Knimrod
04-20-2006, 09:31 AM
He likes guns. You got a problem with that?
Apr. 19, 2006
By Julia Keller
Chicago Tribune
WEST POINT, Ky. - Conventional expectations, prepare to meet your maker.
Ordinary folks aren't supposed to enjoy what goes on twice a year at the Knob Creek Gun Range in this small community some 30 miles south of Louisville. They're supposed to wince in disgust. They're expected to recoil forcibly like a Browning M-1917 with a bent muzzle.
But what if they don't?
What if - after wondering for a good long while just what could possibly motivate somebody to want to shoot a machine gun - you actually go out and shoot one? (The gun, that is, not the person.)
And what if it's fun?
And what if you'd do it again, first chance you got?
Ed Richardson rests his case.
"There's a joke we have - once you fire one, you've got to own one," he says. "It's exhilarating. And it's a symbol of freedom. The key word is `freedom.' Everything else is second."
Richardson is one of several dozen machine-gun owners - and several thousand other people who relish looking at and listening to machine guns - who flocked here earlier this month for the three-day event, billed as "the Nation's Largest Machine Gun Shoot & Military Gun Show."
Normally Knob Creek, a 600-acre, former military proving ground right next to Ft. Knox in an area of deep woods and winding trails and pretty little redbud trees, is just your typical gun range, with regular hours and family memberships and the sporadic pop-pop of gunfire echoing across the ravines.
Twice a year, though, it turns into a sort of amiable Armageddon: a loud, crowded carnival of crashing artillery shells, of the steady punch of machine-gun fire, of the guttural thuwmp-thuwmp-thuwmp of a military-surplus helicopter swooping overhead, of the slightly sweetish odor of gunpowder loitering in the air, of the muffled thunder from exploding ordnance that temporarily turns the ground under your feet into Jell-O.
Since the early 1970s, each Knob Creek event has lured more than 10,000 people from all over the country and overseas to shoot the big guns - when they're not ogling them - and to stroll the aisles of a monstrously large pole barn, under which dozens of vendors display their wares: vintage guns, ammo, knives, Iraqi election ballots, helmets, canteens, compasses, grenades.
It's like the world's largest military surplus store - in which the shopping is syncopated by the bodacious background clatter of machine-gun fire and enlivened by the prospect of rides in that helicopter.
The Knob Creek shoot has been written about many times in newspapers and magazines, often from a perch of utter incredulity that anybody would travel to an out-of-the-way place to do an out-of-the-ordinary thing such as shoot an automatic weapon.
Which explains why participants such as Richardson, an otherwise friendly, affable guy who's easy to like, gets a touch of fire in his eye when approached by a journalist - by someone who surely represents, before she gets a full sentence out, the "liberal anti-gun crowd" that irks him.
"I've refused all interviews over the years," he says. "They make you sound like a blithering, tongue-dragging idiot. That's why the media gets a cold shoulder here."
Richardson, 64, who's been coming to Knob Creek from his Middleburg, Fla., home since 1985, is dressed just the way you'd want him to be: pants and jacket of the brown-and-beige military camouflage pattern known as "cookies and cream," black T-shirt, black boots, moss green watch cap with his official Knob Creek badge - SHOOTER, it says, with crisp simplicity - pinned to the side.
He looks like as if he means business, and he does - although not in an ornery, ill-tempered way, despite the presence of enough firepower to pitchfork a hundred Saddam Husseins out of their spider holes. His fiercest desire is to set the record straight, which is why he's willing to talk about his passion, even to the hated media.
"We're good citizens, and we contribute a lot to the country," says Richardson, who runs an electronics business and who served three tours of duty with the U.S. Navy in Vietnam. "You know what we say? We say, `People with machine guns don't rob convenience stores. They own them.'"
His father was a World War II veteran who joined the D-Day invasion and was fired upon by German snipers. The enemies' weapon? It was, he says, an MG-42 machine gun - one of which Richardson now owns, and from which, when he aims and fires it, spent cartridges pop and drop in an agitated spray. "Being here," Richardson adds, "is like a history lesson."
Of the 24 guns he owns - including three M-16s and two AK-47s - Richardson brought nine to the show, toting them in a small trailer. Along with the MG-42, there's a Browning 30-caliber machine gun and a Taurus 45-caliber pistol. There's also a gun that, Richardson notes, "made your city (Chicago) famous": a Thompson sub-machine gun, nicknamed the Tommy gun, reputedly the gangster's best friend.
The guns are pretty, but the politics aren't. To walk around the machine-gun shoot is to thrash your way through an angry forest of strongly held opinions, channeled through T-shirts and bumper stickers: "I Got a Gun for My Wife - Best Trade I Ever Made" and "`Vegetarian' Is Just an Old Indian Word for `Lousy Hunter'" and "If You Know How Many Guns You Have, You Don't Have Enough" and "If Guns Kill People, Then Spoons Made Rosie O'Donnell Fat."
Because of the incendiary politics on both sides, a gun show apparently can't ever simply be about the beauty of guns - and they are beautiful, particularly the lovingly maintained arsenal of a serious collector such as Richardson. Few issues in American life are more complicated, contentious and polarizing than citizen possession of firearms; it makes the abortion debate seem like an afternoon tea.
Gun laws vary widely from state to state. In about half the states, in places such as Kentucky, Oregon and many Southern states, people with the proper permits and who operate under safe and controlled conditions can own and use automatic weapons, as long as those weapons weren't made or imported after 1986, a cutoff point mandated by federal law.
That makes vintage machine guns all the more valuable. A Tommy gun can set you back $30,000 to $40,000; some Browning and Maxim machine guns can garner more than $100,000. Getting permission to own a machine gun involves a two-to-four-month process, Richardson notes. "A lot of people have the misconception, through Hollywood movies and such, that you can walk into a store and buy a machine gun and walk out. But it requires paperwork, fingerprints, photographs, all this stuff. A complete check is done on you. I don't mind jumping through all the hoops to own these particulars guns - as long as it's never taken away from me."
He comes to Knob Creek as much for the company as for the cacophony. "It's a community," says Richardson, who can always shoot his guns at ranges near his home, but can't meet with friends such as Ray Tidwell of Saulsbury, Tenn. Richardson and Tidwell grew up together in Jena, La., and make the gun show a regular rendezvous point twice a year.
"I've known him since second grade," says Tidwell, nodding a baseball-capped head toward Richardson. "He knows the guns. I come for the show."
For a $100 fee, Richardson is allowed to set up his trailer along the most coveted piece of real estate at Knob Creek: the shooters' line. Here, machine guns of every vintage and variety stretch out in a sweeping curve of concentrated firepower, from GE miniguns to water-cooled Maxims to a brassbound replica of a hand-cranked Gatling gun from the late 1800s. There's now a 10-year waiting list for a spot on the line, Richardson says.
In front of the fenced-off and closely patrolled shooters' line is the range: a half-moon of scraggly ground cupped by hills on three sides. In the center are a series of sorry-looking items pockmarked and scorched from recent assaults: a crumpled car frame and all-but-unrecognizable appliances, other lumpy objects that may once have been things but now are merely targets.
At a signal from one of Knob Creek's orange-vested security men, Richardson and his fellow shooters hoist their weapons into place. And then comes an interval of pounding, rocking, throbbing, totally obnoxious and completely exhilarating noise, a racket that makes you realize why ear and eye protection are so strongly recommended here. Richardson usually goes through more than 12,000 rounds of ammunition per day at the show, he says, including some spectacular-looking tracer rounds - bullets endowed with phosphorus to create orangey-red contrails.
On the upper range where Richardson shoots, visitors can only gawk. To rent a machine gun, you head down a dirt path to the lower range, where anybody with the cash - $100 for 40 rounds, at one location - can take a whack.
Shooting a machine gun may be old hat to Richardson, but for a novice, it's thrilling. There's an initial apprehension, a hesitation; at the first pressure on the trigger, though, the smooth power of the machine becomes all you're aware of. Your senses are completely engaged. No matter what your politics are, the feeling of all that power and intensity, coiled inside a simple instrument around which your hands curve with a tightly instinctive grip, is a mind-clearing rush.
For a few seconds - because those rounds go fast - you blast away.
"Only in America," Richardson says with defiant pride, after finishing his own round. "Only in America, can you do this."
Link to article (http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/nation/14377009.htm)
Apr. 19, 2006
By Julia Keller
Chicago Tribune
WEST POINT, Ky. - Conventional expectations, prepare to meet your maker.
Ordinary folks aren't supposed to enjoy what goes on twice a year at the Knob Creek Gun Range in this small community some 30 miles south of Louisville. They're supposed to wince in disgust. They're expected to recoil forcibly like a Browning M-1917 with a bent muzzle.
But what if they don't?
What if - after wondering for a good long while just what could possibly motivate somebody to want to shoot a machine gun - you actually go out and shoot one? (The gun, that is, not the person.)
And what if it's fun?
And what if you'd do it again, first chance you got?
Ed Richardson rests his case.
"There's a joke we have - once you fire one, you've got to own one," he says. "It's exhilarating. And it's a symbol of freedom. The key word is `freedom.' Everything else is second."
Richardson is one of several dozen machine-gun owners - and several thousand other people who relish looking at and listening to machine guns - who flocked here earlier this month for the three-day event, billed as "the Nation's Largest Machine Gun Shoot & Military Gun Show."
Normally Knob Creek, a 600-acre, former military proving ground right next to Ft. Knox in an area of deep woods and winding trails and pretty little redbud trees, is just your typical gun range, with regular hours and family memberships and the sporadic pop-pop of gunfire echoing across the ravines.
Twice a year, though, it turns into a sort of amiable Armageddon: a loud, crowded carnival of crashing artillery shells, of the steady punch of machine-gun fire, of the guttural thuwmp-thuwmp-thuwmp of a military-surplus helicopter swooping overhead, of the slightly sweetish odor of gunpowder loitering in the air, of the muffled thunder from exploding ordnance that temporarily turns the ground under your feet into Jell-O.
Since the early 1970s, each Knob Creek event has lured more than 10,000 people from all over the country and overseas to shoot the big guns - when they're not ogling them - and to stroll the aisles of a monstrously large pole barn, under which dozens of vendors display their wares: vintage guns, ammo, knives, Iraqi election ballots, helmets, canteens, compasses, grenades.
It's like the world's largest military surplus store - in which the shopping is syncopated by the bodacious background clatter of machine-gun fire and enlivened by the prospect of rides in that helicopter.
The Knob Creek shoot has been written about many times in newspapers and magazines, often from a perch of utter incredulity that anybody would travel to an out-of-the-way place to do an out-of-the-ordinary thing such as shoot an automatic weapon.
Which explains why participants such as Richardson, an otherwise friendly, affable guy who's easy to like, gets a touch of fire in his eye when approached by a journalist - by someone who surely represents, before she gets a full sentence out, the "liberal anti-gun crowd" that irks him.
"I've refused all interviews over the years," he says. "They make you sound like a blithering, tongue-dragging idiot. That's why the media gets a cold shoulder here."
Richardson, 64, who's been coming to Knob Creek from his Middleburg, Fla., home since 1985, is dressed just the way you'd want him to be: pants and jacket of the brown-and-beige military camouflage pattern known as "cookies and cream," black T-shirt, black boots, moss green watch cap with his official Knob Creek badge - SHOOTER, it says, with crisp simplicity - pinned to the side.
He looks like as if he means business, and he does - although not in an ornery, ill-tempered way, despite the presence of enough firepower to pitchfork a hundred Saddam Husseins out of their spider holes. His fiercest desire is to set the record straight, which is why he's willing to talk about his passion, even to the hated media.
"We're good citizens, and we contribute a lot to the country," says Richardson, who runs an electronics business and who served three tours of duty with the U.S. Navy in Vietnam. "You know what we say? We say, `People with machine guns don't rob convenience stores. They own them.'"
His father was a World War II veteran who joined the D-Day invasion and was fired upon by German snipers. The enemies' weapon? It was, he says, an MG-42 machine gun - one of which Richardson now owns, and from which, when he aims and fires it, spent cartridges pop and drop in an agitated spray. "Being here," Richardson adds, "is like a history lesson."
Of the 24 guns he owns - including three M-16s and two AK-47s - Richardson brought nine to the show, toting them in a small trailer. Along with the MG-42, there's a Browning 30-caliber machine gun and a Taurus 45-caliber pistol. There's also a gun that, Richardson notes, "made your city (Chicago) famous": a Thompson sub-machine gun, nicknamed the Tommy gun, reputedly the gangster's best friend.
The guns are pretty, but the politics aren't. To walk around the machine-gun shoot is to thrash your way through an angry forest of strongly held opinions, channeled through T-shirts and bumper stickers: "I Got a Gun for My Wife - Best Trade I Ever Made" and "`Vegetarian' Is Just an Old Indian Word for `Lousy Hunter'" and "If You Know How Many Guns You Have, You Don't Have Enough" and "If Guns Kill People, Then Spoons Made Rosie O'Donnell Fat."
Because of the incendiary politics on both sides, a gun show apparently can't ever simply be about the beauty of guns - and they are beautiful, particularly the lovingly maintained arsenal of a serious collector such as Richardson. Few issues in American life are more complicated, contentious and polarizing than citizen possession of firearms; it makes the abortion debate seem like an afternoon tea.
Gun laws vary widely from state to state. In about half the states, in places such as Kentucky, Oregon and many Southern states, people with the proper permits and who operate under safe and controlled conditions can own and use automatic weapons, as long as those weapons weren't made or imported after 1986, a cutoff point mandated by federal law.
That makes vintage machine guns all the more valuable. A Tommy gun can set you back $30,000 to $40,000; some Browning and Maxim machine guns can garner more than $100,000. Getting permission to own a machine gun involves a two-to-four-month process, Richardson notes. "A lot of people have the misconception, through Hollywood movies and such, that you can walk into a store and buy a machine gun and walk out. But it requires paperwork, fingerprints, photographs, all this stuff. A complete check is done on you. I don't mind jumping through all the hoops to own these particulars guns - as long as it's never taken away from me."
He comes to Knob Creek as much for the company as for the cacophony. "It's a community," says Richardson, who can always shoot his guns at ranges near his home, but can't meet with friends such as Ray Tidwell of Saulsbury, Tenn. Richardson and Tidwell grew up together in Jena, La., and make the gun show a regular rendezvous point twice a year.
"I've known him since second grade," says Tidwell, nodding a baseball-capped head toward Richardson. "He knows the guns. I come for the show."
For a $100 fee, Richardson is allowed to set up his trailer along the most coveted piece of real estate at Knob Creek: the shooters' line. Here, machine guns of every vintage and variety stretch out in a sweeping curve of concentrated firepower, from GE miniguns to water-cooled Maxims to a brassbound replica of a hand-cranked Gatling gun from the late 1800s. There's now a 10-year waiting list for a spot on the line, Richardson says.
In front of the fenced-off and closely patrolled shooters' line is the range: a half-moon of scraggly ground cupped by hills on three sides. In the center are a series of sorry-looking items pockmarked and scorched from recent assaults: a crumpled car frame and all-but-unrecognizable appliances, other lumpy objects that may once have been things but now are merely targets.
At a signal from one of Knob Creek's orange-vested security men, Richardson and his fellow shooters hoist their weapons into place. And then comes an interval of pounding, rocking, throbbing, totally obnoxious and completely exhilarating noise, a racket that makes you realize why ear and eye protection are so strongly recommended here. Richardson usually goes through more than 12,000 rounds of ammunition per day at the show, he says, including some spectacular-looking tracer rounds - bullets endowed with phosphorus to create orangey-red contrails.
On the upper range where Richardson shoots, visitors can only gawk. To rent a machine gun, you head down a dirt path to the lower range, where anybody with the cash - $100 for 40 rounds, at one location - can take a whack.
Shooting a machine gun may be old hat to Richardson, but for a novice, it's thrilling. There's an initial apprehension, a hesitation; at the first pressure on the trigger, though, the smooth power of the machine becomes all you're aware of. Your senses are completely engaged. No matter what your politics are, the feeling of all that power and intensity, coiled inside a simple instrument around which your hands curve with a tightly instinctive grip, is a mind-clearing rush.
For a few seconds - because those rounds go fast - you blast away.
"Only in America," Richardson says with defiant pride, after finishing his own round. "Only in America, can you do this."
Link to article (http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/nation/14377009.htm)