THE GUN STORE OWNER

Yes, he tells me, he knows he looks like Santa Claus. He strokes his long, white beard and chuckles. "Every Christmas, people ask me to come to their church function in a costume," he says. "I tell 'em I ain't big into religion and if they invite me in, I'll just tell all the kids that neither God or Santa is real." He laughs. "That usually gets 'em off my back."

I ran that store for 21 years. First couple were sort of tough. 

But then Obama got elected in '08 and man, that turned everything around. 

Every single year you had guys coming in convinced that it was their last chance to buy a gun. They really believed it. That the raids were coming any minute now. All because he said that one line about people "clinging to guns and religion." That was all people needed to fill in the blanks. Buy a gun now before it's too late! 

I hate to say it, but every time there was a school shooting or like a nightclub massacre, sales got even better. Anything that reignited "the gun debate" was enough to send folks runnin' in. 

If you'd asked all the firearm industry guys who they supported in 2012, they would've denied it, but they were all rootin' for Obama to win again. 

The weird thing was, it never slowed down again, even after the Republicans took back over. More and more people were in an apocalyptic spirit. Folks all seemed to have this sense that maybe the system wasn't gonna last much longer. And no matter where they stood on the political spectrum, they all knew they'd need a gun whenever the shit hit the fan. 

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My customers all had a different idea of how it'd go down. You'd think these guys—the real preppers—would be preparing for a bunch of different types of doomsday scenarios. But if you ever really started talking to them, almost all of them really had one particular type of apocalypse in mind that they were preparing for. 

There were the older guys convinced that the nukes were gonna fall at any minute. They tended to go lighter on the guns but heavy on bunker supplies. Over the years, I lost a lot of my nuke guys. Maybe because they were getting too old for this shit, but also maybe because they left town. Los Angeles isn't exactly the best place to live if you don't want to be targeted in a nuclear exchange. 

Then you had the zombie guys. These dudes would start talking to you about viruses. "It'd just take one wild mutation of rabies going airborne, and it'd all be over." Really great customers. They wanted shotguns, assault rifles, swords, whatever they could get their hands on. And they tended to buy ammo in bulk.

The "race war" guys were always a big market too. I learned to spot these guys pretty quick. The trick to spotting a race war guy is they'll always talk about "people being crazy out here." At first they'd just say stuff like, "I just wanna be prepared in case it gets crazy out here," or, "You never know, people are really crazy out here." Always sort of similar kinda phrasing like that. But eventually they might make a reference to Rodney King, or the riots that followed King's beating, or even the O.J. thing. Then it became pretty clear which "crazy people" they were talking about. 

They were always nice to me, even though I'm Latino. A couple of my regulars would even lend me copies of racist literature. If it hadn't been for that, I probably wouldn't have known what they were really about. 

It's funny: There's just not too much of a difference between the race war guys and the zombie guys. They all bought the same type of stuff. 

So business stayed good, all the way up until the replicators came. The day after that Kobek thing was the best sales day we ever had. All that week, people were coming in talking about getting ready for Bastille Day II. I had no idea what that meant, but I was happy to sell 'em guns. (Laughs.) 

Of course business fell off pretty quickly after that. I put everything up for fire sale prices and cleared out of town. I didn't want to hang around and find out what Bastille Day II really was about.