Housatonic — In the heart of this Great Barrington village in the Berkshire Mountains, just a few hours away from New York City and Boston, you can buy all kinds of guns. But it’s not that easy.
The men at A & J Sporting Goods run a tight ship, they say; every legal gun dealer in Massachusetts, a state with some of the strictest gun laws in the country, is forced to. Owner Joe Aberdale and his employees may be in the retail business, but it’s one that requires acute awareness and intuition every time a customer walks through their door.
Aberdale’s parents came here in 1961 and opened Housatonic Pharmacy and A & J on the Depot Street block across the street from the post office. The pharmacy reincarnated into the corner grocery, lunch counter and liquor store that it is now, all of it remaining amid changes to a rural area where not 40 to 50 years ago local teenagers went to school with shotguns for after-school hunting treks into the woods. Housatonic hasn’t gentrified. It is still the most affordable place in the area to rent or own. Yet there are changes. Just around the corner are now two recording studios, a farm-to-table coffee and breakfast shop, a dance studio, a small block of art galleries and a sourdough bakery.
On this cold December evening, two days after Islamic terrorists killed 14 people and injured 21 in San Bernadino, California, and a month after the Paris Islamic terror attacks, the gun shop gradually fills with customers, some simply there to browse and appreciate the merchandise, others there to buy. Purchases are mostly for competition and collecting, “hunting, less and less nowadays,” Aberdale says. He’s seen an uptick in business lately, particularly with “first time firearm buyers,” but he isn’t sure exactly why. “Business typically increases this time of year so it’s hard to say. In talking with customers, it is fair to say that some of the increase can be attributed to the instability we are seeing in the country and the world.”
A & J owner Joe Aberdale, left, explains the features of a Browning rifle. Firearms instructor and employee Richard Bailly holds up a Ruger semi automatic rifle. Photo: Heather Bellow
I stand behind the counter talking to Aberdale and longtime employee Richard Bailly, a firearms course instructor and former Army sergeant whom everyone, including Aberdale, addresses respectfully as “Mr. Bailly.” Both men are Housatonic natives. Bailly went to the former Searles High School, and Aberdale, to Monument High. Odd, I think as I look around, that I should come to a gun shop for some kind of solace and understanding about mass shootings, the rate of which have been increasing over the years, according to the FBI, yet are still a tiny fraction of overall gun deaths (1.49 percent in 2013, according to Center for Disease Control and Prevention). The Paris and San Bernadino attacks, not to mention the slew of other shootings over the past year, appeared to flip a switch in American minds, lodging doubts in our psyches about our sense of safety in public.
There is even a website called Mass Shooting Tracker, that provides “unbiased…raw data” on a phenomenon that is still not fully understood by psychologists and law enforcement. And no one agrees on whether citizens should arm themselves, something Republican Presidental candidate Donald Trump suggested after the Paris attacks. Eyebrows went up when Detroit Police Chief James Craig recommended that approach for Detroiters, according to the Detroit News. “An armed citizen won’t give [terrorists] a high body count,” he said.
Nearer to home, in Ulster County, New York, Sheriff Paul J. Van Blarcum urged licensed gun owners to pack their weapons. “In light of recent events that have occurred in the United States and around the world I want to encourage citizens of Ulster County who are licensed to carry a firearm to PLEASE DO SO,” he wrote on the department’s Facebook page.
How an armed citizenry packing in public would affect police departments is yet another question, one that is so loaded Great Barrington Police Chief William Walsh refused to comment. There are 659 gun licenses in Great Barrington, 582 of which are unrestricted Class A licenses that permit a range of loaded, large capacity and concealed firearms, according to this report by WWLP.COM. According to the Boston Globe, 284,000 state residents had Class A licenses in 2013. Gun ownership in the state is up 65 percent percent since 2010. Click on this interactive map for a listing of gun licenses in each town and city in the state, including all the towns in Berkshire County.
I’m not the first to come to A & J to grasp the situation. After the 2012 Sandy Hook School shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 20 children and 6 adults were shot to death in classrooms, legislators Sen. Benjamin Downing (D-Pittsfield) and William “Smitty” Pignatelli (D-Lenox) came to pick Aberdale and Baillys’ brains before heading back to Boston. And several Great Barrington Selectboard members came here for the same reason.
Aberdale and Bailly are welcoming and eager to talk about the paradox of a society that uses weapons that can be used both to protect, and murder, innocent people.
Semi automatic firearms used for hunting and competition. It is some of these guns that can be modified by terrorists to increase firepower. The New York Times advises some of these varieties be outlawed. Photo: Heather Bellow
“You don’t see people coming here to rob us,” Bailly said. “We’re armed. And if you look at your President and other officials, they’re all protected by firearms.”
Bailly adds that the shooters “always go to where they are top dog — like schools.” And the problem with law enforcement, he says, is timing. They can only respond to a crisis. There are other issues, he noted. He once had female customer, her face bandaged. He asked her why she wanted a gun. “She pointed at her face and said, ‘because this isn’t going to happen to me again.’ ”
According to Bailly, who teaches state-approved shooting courses required for a gun license, women are driving increased gun sales everywhere. “They make the best shooters,” he said. “They don’t develop bad habits.”
We go over what it takes to buy a gun in this state, which has the 6th toughest gun laws in the country (California is number one). First, you have to be 21. Then there is the shooting course, usually through the National Rifle Association (NRA) and approved by the state. The course, Aberdale says, is where firearm “responsibility begins.” The applicant must pass and bring that certificate to the local police department, where, depending on how large the department is, the police chief sits down with the applicant to find out why he or she wants a gun. Fingerprints are taken. The police chief, Aberdale says, has latitude to suss out the applicant, and reject the application on any number of grounds. If accepted, the application and $100 fee goes to Boston for state, FBI, Homeland Security and mental health background checks. Gun dealers and their employees must also go through the check. The federal background checks were adopted after the Sandy Hook slayings.
Neatly stacked boxes of ammunition at A & J Sporting Goods. Photo: Heather Bellow
Aberdale says the mental health check could use some beefing up. He said it can only spot those who were “committed” to a mental institution or were hospitalized in a psychiatric care unit. “That’s the weakness in the system,” he says, adding that even a “law-abiding person” could “lose it.”
Bailly says the Health Information Privacy Act (HIPA) is a hinderance to keeping guns out of the wrong hands.
Ron Glidden, a former Police Chief in Lee who sits on the Massachusetts Gun Control Advisory Board says it’s complicated. “People say it’s a mental health issue,” he said, noting how murky these waters are. “Should we disqualify everybody who goes for counseling?”
Devin Alden, 19, is meandering through the store like a five-year-old in a candy shop. He stops to talk to me and says he also thinks “there should be a bigger focus on mental health — looking for symptoms.” The Lenox resident target shoots, competes, and has an interest in antique guns. He owns two rifles — one a Russian WWII-era Mosin-Nagant.
When a customer is licensed and ready to buy a gun, a federal “Firearms Transaction Record” application is filled out. Questions range from past criminal history to drug abuse, domestic violence or dishonorable discharge from the military. The information is entered into A & J’s computers, which are linked to the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Service (CJIS).
Aberdale puts my name and basic information in his system to show me how it works. In less than a minute I am approved. But this doesn’t always happen. Aberdale once plugged in a customer’s data and within seconds the phone rang — it was the FBI.
“If you did something [wrong] last night it would come up,” Bailly said.
“We’re a business, but this not about making money,” Aberdale says. “We don’t always sell to people.” Both he and Bailly say they won’t sell if something doesn’t feel right, if the gun isn’t right for a customer, if a customer has been drinking.
Aberdale knows why I’m here. “You want to see the ‘black guns,’ ” he says, taking down a Ruger semi-automatic rifle. I noticed these, along with Armalite (AR) rifles, as soon as I walked in the shop. Aberdale explains that these are “civilian models” of the M-16 rifles used by the armed forces.
The San Bernadino terrorists used two similar weapons, illegally tampered with to accept detachable magazines that increased firepower, according to this article in the Wall Street Journal. California law, like Massachusetts law, requires reduced capacity magazines that limit the speed at which bullets are fired. And machine guns with high capacity require a special license, a registered federal permit, Aberdale told me.
Bullets and buckshot.
Police departments now have an inventory of AR rifles, Aberdale said; they are much safer and more manageable than shotguns that blast buckshot all over the place. “Seven or eight shells can come flying out,” Aberdale says. Bailly holds up a Browning hunting rifle that would deliver such a shot. “But no one is worrying about these rifles,” he said, adding that the black AR rifles are also “terrific sporting rifles for smaller game and competitions.”
There are calls to outlaw these. In a historic front page editorial this week, the New York Times said civilians should not be able to own combat-style rifles and “certain kinds of ammunition.” Assault rifles used in both the Sandy Hook and San Bernardino slayings were made by the Freedom Group, a powerful gun consortium that the New York Times called “the most powerful and mysterious force in the American commercial gun industry today.”
Between 1994 and 2004, a federal assault weapons ban was in place. It was written to be law for a 10-year period, after which it expired. According to data tabulated by Mark Follman at Mother Jones, the number of mass shootings every year doubled since the ban expired. The number of victims each year almost tripled. But as Sam Wang of Princeton points out, “the assault-weapon-ban hypothesis does not explain why victims and shootings were not as common before 1994. Has something new happened in the last decade? War? Economic disruption? Lax monitoring of the mentally ill?”
Everytown for Gun Safety examined mass shooting data from 2009 to 2015 and found that high-capacity magazines were used in 11 percent of incidents, but resulted in a higher percentage of people shot than in other gun-related incidents.
For an interactive map that displays up to date numbers on shootings near you, click here.
Bailly, who like Aberdale was one of those teenagers who used to put his shotgun in the car for after-school bird hunting, gets down to what he sees as the problem. “One of the biggest responsibilities is that no unauthorized person gets to use your firearm.” Both he and Aberdale talk about standard procedures like locking down guns and ammunition in the house, and move on to the topic of Chicago, where gun laws are strict and shootings are frequent. Both men say the law should come down extra hard on criminals using illegally obtained guns.
It is here where the gun control issue wobbles. It isn’t Aberdale or Bailly we have to worry about. Both men say the problem isn’t guns, either. “They always pick on the firearm,” Bailly says.
On Monday the FBI said two semi-automatic rifles used in the San Bernardino shooting were sold to gunman Syed Farook by his neighbor, Enrique Marquez, who had purchased them legally. Most guns used in mass shootings over the last three decades, according to this article, were obtained legally.
There are statistics. In this article in the New Republic, criminologist Frederic Lemieux said “mass shootings and gun ownership rates are highly correlated.” He further noted that restrictive gun laws actually do make a difference. Gun Law Scorecard tracks the laws in each state and the correlation between restrictions and gun violence.
“A recent study published by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center shows that the frequency of mass shooting is increasing over time,” Lemieux wrote, and that it is doing so as the rate of “intentional homicides” decreases. The Harvard study said “the days separating mass shooting occurrence went from on average 200 days during the period of 1983 to 2011 to 64 days since 2011.”
The register at the shop gets crowded, and Aberdale goes to help one of his employees. Bailly and I talk more about guns and other things that are killing people at a high rate. “Texting while driving,” Bailly says. “Whole families get wiped out because of some nitwit.” Turns out guns and car accidents kill about the same number of people every year — nearly 34,000 ––according to the CDC’s 2013 data.
Rep. Pignatelli says while gun violence, particularly from illegally obtained firearms, is a problem, there is something else. “The NRA and gun owners need to be part of this discussion,” he said, “but to only focus on guns is shortsighted.” He pointed to other ways around the state’s strict gun laws. “There was the Boston marathon bombing,” he said, noting that his daughter was there when two terrorists set off pressure cooker bombs, killing three and wounding 264. “There were no guns. If you Google how make a pipe bomb or a pressure cooker bomb, you could go down to Lee Hardware and buy [those materials] today.
Richard Bailly holds the rifle he was trained to shoot while in the United States Army. Photo: Heather Bellow
“It’s easy to sit back and look at a disaster and say, take the guns away. We do have strict gun laws and we still have a problem,” he said, noting recent shootings in Boston and Pittsfield. “We need to take a look at who’s on the Internet and what information is on the Internet and put politics aside.” He says the federal government “needs to wake up,” and says there is too much violence on the screen and in video games.
Rep. Pignatelli addressed domestic Islamic terrorism. “We are in a world war right now, though it’s not my father’s war. We’ve got to view things very differently. It’s easy political fodder to say take the guns away.”
He does, however, think it’s crazy that people on the “no fly list” can buy a gun. The NRA is fighting the “Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act.”
Pignatelli also wonders “where you draw the line” about mental health records. “So many people are trying to get themselves better.” He praised Gov. Charlie Baker’s “no more stigma” statewide campaign “to break down barriers and views of mental health and substance abuse.” He says we shouldn’t give up those privacy laws because, “it’s why we have this place called America.”
And maintaining “this place called America” is served with a big helping of complexity. Bailly tells me how, years ago, he frequently sauntered through town with his shotgun on the way to hunt.
“Today, if you saw someone crossing the street with a gun…?” He gives me a sharp look. I nod.
“Something’s changed,” I say. He nods back.
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