With ‘Gunfight,’ an Insider Takes On a Community
That Was Once His Own
Ryan Busse used to be a prominent figure in the
firearm industry. A recent book details his disillusionment as he saw gun
culture transform — and has drawn disdain from former allies.
Kristin
HusseyRick Rojas
By Kristin
Hussey and Rick Rojas
Dec. 15,
2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/us/gunfight-ryan-busse.html
Guns have
been a constant in Ryan Busse’s life story. His father taught him to shoot as a
boy growing up on a ranch in the high plains of Kansas. He and his brother used
to wander the land, shooting at rabbits and tin cans with a lever-action rifle
that reminded him of the Old West.
That
upbringing led him to a dream job at the gun manufacturer Kimber. Over 25
years, he rose to become a senior executive and an influential force within the
firearm industry.
“I am
responsible for selling millions of guns,” Busse wrote at the start of his
book, “Gunfight,” which Public Affairs released in October.
The claim
was not a boast. It was more like the beginnings of an apology.
With the
book, which is part memoir, part treatise on gun policy in America, Busse has
inserted himself into the center of a seemingly intractable debate that
recharges each time the country confronts another burst of deadly gun violence,
including mass shootings, police killings and fatal confrontations like the one
involving Kyle Rittenhouse.
Over years
of arguing, views have hardened and the political divide has become
increasingly difficult to bridge, making Busse a surprising and polarizing
figure as a longtime insider in the firearm industry and the culture
surrounding it who has now cast himself as a critic.
Proponents
of stricter gun restrictions have been drawn to Busse’s moral inventory
wrestling with the gun industry’s role, and his own, in arming an escalating
culture of gun violence. (As he introduced Busse on his podcast, former Senator
Al Franken told listeners, “I think you’re just going to love this guy.”)
It has also
been assailed by a community that Busse once considered his own. Gun rights
supporters have labeled him as a defector and hypocrite, and questioned his
allegiance to the Second Amendment. Donald Trump Jr. said Busse was a “useful
idiot” who was co-opted by their enemies.
Still, the
response to the book reflects just how much of a challenge it will be for
“Gunfight” to penetrate the high-decibel discourse and reach its intended
audience of politically moderate gun owners like Busse.
“I don’t
like guns any less than I did, or any more than I did,” he said from his home
in Montana during a video interview in October. “I shoot with my boys. I hunt
every chance I get. I still own a lot of guns. Many of the best parts of my
life have been centered around guns or using guns, so in that way, I don’t
think I’ve changed at all. What has changed, though, is a radical shift in what
the industry believes to be decent and responsible.”
“Gunfight”
is one of several recently published books exploring a transformation gripping
the nation’s gun culture. In many ways, the books mirror what’s happening in
conservative politics.
In
“Misfire,” published in November, the investigative journalist Tim Mak digs
into the National Rifle Association as it has been shoved to the brink of
collapse over internal strife and financial turbulence. “Firepower,” by Matthew
J. Lacombe and published in March, is an academic analysis of decades of
editorials from the N.R.A.’s American Rifleman magazine.
Last year,
Joshua L. Powell, a former senior N.R.A. official, wrote a memoir after he was
forced out of the organization, and the investigative journalist Frank Smyth
chronicled the history of the organization in his book, “The N.R.A.”
With
“Gunfight,” Busse, who said he left the industry voluntarily in 2020, stands
out because he is one of the few insiders to speak publicly, and critically,
about the insular culture of gun companies.
He
acknowledged that he was not a silent bystander. When Smith & Wesson
reached an agreement after the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School that
included adding a number of safety measures to new guns, including trigger
locks, Busse wrote, he successfully organized dozens of gun dealers to boycott
the company.
At Kimber,
where Busse spent the entirety of his career, he believed he had carved out a
spot in an esteemed and sober-minded company. He described it as being like the
Tiffany & Company of the firearm industry. He believed that it was on the
right side of an “unspoken line of bifurcation,” adding, “We all knew that
higher-quality, more expensive, lower-capacity guns” — the kind his company
made — “were far less likely to be used in crime.”
Even so,
the industry as a whole was evolving in a way he found irresponsible. That
shift crystallized for him in 2010 at an N.R.A. convention in Charlotte, N.C.,
where he saw a large poster advertising the Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle that
said, “Consider your man card reissued.” The slogan would become part of a
lawsuit being waged by families of people killed in the shooting at Sandy Hook
Elementary School, which argues that the gun manufacturer had employed
militaristic marketing campaigns that appealed to so-called couch commandos and
troubled young men like the perpetrator of the 2012 attack.
“I remember
lots of us in the industry kind of whispering to each other, looking at each
other like, geez,” Busse said. “Norms were being broken, and lots of us who had
been in the industry for quite a while did not quite know what to make of
that.”
That trend
in marketing, he said, has only intensified, pointing out that one company now
markets a rifle as the “Urban Super Sniper.”
The
massacre at Sandy Hook, during which 20 first graders and six adults were
killed, was a decisive moment. “My kids were almost exactly the same age as
those Sandy Hook kids,” Busse said. “I don’t know that there’s ever been
anything that horrific.”
He added:
“It was sort of like, OK, if this doesn’t spur legislation, nothing will.” (The
attack did not lead to new federal regulations.)
Still,
nearly eight years passed before Busse left his job as Kimber’s vice president
of sales. He delayed, he said, because he thought he could make a difference
from inside the industry. There were also practical concerns: He was earning
$210,000 a year, he said, but he was 50 years old, had a family and could
scarcely afford to leave his wages behind.
His wife,
Sara Busse, kept pressing him to leave. In 2019, when they were celebrating
their 20th anniversary, she sequestered him in a hotel room and said, “We’re
not leaving until we have a plan.”
“We cannot
be a part of this,” she recalled saying in an interview. “He was part of the
gun industry, but for me, it felt like we were complicit — our family was
living off of the gun industry.”
Busse left
Kimber in August 2020 and dived into writing the book. In June, he became a
senior adviser for Giffords, the gun safety organization founded by Gabrielle
Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman who was gravely injured in a 2011
mass shooting.
His former
colleagues and allies have publicly disavowed him or distanced themselves from
him.
Backcountry
Hunters & Anglers, a conservation group where Busse had once served as
chairman, said in a statement that the organization was not connected in any
way to the book.
Leslie
Edelman, Kimber’s owner, declined to comment on the book or Busse’s departure.
But after Busse published a letter in The Sidney Herald and other newspapers in
Montana criticizing legislation to loosen gun laws, Kimber released a statement
distancing itself from him and said the company was “a proud supporter of our
Constitutional rights to keep and bear arms.”
But Busse’s
family and friends outside of the industry have urged him on. Former colleagues
have sent him texts quietly encouraging him as well.
“I just
think the gun issue has become so partisan and polarized, and the reality of
where people are is not reflected in how the issue gets framed,” Matt Leow, a
friend of Busse’s, said as he was preparing to take his son out for a day of
hunting. “It gets framed as gun nuts versus gun grabbers. There’s no place for
most of us to land.”
Busse is
trying to mobilize a group in the middle ground. He wrote in the book that he
imagines people like his father, who, as he wrote, “embrace safety and reason.”
“Change is
not going to happen from the outside in,” Busse said. “It has to start with someone
like me.”
Rick Rojas
is a national correspondent covering the American South. He has been a staff
reporter for The Times since 2014. @RaR
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário