -- I can't shake the image of a man enthusiastically greeting an eight-year-old boy to his booth with a crisp Hitlergruß -- in aggregate the event was more Paula Dean than Anarchist Cookbook.

Firearms unquestionably outnumbered attendees by a factor of ten, both for sale and in personal possession, and I'm fairly certain I've never felt so safe in all my life. Vendors routinely turned their backs on unsecured items worth tens of thousands of dollars; after all, who would try to rob these people? Even US Senate candidate Rand Paul made an early appearance, pressing the flesh with hobbyists and kooks alike with no visible security entourage of any kind.

Had MSNBC been on the scene (like the New Zealand Herald?), it would have been easy to cherry-pick a ratings-grabbing hodgepodge of militants and racists, but the reality is that Knob Creek was ideal family fare. Between rich historical displays, a live band, "feel-free-to-touch!" meteorites, a light-and-sound show that puts fireworks to shame, and a swiftboatload of genuine experts teaching respect for and healthy caution toward weapons, the Machine Gun Shoot is exactly the kind of event Washington, Adams, and Jefferson would have enjoyed.

At eighty-seven degrees, less parking than your average Hawaiian Shave Ice hut, and no beer for sale, 8000 people certainly didn't come all this way just to whisper about "colored" people.