“My dad was a big NRA member and gun proponent,” he says.
“He had lots of friends who were with the sheriffs, and we’d go out into the
desert in California and shoot.” He turns almost wistful for a second. “Now the
desert is all houses.”
Jesse James has been a lot of things over the years:
hamburger-stand operator, motorcycle customizer and proprietor of West Coast
Choppers, reality-television star, tabloid villain, and, now, gunsmith and
Texas transplant, one among the exodus of Californians who have landed in the
Lone Star State to something short of universal acclaim. A fair number of them
have brought their politics to Austin from Palo Alto or wherever it was they
couldn’t afford to live anymore, and the locals dread the Californication of
Texas.
Jesse James, on the other hand, fits in pretty well.
“In 2010, my buzzer went off on California,” he says. He’d
been living part-time in Austin since 2004, operating a motorcycle shop there.
Eventually, California’s suffocating political and social atmosphere became too
much, and he decamped to Texas for good. Moving Day in the Jesse James
household is something else: “The amount of stuff you accumulate in two decades
is amazing,” he says. He doesn’t mean tennis rackets and hedge clippers. “We
had 17 semitrucks full of equipment.”
California isn’t what it used to be, and it’s not just all
those stucco three-twos littering the formerly wide-open spaces of the Mojave
Desert. The wide-open spirit that once attracted to the West Coast characters
ranging from Jack Kerouac to Ronald Reagan has long since been supplanted by
the tepid and sanctimonious spirit of progressive nanny-statism, oppressive
taxes, endless regulation and Thou Shalt Nots, and the generally dreadful
project of trying to convert a glorious strip of the formerly Wild West into
Norway with nicer weather. Reagan may have won California in 1984, but, in the
end, it was the Miracle Whip–on–Wonder Bread spirit of Walter Mondale that
prevailed. Even Sonny Bono couldn’t win an election in the Coachella Valley
today.
And nowhere does the shadow of Nurse Ratched fall more
darkly in California than on firearms, the right to keep and bear them, and,
most important, the class of people inclined to do so.
“The gun regulation — I didn’t even realize how bad it was
until I moved to Texas,” James says. “I was like: Whoa. It happened when I was
in high school, but I wasn’t paying attention.” For much of his time in
California, James’s experience with firearms was a lot like that of any other
California-based celebrity: the Hollywood version. “We rented a lot of guns for
filming Monster Garage,” the reality show in which teams of colorful characters
worked to create unlikely mechanical monstrosities, e.g., turning a DeLorean
into a hovercraft. Unsuccessful projects were dispatched with dynamite, tank
treads, and, on occasion, gunfire. “Full autos, .50-calibers.
But I didn’t
realize what it was really like until I bought an AR-15 in the 1990s and it was
this weird composite breech-loading thing.” California law requires that
AR-style rifles have fixed magazines rather than detachable and swappable ones,
which more or less defeats the purpose of an AR. “It kind of made me mad,” he
says. And his interest in gunsmithing? “It kind of found me.”
Unlike motorcycles or monster mutant cars, guns become
family heirlooms, meaningful in a way that few other things are. “I’ll always
build bikes and cars. But a motorcycle is just like a boat. You can sell it on
Craigslist. Guns are a personal thing. It provides protection for you and your
family, and that gives it a higher meaning. You’re not going to think about
showing it off this weekend, but about two generations from now. And that seems
more important than motorcycles.”
James says that when he decided to get into the gun business,
some people assumed he was simply after a paycheck, looking to slap his famous
name on someone else’s product. Instead, he undertook a serious course of
study, spending time in the shop of master pistol-smith Jim Garthwaite in
Pennsylvania. Welding, machining, lathing: not exactly new ground for him.
Jesse James is in many ways emblematic of the enduring but
evolving gun culture of the United States. It’s a bright spot in the
manufacturing economy, from old-line mass-market companies to low-volume artisanal
shops. Once a primarily rural and blue-collar pursuit, the U.S. gun industry
has gone urban and upscale: One of James’s more notable creations — a
1911-style automatic pistol hand-forged out of Damascus steel and incorporating
a bit of metal taken from the Statue of Liberty during a restoration project —
would set you back just a smidgen less than a top-of-the-line Mercedes sedan.
Recreational shooting was once mainly about hunting, but today there are many
thousands of American firearms that have never had a whitetail in their sights.
And while many Californians are rightly frustrated with the
state’s ridiculous magazine regulations, the hot trend in shooting right now is
precision marksmanship, dinging twelve-inch steel plates from distances of 2,000
yards and more, with a day at the range meaning only a dozen or so carefully
considered shots. Heavy, bolt-action rifles chambered for relatively new rounds
such as the 6.5 Creedmoor, which serve no practical purpose other than
long-range plinking (most are far too cumbrous to use for hunting), are tough
to keep in stock. Big names in gunmaking such as Savage and Ruger have had hits
with high-tech precision rifles, but many smaller makers, including
Dallas-based Modern Outfitters and Phoenix-based Surgeon Rifles, have got into
the market with small-volume precision firearms sold at prices that would have
made Oliver Winchester blush.
A great part of the popularity of precision shooting can be
attributed to one man: Chris Kyle. The late Navy SEAL and author of American
Sniper, who survived four tours in Iraq only to be gunned down by a troubled
fellow veteran at a Texas shooting range, has become something of a cult
figure. Go to any shooting range and you’ll see young men with the same short
neat beard and Merrell hiking boots he sported, and a lot of sheepdog decals on
their Jeep Wranglers. (In the moral cosmology of American Sniper, there are
three kinds of men: wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs. You want to be a sheepdog.)
There are websites dedicated to obsessively documenting the gear he used, from
rifles and body armor down to the compass he carried in case his GPS failed.
Among his most famous exploits was shooting an enemy sniper from nearly a mile
and a quarter away.
Inescapably, there is a political aspect to this: A statue
memorial to Kyle was built with funds raised by tea-party groups. The political
charge associated with gun culture is only partly about policy as such. There
are the usual familiar debates about the Second Amendment, regulation, and
public safety. But the real question at the bottom of it all is: Who are we?
And who are we going to be? California? Or Texas?
Many of our current political fissures — which are, at their
center, cultural fissures — go back to September 11, 2001, and the emotional
and divisive politics associated with the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq, the PATRIOT Act and associated counter-terrorism measures, and the
permanently reordered relationship between the United States and the rest of
the world. It was not the finest moment in American political history: On the
left, the Iraq War was met with absurd conspiracy theories and irresponsible
hyperbole; on the right, “Support the troops!” became a kind of accusation. For
subway-riding big-city Democrats and those who aspire to an urban and
cosmopolitan life, Barack Obama became the ideal American. For truck-driving
country boys and those who identify with them, it was Chris Kyle. That division
has touched every aspect of our public life, down to our manners and habits of
speech: the confessional invocation of “privilege” in Berkeley, the ritualistic
incantation “Thank you for your service” at the Provo airport.
Of course there are gun lovers who voted for Hillary Rodham
Clinton. A few of them, anyway. (You could forgive them for not talking about
that very much.)
But, by and large, gun country is Trump country.
Jesse James is not exactly eager to talk about politics, but
he isn’t shy about it, either. He talked up Donald Trump on Fox News during the
campaign and built a rather lovely pistol in his honor. He and Trump go back:
He was a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice. Executives at the big gun
manufacturers sometimes joked that Barack Obama was the best gun salesman
they’d ever seen: Every time President Obama suggested some new restriction on
Americans’ Second Amendment rights, the U.S. firearms industry enjoyed another
year of record sales. But at James’s end of the market, Trump’s gun policies
are probably less relevant than the 2016 tax cuts. “I deal on the extreme high
end of the market,” he says. His customers care about the top rate on capital
gains.
James used to do a fair amount of business in California,
but today he makes only one gun that can be legally sold there. “You can’t sell
AR rifles or 1911s, even though that’s a hundred-year-old design. It kind of
sucks. That’s where I’m from, and I have friends and relatives there, and
people who want to support our stuff but can’t. We shipped 200 pistols to
California the week before the ban came down. We spent months filling every
California order. I feel bad for people in California. Gun regulations are only
the tip of the iceberg. Businesses, automotive shops, everything: You need
permits for an air compressor, and if you don’t have one you get a $5,000 fine.
It’s dinging the working man.” You can see 1st hand at Jesse James Firearms Unlimited where he has tons more.
And that post-9/11 cultural divide runs through his
business, too.
STORY: Kevin D.
Williamson
SOURCE: NationalReview