Review of “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America” by Ryan Busse (Part 1)

Ryan Busse is mad and he doesn’t deny it. He also wants to atone for his sins and this book is part of that process. But seeing red and mea culpas are a blessing and a curse. They’re what makes Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America (Public Affairs, 2021) a fascinating memoir and also explain its shortcomings as an analysis of contemporary gun culture and politics.

As Vice President of Sales for the gun manufacturer Kimber, Busse had a front-row seat to the drama of the contemporary culture war over guns. He also exposes, in ways reminiscent of Paul Barrett’s book Glock, the questionable professionalism of some in the gun industry. Busse recalls taking $5,000 from the Kimber coffers (at a time when the company was having trouble meeting payroll) to pay for booze and strippers for a birthday party for Greg Warne, the “oversexed frat boy” president and owner of Kimber (p. 49).

This actually helps put “the gun industry” in context. We do well to recall that like every industry it is composed of various businesses, some of which are poorly run by people of dubious ethics. Also, the big, bad gun industry that critics build up is actually “rather small by traditional measures” (p. 87), according to Philip Cook and Kristin Goss (The Gun Debate: What Every American Needs to Know).The gun industry is similar in size to potato chips or ice cream but far from big pharma or big alcohol or big business in its size or influence.

Busse’s memoir is also a family drama as his move from being a “gunrunner” to a “gunfighter” (p. 17) is affected by – and affects – his wife and children. In fact, Gunfight begins at a June 2020 Black Lives Matter rally in Kalispell, Montana during which a counter-protester curses at Busse’s 12-year-old son, calling him “an evil little bastard” and poking his finger into the boy’s chest. This would make me furious, too, so I appreciate Busse’s rage.

Busse sees this moment as a microcosm of the radicalization of America wrought by the National Rifle Association and its economic arm, the gun industry.

(Note: Busse counters assertions that “the NRA is just an arm of the gun industry” by claiming the opposite: “The gun industry is an arm of the NRA” [p. 119]. Busse even suggests, but does not give specific examples of, gun manufacturers allowing the NRA to name products [p. 120]. Regardless of who owns who, it seems undeniable that the NRA and the gun industry work hand-in-hand, not unlike the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States and Beam Suntory, Campari Group, Diageo, et al.)

I don’t question the radicalization of some gun owners, but my own wandering around gun culture in America for the past 12 years makes me wonder if Gunfight shows us (A) the “center of mass” of contemporary gun culture, (B) the leading edge of the gun culture to come, or (C) just the loudest and most visible part of gun culture today?

I argue for option C. For example, Busse says of the Kalispell rally that there were thousands of BLM supporters and just dozens of counter-protesters (p. 8). Certainly, a minority of people can do a great deal of damage, but by centering Oath Keepers and Three Percenters in this event, is he giving them too much of a starring role in the bigger picture of gun culture?

I have observed the same about the “missing insurrectionist gun owners” in the storming of the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6^th. Certainly, gun symbols were evident that day and Oath Keepers are going to jail for seditious conspiracy. But the few (hundreds or thousands) should not be too quickly generalized to the many (tens of millions).

My concern, then, is that Busse can’t see the forest for the trees because he is too deeply involved in his subject matter. Or perhaps more precisely, he overgeneralizes from the trees he has seen and experienced for so long to the entire forest. (Insofar as he also contributes to the master narrative of democracy-destroying right-wing politics, he shares this liability with Harel Shapira and others.)

National Rifle Association annual meeting, 2013. Photo by David Yamane

A big part of Busse’s claim beyond the memoir part of Gunfight is the central causal role the NRA and gun industry played in radicalizing America. Here I think his causal claims are too strong.

He claims, for example, “the new US political system had been rigged by the NRA” (p. 283). He talks about “MAGA devotion” being “spawned” by the NRA (p. 284). He highlights “NRA-funded political gridlock” (p. 283), as if NRA funding caused the gridlock.

Certainly, the NRA’s politics have become more strongly aligned with conservative politics in general, as Matthew Lacombe convincingly argues in Firepower. But alignment is not causation and Busse doesn’t provide any evidence to the contrary.

At times Busse’s causal claims are more modest, as when he says the gun industry played a “leading role” in radicalizing the country (e.g., p. 57). But when his tone turns more strident, he lapses into more empirically questionable assertions like: “The gun industry and the NRA have successfully transformed an entire country” (p. 303).

In fact, Busse claims – without evidence and against known evidence – that the NRA is the “world’s most powerful political organization” (p. 161). This is especially noteworthy as in the next paragraph he criticizes the NRA for making “unsubstantiated claims” (p. 161). Two wrongs don’t make a right. But they certainly do contribute to political polarization.

Busse’s overreaching causal arguments combine with the generally strident tone of the book to make me want to summarize it as: “Polarizing book criticizes polarization.”

At points, Busse does seem to recognize that political polarization (especially over guns) in America today is a two-ways street (a caveat I also make in my review of Jennifer Carlson’s new book, Merchants of the Right). If the NRA poured the gasoline of fear onto our political moment, “Democrats struck a match” that ignited the fire (p. 128).

Busse frequently highlights polarizing rhetoric coming from the NRA and gun industry, but doesn’t see his use of politically dismissive language like “common sense” (or sometimes brought together as “commonsense” – p. 307) as problematic.

“What I regret is that I helped the NRA create a political world where that debate can no longer happen,” Busse writes. “The NRA fomented a hardline ‘you’re with us or against us’ position that left no room for common sense” (p. 131). But as I have been saying for years now, common sense is itself a political term meant to create divisions of you’re with us (you have common sense) or you’re not (you don’t).

Busse writes from a particular perspective, which is his prerogative and certainly something that compelled Hachette Book Group (whose parent Lagardere is majority-owned by the French media holding company Vivendi) to acquire his book. Polarization sells.

Fake cover of the book I should have written if I wanted to sell books

A telling analogy that Busse gives is describing himself as “a frog who had jumped into the gun-industry pot when the water was tolerable” only to find “the temperature was creeping up” after the 1994 assault weapon ban (p. 69). By 2017, he “was still a frog in that pot” but “now grasped just how hot the water really was” (pp. 273-4).

From that point forward he was ever more committed to “speak truth to bullshit,” a phrase Busse takes from cultural influencer Brene Brown. But Brown argues that getting beyond “bullshit” requires avoiding forced choices and false dichotomies. It requires us to think beyond either/or.

Busse has certainly experienced some “bullshit” in his time in the gun industry. Unfortunately, he doesn’t provide us with the kind of graceful, wholistic, both/and approach to the issue of guns in American that can get us beyond it.

I have hundreds of more words of reaction to Gunfight that I hope to share in a following blog post if I can transform the mess into coherent sentences. Stay tuned.

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