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it could shoot the .50 Beowulf, whose cartridge, proportioned like a ChapStick, had shattered Taliban LandRover engine blocks in Afghanistan. You could even buy parts to transform an AR-15 into a shotgun or a crossbow. In one afternoon, you could knock tin cans from a fence, hunt rabbits, kill a bear, and shoot skeet—all with the same gun. It seemed both weird and revolutionary—like grocery shopping in a Toyota Prius, then pushing a button on the dash and transforming it into a Dodge Ram to haul trash to the dump. It let a gun guy do all his different kinds of shooting and always be handling the same grip and stock. “Beware the man with one rifle,” the red-haired clerk said, quoting an old saying. “He probably knows how to shoot it.”
    The unshaven giant sighed loudly and gazed at the parts counter with red-rimmed eyes. “You know what it is, right?” he said. “It’s Barbie for men.”

2. CONDITION YELLOW
    People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society.
    —Major L. Caudill, USMC (Ret.)
    I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn’t need a gun, you’d better take one along that worked.
    —Raymond Chandler,
Farewell My Lovely
, 1940
    B ack home, I kept replaying that quizzical look from the clerk at Specialty Sports & Supply. My NRA cap clearly was not the perfect camouflage. Slapping it over my pointy bald head was likely to camouflage me at gun venues in Arizona and Kentucky about as effectively as sticking a sprig of parsley on a Panzer. I was likely to get frozen out, if not run off the property with a shotgun, as I ambled around asking people about their gun lives.
    Clicking around the gun-guy websites one day, I blundered into a conversation about something called “open carry”—the practice of wearing a pistol in plain sight. In almost all states, no permit was needed to carry a gun that was holstered and visible. It took me awhile to get my head around that, but once I did, it seemed a spectacular solution to my problem.
    The thinking, which went back to the Old West, was that if you could see a man’s gun, he had less chance of doing mischief with it. Open carry was the new front in the nation’s perpetual war over gun rights. Activists were holding armed picnics, video-recording encounters with police(“Hey, bud, what’s with the gun?”
“I know my rights!”
), and wearing guns openly to Starbucks in hopes of being refused service or, better still, arrested. (Starbucks refused to take the bait, serving the gun toters with a smile.) A few gun wearers had even shown up outside of rallies in New Hampshire and Arizona attended by President Obama. If they’d hoped to martyr themselves and file false-arrest lawsuits, they were disappointed: The Secret Service, knowing perfectly well that open carry was legal, left them alone.
    Mike Stollenwerk, the retired Army lieutenant colonel who ran OpenCarry.org —“A Right Unexercised is a Right Lost!”—told me when I called him that he thought displaying a gun at a presidential event was for “Tea Party nutties.” He wanted more people showing guns not at political events but in supermarkets and at kids’ soccer games, because “we want everybody to have that right.” Wearing guns openly so that you could wear guns openly sounded to me like the old Firesign Theatre joke about the mural depicting the historic struggle of the people to finish the mural. Open carry was already legal almost everywhere. But Stollenwerk said the movement was more about changing culture than about changing the law. “We’re trying to normalize gun ownership by openly carrying properly holstered handguns in daily life,” he said.
Good luck with that
, I thought. My guess was that Stollenwerk’s strategy would backfire—that, instead of acclimating people, the open-carry movement would frighten them, and they would eventually ask their