It is this adjective, and the ubiquity of references to “tacticians” in advertising copy, review sites and hobby forums, that suggests the baleful aspect of AR-15 culture. Who exactly is practicing these tactics, and where and for what purpose? What this “tactics” business signals is not so much a commitment to action (the overwhelming majority of those who own AR-15s are law-abiding) as a general frame of mind. To the would-be tactician, every place that humans inhabit — housing developments, apartment complexes, stores, strip malls, hotels, churches, hospitals and, yes, schools — is another opportunity to imagine oneself taking part in military-style maneuvers. Where would you go for cover if you were here? How would you hold this position? What weapons and gear would you use?
Such mental habits may be usefully cultivated in the training of U.S. Special Forces. But at a time of social atomization, racial unrest, increased crime rates and widespread drug abuse, it is harder to see the upside of instilling this paranoid attitude among millions of ordinary Americans who otherwise show no indication of moving to remote Montana and stocking ammo for the day the black helicopters arrive.
I am an enthusiastic if undistinguished hunter for whom the most enjoyable time of the year is the long Thanksgiving weekend, when I emerge from the deer blind only for the Michigan-Ohio State football game. My earliest memory of using a gun is at age 6, when I shot at and missed a cloud of bats flocked above an old barn on the edge of our property. But the world of bump stocks and blast mitigation devices is as remote from my experience as is hang gliding. For AR-15 enthusiasts, the gun is not a means to an end — a tool with which you hunt, a weapon with which you protect your family and property — but rather the end itself, a site of fantasy and meaning making.
I suspect that part of the reason for the rise of AR-15 fandom is the decline of other American hobby cultures: auto repair, darkroom photography, ham radio operation and the like. Automobiles have become hulking mobile computers that often can be repaired only by manufacturer-approved dealerships; anyone with a smartphone can now take high-quality pictures; no one needs limited-frequency radio bands anymore to talk with people on the other side of the world. Gun ownership is among the last preserves of community for those who might once have enjoyed the opportunities for the innocent pursuit of mastery and refinement afforded by those innocuous pastimes.
But for all the amateur tinkering, the reality is that these fetishized murder weapons, so often treated by their owners as if they were indistinguishable from model ships or Pokémon cards, have been used repeatedly in incidents like the recent one in Nashville. The pervasiveness of these guns — made possible by the end of the federal ban on assault weapons in 2004 — has led to the creation of social and cultural conditions in which such shootings have become a familiar fact of American life. In that sense, even “harmless” AR-15 fandom belongs somewhere on a continuum with our uncritical attitude toward violent video games, our blithe acceptance of the legalization of cannabis and online gambling and our casual indifference to the weakest and most vulnerable Americans.