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34 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.15 one of the very few chairs with a wall behind it and a good view of the room. Such things are important to a man who feels responsible for the safety of others, for my safety. Pagano wears a black short-sleeved jacket, the garb of the "elite Israeli Shabak and high-profle bodyguards," according to its manufacturer. It provides cover for his Glock 23. He wears his G-Shock watch face on the inside of his wrist — it's better for rife shooting, an Israeli commando buddy told him. And of course, he's packing. I'm not. In the parlance of many concealed-carry advocates, he's the sheepdog, and I'm the sheep. Baah. Is life truly so dangerous that this vigilance is necessary? Te most recent U.S. Justice Department statistics show that the homicide rate in 2010 was lower than it has been in 50 years. Tat year there were 4.8 murders per 100,000 people, down from the 1980 peak of 10.2 homicides per 100,000 people. Te 2010 murder rate was roughly equivalent to the rate in 1962. In Kentucky, the murder rate is even lower, according to FBI statistics, with 3.8 homicides or instances of non-negligent manslaughter per 100,000 people in 2013. But for Pagano, carrying a weapon is a mat- ter of personal responsibility. "People say, do I carry a gun because I'm afraid?" Pagano says. "I don't really carry a gun for me. I carry a gun for others. Tat's the sheepdog or shepherd in me coming out." In other words, it's a public service. And he's a public-service kind of guy. He was a Marine, an emergency medical technician, a pastor and a chaplain with the Louisville Metro Police Department. Now he's a reserve deputy sherif. He also teaches several gun-related classes, including Israeli combat shooting, a course called Women on Target (surprisingly not Ladies on Target) and a gun-safety class for kids. It's all part of a belief that gun ownership comes with certain respon- sibilities. "If you were someone that I know, and you had the capability of legally packing a frearm, and you don't, and something happened, then I put part of the culpability on you because you had the ability to do some- thing and you chose not to," Pagano says. Pagano's not worried that Starbucks is Terrorists "R" Us. Rather, in his world- view, the only safe place is one he controls access to. "Hopefully I won't have to draw my frearm," he says. "But who knows? Who would have ever expected a shooting at a mov- ie theater? Or at a mall? Or Sandy Hook? "Is there a certain amount of paranoia?" he says. "I think paranoia and being prepared are overlapping circles. . . . Is wearing a seatbelt and having airbags paranoid? Or is it being prepared? You have insurance, don't you?" Yep, I think, I have insurance. You have insurance. But your insurance can't kill me by accident. Tere is as much paranoia on my side of the table as his. Pagano is probably the best-known gun advocate in the state. He drew national media attention in 2009 when he announced a bring- your-gun-to-church day at the former New Bethel Church in Valley Station, where he was pastor for 10 years. "We made the front page of the New York Times the day Michael Jackson passed away," Pagano says. "Andy Warhol was wrong. It was more than 15 minutes. It was pretty wild there for a while. We would get phone calls and emails from China, Japan, Germany, England. I was on the radio. I was on live television in Australia, on Fox, on CNN." Te Saturday event was an Indepen- dence Day celebration designed to emphasize gun safety. As an LMPD chaplain, Pagano says, he'd seen children hurt because someone left a loaded weapon lying round. But the event left its mark. To Pagano's and his congregation's discomfort, people started calling Bethel "the gun church." "We did softball events but were not known as the baseball church. We would go bowling, but we weren't known as the Holy Rollers, certainly," he says. "So we gave away a gun, so we had a gun event, so we became known as the gun church." He sighs. "Oh, well." Pagano retired from the church in 2009. After 30 years in the ministry, he was ready for something new. And given all the rigmarole over the gun celebration, which included death threats, he fgured the church needed to make a new start without him. Not that he would have done anything diferently if he had it to do over again. "I'd do it every year," he says. Guns and Christianity. It hardly seems a suitable pairing, yet often gun owners talk about not just a constitutional right to bear arms but a God-given right. Pagano didn't call the right God-given in our conversation, but he labeled gun ownership "biblical. It's not un- scriptural." Te Old Testament is full of stories of God's people defending themselves, Pagano says. Te New Testament notion of turning the other cheek is not a call for unquestioning submission to outside forces, he says: "Turning the other cheek, I believe, had more to do with an insult: If you insult me, I'm bigger than that. You try to kill my wife or family, that's a diferent story." Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers," in the Sermon on the Mount, but Pagano says, "What does that mean to be a peacemaker? Is it peace through strength? Or is it peace through being obsequious?" Pagano points to a branch of Christian thought that permits whatever the Bible doesn't specifcally forbid. Tat would include gun ownership. It occurs to me now that such an interpretation has all kinds of possibilities. Biblical marijuana, anyone? Pagano, it turns out, was simply ahead of his time. In the last few years, a number of churches, including several churches in the Kentucky Baptist Convention, have used gun giveaways to attract new members. A Paducah church rafed 25 handguns at its Second Amendment Celebration in 2014 and reported a crowd of 1,300. Guns are a more efective magnet than a church supper ever was. When I ask Pagano how many guns he owns, he will only say he has more than one but fewer than 100. "How many purses do you have?" he asks me. "I tell my wife, 'God forbid anything happens to you, but I'm never going to get anything for all your purses and shoes combined. But if anything happens to me and you take everything I have and sell them of, you can go on a cruise.'" First there's the unholy roar — the chest-thumping booms, the earsplitting staccato of screaming metal that goes on and on and on until it begins to sound like music, like some sort of freaky deconstructionist masterpiece. When it stops, the silence booms. Men can hear themselves laugh as they survey the smoke-hung feld, a fat and narrow valley where diesel fres burn amid twisted piles of metal. Somehow in the wreckage it's the wash- ing machine that commands attention, stand- ing tipsily, its door hanging open in a wordless howl — Appliance, by Edvard Munch. Chad Sumner, a buf 32-year-old, is in his element in the noise and the wreckage. He helped haul some of the cars and appliances out to this range where they serve as targets. He has been frantically busy setting up exhibi- tor tables and getting the buses ready for their twice-yearly duty carrying customers here from a distant parking lot. Te Louisville frefghter has short-cropped hair that stands up straight. Opposite page (clockwise from top left): the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot; 111 Gun Shop proprietor Misty Van Fleet; frearms advocate Ken Pagano; the Knob Creek Gun Range's Chad Sumner, part of the family that starred on TV's Guntucky reality show; and a fully automatic enthusiast. "I don't really carry a gun for me. I carry a gun for others," Ken Pagano says.