Finding middle ground in the gun debate

Knopf, 338 pages, $26.95.

It’s hard to imagine a hotter political topic than guns right now. Since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in December, almost everyone has one of two views on firearms. Guns are seen by some as a life-or-death issue that merits careful regulation, and by others as a matter of personal freedom and constitutional right. Each camp makes little attempt to understand the other, much less to compromise.

That could soon change, as the gun issue is about to find a new ambassador in Dan Baum. A self-professed “gun guy,” the former New Yorker staff writer is an urban Jew whose liberal views on everything but guns align with those who abhor firearms the most.

Yet something about shooting rifles at summer camp in 1961 captured his fancy and never let go. Even when his friends outgrew GI Joe and war games, Baum didn’t. As an adult, he took up hunting as a way to legitimize his gun hobby.

All of this makes him the perfect tour guide for a well-timed trek through gun culture in modern America. A surprisingly funny book, “Gun Guys: A Road Trip” is an insightful exploration that brings some much-needed humanity to gun lovers and gun haters.

Over 18 months, Baum travels to gun shows, a Hollywood armory and various shooting competitions. He visits the headquarters of the National Rifle Association and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Thanks to an app on his iPod Touch called Gun Store Finder, he visits every arms peddler along the way. He goes pig hunting in Texas. He meets a criminal turned firearms safety instructor, a gunshot victim and a machine gun collector, among others.

Baum is forced to confront the real and sober connection between guns and death when a 22-year-old friend, featured in “Nine Lives,” Baum’s earlier book about post-Katrina New Orleans, is shot and killed in a domestic dispute.

If Baum never makes the appeal of guns universally clear, he does come across some compelling possible explanations. A man whose job it is to handle guns on Hollywood movie sets, for example, suggests that guns fit into the American narrative, appealing to our love of equality by giving the small and weak a chance against the big and strong.

A manufacturing entrepreneur convinces Baum that “enshrining an armed citizenry into a country’s founding document did seem to imply a rather extraordinary amount of trust in ordinary people.”

“Gun Guys” is a thoughtful, well-reasoned antidote to the polarized hysteria that currently passes for a national gun debate. By the end of the book, Baum arrives at something that feels truly fresh: a middle ground on guns.