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36 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.15 When he talks, his dark eyebrows help tell the story, rising, arching, pointing up toward his widow's peak. He shoulders his way among the machine gunners he's known forever, the guys who made that mess out in the feld. "Hey!" a guy calls out. "It's Flat Stanley!" Sumner poses a crayoned paper doll used in elementary school literacy programs so it looks like it's shooting a GE Minigun, a Gatling-style, six-barreled weapon that fres more than 3,000 rounds a minute. Flat Stanley has had quite a day at the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot, where gunfre blossoms for three days every spring and fall and machine guns sell for the price of a new car. Tere's Flat Stanley in a Huey helicopter. Here's Flat Stanley on a tank. Tere's Flat Stan- ley reclining on a pile of shell casings. When the mayhem is over, Sumner's eight-year-old daughter, Lily, will take the Flat Stanley pho- tographs to school and show them of. When your great-grandfather founded arguably the largest machine-gun shoot anywhere, when your grandpa runs the range where it's held, and when your dad helps put it all together, your Flat Stanley is badass. Over the course of three days some 12,000 people turn of Dixie Highway, scoot around the foodwall, pass the pink palace of Jerry's Liquors and cross the Bullitt County line to reach the range. Along Stites Station Road, vendors hawk khaki military clothing, back- packs and boots. Cars and pickups park along both sides of the road for more than a half- mile on Saturday afternoon. I pay $15 to put my eardrums in danger and wander in. A handful of men wear uniforms of various armies. I run into Brian Ostermeier, his 25-year-old son Neil, and Neil's friend Eren Ehlerding, 20. Each wears a mix-and-match collection of uniforms of the world. Neil matches a Dutch military coat with an East German paratrooper vest and Swedish trousers. Eren runs through the details of his outft like a well-trained military model. "I'm wearing three layers of German. I'm wearing a German light feld jacket with a hood under a standard German uniform jacket and a German Bunde- swehr shirt." His hat is West German, older than the other pieces, he says. Tey left home at 4 this morning and drove six hours from northern Indiana near the Michigan border to be at the shoot, one of their few opportunities to show of their uniforms. Kids with weaponry weave through the crowd. Tey carry M-14s and AK-47s, .44 Magnums and M1911 pistols — each "Stur- diGun" the plywood creation of 25-year-old Michael Griswold from Mount Grove in Cen- tral Missouri. SturdiGun's slogan is "Real Toys for Real Boys," but several gun-toting girls have other ideas. Griswold, his chubby cheeks sprinkled with light stubble, started making the plywood guns four years ago. He had to. Christmas was coming. He has seven younger siblings, and he was nearly broke after quitting his job to do a little volunteer work: patrolling the Mexican border as part of an Arizona militia. Now back home, he had to improvise Christmas gifts. He printed pictures of guns and jigsawed them out of plywood. Turns out, they were everyone's favorite gift, and SturdiGun was born. Te family grew so busy making and selling wooden armaments that their dairy cows became a time-consuming distraction. Tey moved SturdiGun's manufac- turing operation into the dairy barn. But not all of Knob Creek's guns for tots are just pretend. Jake Anderson, a seven-year-old with golden-brown curls, crouches over a rife fanked by two certifed range ofcers. Tey steady the boy's shoulder. Tey make sure his hands are in the proper position. "You got the target in the crosshairs?" one asks. Jake's voice is tiny. "Yeah." "Pull the trigger." Pop! "You shot a little high." Pop! Clink! Te bullet strikes the target, one in a row of metal lollipops. "Tere you go!" Pop! Clink! "You hit another one!" Pop! Clink! Pop! Clink! Pop! Clink! "I think he's fgured it out," Jake's dad says. "He hasn't missed nine in a row." Te clatter of several nearby machine guns replaces conversation for a moment. Te noise comes from down the hill, where people — almost all men — pay to shoot automatic weapons — from $50 for 30 rounds on an Uzi to $160 for a 100-round belt on a Russian RPD. When the noise stops, one of the men with Jake's family nods approvingly. "We call this our mecca," he says. "We all bow toward Knob Creek." But the shoot has its critics, most often due to the white-supremacist literature and Nazi memorabilia that's been peddled here. Te white-supremacist blog, Occidental Dissent, has praised the machine-gun shoot for its "palpable sense of whiteness," as well as for the numerous booths selling Nazi paraphernalia and the number of white supremacists in the crowd. I saw none of this, although Chad Sumner told me before the shoot that it was a possibility. It would not have surprised me: Nazi fags and posters were on sale at the gun show at the Kentucky Exposition Center. I didn't feel palpable whiteness, whatever that is, and there were African-Americans at the Knob Creek event, though not in great numbers. Ten again, gun owners in the United States are more likely to be white. A 2014 Pew survey showed blacks are about half as likely as whites to have a frearm in their homes, although they are more likely to be the victims of gun violence. Gun owners are also more likely to be middle-aged and middle income — with 45 percent of gun owners earning more than $50,000 annually. Only 20 percent of gun owners earn less than $20,000 per year. Gun owners are also twice as likely to be Republicans as Democrats, the Pew survey found. When I ask about political ideology, gun owners assure me that they know plenty of liberal Democrats who love guns. And I'm sure that is true. I even met one. More often, though, I encountered people at the other end of the political spectrum, like the guy in the "Buck Ofama" T-shirt at Knob Creek. But the attraction at Knob Creek isn't the politics or the whiteness. It's the noise. It's the weaponry. It's the all-out mayhem. And, if you're into investment spending, it's a chance to shop for a machine gun. Not a souped-up AR-15 or a pretend plywood one, but a se- lection of the only legal machine guns sold in the United States — those made before 1986. Tese guns are a lesson in classic supply and demand. "Eight years ago I wanted to buy an MP5, a little submachine gun," Sumner says. "It was a 9 mm, and it was $10,000. Tat's expensive. Tat's a car for most people. I had saved up some, but I wasn't there yet. Within those eight years, (the price) had jumped to $25,000. Te exact same gun, nothing diferent." Tere is a 10-year waiting list for people who want to sell at the Knob Creek show, Sumner says. Already they fll almost 900 ven- dor tables every year — although only some of the tables are devoted to selling machine guns, none of which cost less than $20,000. "Anybody can go out and spend $800 on a Colt AR-15," Sumner says. "But if you ordered that in full auto, the original, the cheapest one I was looking at out there was $25,000. Tere's just a big diference between fully automatic and semiautomatic." Tere's a second 10-year waiting list for people who hope to shoot their machine guns at Knob Creek. Te folks on the front line fring at the old cars, barrels of diesel fuel and ancient appliances can have obscene amounts of money tied up in these guns, Sumner says. People talk about the number of millionaires that prowl Knob Creek. Tere are rumors of a study that says the Machine Gun Shoot draws more millionaires than the Kentucky Derby. I found no evidence of any study, but given