Street Crooks, Militarist Kooks Trouble Gun Collector

To give me a better look at one of his “sweethearts,” Dan Baker emptied the bullets from his Dan Wesson .44 Magnum onto his bed. He palmed it, turned it over, caressed it--a shiny and spotless work of art. In the way some people appreciate a fine set of wheels, Baker is in love with the gun.

A few moments later, he takes a .338 Winchester Magnum rifle out of the same safe in his bedroom and holds it under the living room light. “Look at this,” he says, “the quality of the wood. Look at the stock. Have you ever seen engraving or carving like that?”

We had been talking one night this week in his Westminster home about guns--more specifically, a collector’s love of them. These are not especially good times for gun owners, uneasily linked in some people’s minds with both the street criminals brandishing handguns and kooky militarists on their own private missions.

That genuinely saddens people like Baker, a 61-year-old sales manager for a food company, who collects guns like other people collect stamps. It’s a collection that he started 40 years ago and that now numbers more than 100, with an estimated value of $50,000.

“I just like guns,” he says as we sit at the dinner table in his kitchen. “I like the way they look, the way they feel, and most important, I like the way they shoot. That’s the part I enjoy, shooting the firearm. I don’t know if I could just buy guns. I’ve got a few that have never been fired, but not for any particular reason other than I don’t especially like the gun but that it was a caliber and a gun I had wanted” for the collection.

Baker’s dad was a Texas Ranger who used his gun occasionally on the job. He told his two sons there was nothing funny about guns. “He taught me gun safety,” Baker says, “and he taught me to leave his guns alone. I had a BB gun when I was about 10. Then my dad made a trade for my first .22 rifle, a Stephens pump, and that’s where it started. I was very good with it. I felt I had developed a skill that nobody else had.

“The collection started when I was about 20. I just started buying guns--good ones, no junk. I bought quality firearms as I could afford it. I kept adding to the collection. When I saw a gun that appealed to me, I purchased it. Primarily, rifles, and second would be pistols. I’ve got one of about every caliber made in the world.”

Baker disdains military-type weapons. “I was drafted and they practically had to come get me. I didn’t like military service, the regimentation. I would never own a semiautomatic, military-type weapon. Having been in the service and having been here 60-some odd years, I associate them with the military and with war, which I don’t like. I don’t like war, don’t like that kind of violence. All those military rifles, they all look so ugly to me. I don’t know if that makes any sense to you, but they’re ugly and there’s only one reason they’re manufactured, in my opinion, and that is for killing.”

Baker says he can’t imagine shooting someone and doesn’t even pretend that he owns his guns for self-protection. Yet he’s worried about which way the wind is blowing on private gun ownership.

He only became a Republican in recent years, spurred by the gun-control issue. He chastises the group of “liberals” who would restrict gun ownership. Even though he realizes it’s not people like him they’re after, he fears the impact of sweeping gun-control legislation.

“I would give them up, if it were the law,” he says. “I would be very unhappy about that, but it goes back to me being a law-abiding citizen. But I certainly would have a different feeling about my country.”

He’s hopeful the furor will subside. Before I leave, I ask if the heated rhetoric is taking all the fun out of owning guns.

“I know a lot of people have hobbies that I don’t particularly like, but I don’t put them down,” he says. “This is mine, and if they have a problem, it’s their problem and not mine. The thing is, I’m not going to let it bother me.”

And yet, it does bother him. It bothers him that a pastime he’s enjoyed since childhood--when every kid he knew had a gun--is increasingly connected in so many peoples’ minds with violence and hatred.

“I think about it a lot more than I used to--what other people think about my having guns. I still enjoy my guns, but I think I’m a lot more sensitive about it. I don’t know how to put that. . . . A lot of people know I own guns and a lot of times they’ll say, ‘You shot anyone lately?’ The more publicity that comes out about the crap that goes on, the more they look at me with a jaundiced eye. They should be looking at their next-door neighbor, not me.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.