Fully Loaded

My parents said I could be anything, so I became an asshole.

I can’t take credit for thinking of that on my own. It’s on a T-shirt for sale here at the Gun and Knife Show.

I don’t belong here. That’s been obvious from the moment I pulled into the Blue Ridge Mall parking lot, driving the lone compact car in a sea of gun-racked SUVs. My car’s only adornment is an air freshener depicting Deery Lou the Cheerful Fawn. Deery Lou, a distant relative of Hello Kitty, strolls through a forest among other woodland creatures, frolicking under a rainbow sky.

We didn’t have toy guns in my house, let alone real ones. But I relate to the urge for self-protection. A part of me even romanticizes the do-what-you-gotta-do attitude I associate with gun ownership.

A few weeks before making this trip to Blue Ridge Mall, I attended my first gun and knife show at the KCI Expo Center. I went with a friend whose dad had come to town specifically for the occasion. Being at a gun and knife show with a legitimate gun enthusiast felt safe. I chuckled at the man in Civil War regalia whose holster had an extra strap specially fashioned for a cell phone. I even made an impulse buy: my own self-adhesive, glow-in-the-dark prairie chuck targets. No sooner were the pest-shaped targets in my clutches than a swarm of bearded men descended upon me to provide instructions on how to use them. They graciously shared their knowledge, giving me the benefit of the doubt. For all they knew, I had a gun at home or might buy one before leaving the show. For some reason, I appreciated that.

Overconfident from the tameness of my first excursion, I decide to attend my second gun show alone. Now, however, I am glaringly out of place. When I pay my $6 admission, the woman at the desk places her hand gently on mine and says, “Honey, this is a gun show.”

But it’s not the weapons that scare me. It’s the T-shirts, like the one that depicts hooded Klansmen and brags that they’re “The Original Boys in the Hood.” It’s the bumper stickers, especially the one with a Confederate flag that reads: “I’d rather be historically accurate than politically correct.” It’s the books: How to Lose Your Ex-Wife Forever and Forging Identities: Everything You Need to Know About Birth Certificates and the Rest.

I don’t talk to anyone until I pass a man with tiny saws. He’s cutting centimeter-length gun shapes out of plywood and calling them “unregistered handguns.” He offers to carve one for me, so I wait there, listening to him explain that NASA uses the same saws he uses. He may be crazy, but he’s not going to hurt me, so we’re cool.

Browsing at a booth that displays everything from belt buckles to floral scarves, I pick up the cutest little gun I’ve ever seen. Although I’m looking closely at the engravings and marveling that it costs only $20, I don’t completely realize that I’m holding a gun until I begin to ponder the trigger.

For the first time in my life, I have a gun in my hand. Looking around at all the guns people are toting in this former discount clothing store, it occurs to me that coming here alone is one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever done.

But I could think of no better way to prepare for the art-filled Gun and Knife Show at the Fahrenheit Gallery, curated by Review editor Marcus Cain and gallery owner Peregrine Honig. The show contains real guns. It also contains bullets, fabric swatches with bullet holes in them and dead baby deer under Plexiglas. Knives covered in layers of rubber bands are still knives, and they’re still dangerous — a reality made clear by the fact that the curators have displayed them by stabbing them into the gallery’s walls.

One of the simplest and most powerful pieces here is a pistol hanging on the wall, the phrase “I Love You” engraved in its barrel. The ambiguity is what makes it so strong. Who loves what? Does the gun owner love the gun? Does the shooter love the victim?

The artist, Matt Wycoff, had to get this gun licensed when he bought it. As curators, Cain and Honig weren’t sure how to go about selling this piece if somebody wanted to buy it. After a little research, they found out that anyone who wanted to take this baby home and display it above the sofa would have to go through a background check and register it just like Wycoff did. This may be art and these may be curators, but selling firearms is selling firearms.

The arty Gun and Knife Show feels safe to me not because the weapons are any less real or because the people are any less likely to use them, but because I am the intended audience. My doubts are welcome here. Some of the artists express strong pro-gun sentiment. Some feel strongly in the opposite direction. But most deal with both sides of the subject, in the murky area where a lot of people reside.

Just inside the gallery door is a painting by David Ford. In it, a dude with a knife stands in front of a stage where a girl in a ruffly skirt is performing. Text scrawled beneath them reads, If I gave it to you right now/Would you handle it? Could I deal with it? OK, so there’s some disturbing sexual meaning in the text, but there’s also an important question: Can you handle this?

It’s a question that most of these artists had to ask themselves. Tammi Kennedy made hollow Scotch tape shells of her brother’s guns — one pistol and one shotgun. The pistol is inside a tape-based suitcase and contains a tape-based bullet — Kennedy’s commentary on the X-ray ritual in airports since 9/11. Kennedy originally planned to make her tape sculptures using toy guns. But toy guns are made of plastic and would have melted during the heat-tacking phase of her process.

She had to drive three hours and cross a state line to pick up her brother’s guns. “I’m so naïve that I even had to ask if you need a license to transport them or anything,” she says.

At first, having the guns in her studio was intimidating. “There’s so much power in a gun,” she says. “This thing can take away someone’s life.”

But once the guns were covered in a layer of tape, she felt more comfortable with them and even liked the way they felt. “It wasn’t the cold metal touching my hand,” she says. “It was Scotch tape. I couldn’t get it wrapped fast enough.”

Kennedy began making tape shells of furniture and other harmless objects years ago. But these days, it seems as though the art teacher, adoptive parent-to-be and strict vegetarian is straying into the realm of more emotionally and politically charged objects. It began with the translucent animal heads she made last spring. When she started covering the animal heads, she had to talk to them to keep from getting upset. “Taxidermy heads and guns are both things I’ve always loathed and never wanted to be that close to,” she says.

How does covering these items in tape and reducing them to adhesive exoskeletons change Kennedy’s relationship to them? “I always think of my pieces as being ghosts of the objects they came from,” she says.

Kennedy took away the gun’s power. She took away its weight, its color, its substance. A tape gun, perfectly conformed to the shape of a real gun, evokes everything I associate with weapons — except fear. I can see through these guns. I know they’re empty.

But that doesn’t stop me from cringing when a few pranksters show up at the gallery, toy guns in hand, shooting each other with harmless plastic pellets. Steve Martin’s line from The Three Amigos starts running through my mind. Oh, great — real bullets.