Judy Gumbo Albert : Gun Show After Tucson

Checking it out at Crossroads of the West Gun Show. Image from Spirit of the Sportsman.
Tactically armed citizens:
Gun show after Tucson

By Judy Gumbo Albert / The Rag Blog / January 25, 2011

Like most Americans, I’ve been wrestling -- no, agonizing -- about guns. Then I heard about a gun show at San Francisco’s Cow Palace. So I go. To confront my inner turmoil.

Back in the late 1960's, I passionately believed the revolution had come. It was, like the Black Panthers said, time to pick up the gun. John Lennon sang sweetly in the background: "Happiness is a warm gu-hu-hun." My anti-war cohort and I went to a gun show in Contra Costa County. We bought low-end rifles, a shotgun, a handgun. We cleaned ‘em. We went to the Chabot Gun Club and shot ‘em. We cleaned ‘em again.

My cheap .22 Italian rifle against my shoulder made me feel as powerful as Superman.

Forty years later comes Tucson. Other massacres precede it. I react with horror and empathy like the rest of the world. How do I explain my past self in the present? "You’re not the Teabag Hat Lady, you have completely different moral values, an opposite worldview," I tell myself each time I see her on TV with her pals, rifles carried openly at their sides. I once loved guns. After Tucson, the duality is driving me crazy.

My first thought is: what to wear? Not my black Greek fisherman’s cap with its faux diamond peace pin that I bought in Washington, D.C., at the last gigantic pro-choice rally. Not my gorgeous rust-brown Sergeant Pepper jacket with its epaulets, bronze buttons, and pearl encrusted three-inch wide pink velvet flower pin. I settle on inconspicuous: jeans, white vest and sweater, and a black, Access Capital Strategies cap. Maybe they’ll mistake me for a capitalist. I reject the iPad, but worry that my recycled brown paper notepad with its peace dove and ECOHOPE cover might draw attention.

I park behind a Lexus. There’s a BMW to my right, a yellow Hummer to my left, a lone green Prius sits between two black pick-ups, one of which is a Toyota. Not the America First cars I was expecting. I avoid the outdoor red, white, and blue NRA tent, pay my $10, and go inside a crowded, high-ceilinged shell. American flags are omnipresent but not intrusive. “Wow, this feels familiar,” is my first reaction.

A vendor calls himself "Tactically Armed Citizen" (e-mail TGUNNUT). I stop, breathe, and then approach his stacks of two-foot long thin boxes. On top of each is a different make of rifle, most with elaborate eight-inch black scopes. The front barrel of one rests solidly on a black metal tripod. This gun could mow anything down.

A genial curly-haired white guy with wire-rimmed glasses is explaining the gun to a tall forty-something East Indian customer. Their conversation is casual, friendly, knowledgeable; I pick up no hint of prejudice or fear. The price tag is $1,750. The gun looks heavy. But not larger than life, like in the movies.

“What’s this gun for?” I ask, running my fingers down a sleek black barrel.

“Hunting. Target practice.”

Gun-packing mama? Judy Gumbo Albert, in the day.
I realize that, to work things through, my former gun-loving Judy Gumbo persona needs a voice:

“I’m looking for something for self defense.”

“Self-defense? You need a handgun.”

“No,” I reply, “I’ve never liked handguns. Too hard to aim.”

“How about a shotgun?” he suggests.

“Nahh, too much kick.” The ease with which my minimal knowledge comes back surprises me.

Gun vendors are outnumbered by people selling peripherals: green, orange, and camouflage hunters' vests; scary looking gun stocks made of lightweight black metal; high strength instant glue; carefully arranged antique and modern military medals in glass-covered display cases; multiple varieties of beef jerky. Vicious hunting knives sit alongside multicolored switchblades.

I see tables covered with sexy curved black magazine clips that, no matter how large they look, are, I’m assured, jiggered to hold California’s legal limit of 10 bullets. The ammo section is conspicuously bare of product. I’d read there’d been a run on bullets since Tucson, fear of increased restrictions.

I feel bizarrely at home in this multi-aged crowd of beer-bellied white guys, short Spanish-speaking men, young hand-holding couples, Asians, Savage Breed motorcyclists, women pushing strollers. I’m just another Grannie looking to defend herself. The t-shirt on a passerby reads: ‘If you know how many guns you have, you don’t have enough.”

I make my way past a vendor who has lethal looking sleek black military-style firearms for sale. His logo is a target. His guns are made in the USA. And Russia. Of airplane grade aluminum. One has a 10” long calibrated sight he says is accurate up to 1,000 feet.

“What’s this gun for?

“Target practice.”

“You need a guy like Castro to take over.” I overhear a longhaired fifty-something vendor trying to talk a group of Chicano men into buying Stetsons. “Make the rich leave. Give the country to the people.” This man wears a Superman t-shirt. A familiar "what else is nu?" gesture accompanies his New York salesperson prose. I wonder if I’ve found a landsman.

In addition to Stetsons, rifles, and handguns he sells hemp bags with images of Pancho Villa. He says the Mormons who run the gun show won’t let him sell his smoking paraphernalia. He tells me a friend in Kingman, Arizona, owns a gun safe that takes up an entire wall. “He comes home at night, opens it, sits in front of it and stares. He isn’t married.”

“What does he do with all those guns?”

“Target practice.”

I visualize millions of bullets whipping across American farmland, or burying themselves deep into targets at gun clubs and ask myself what violent fantasies lie beneath the meaning of the phrase: target practice.

Then I see it. A small, Judy Gumbo kind of gun. Black. Maybe one and a half feet long. Curvaceous clip. The gun calls to me like that slouchy, punky teenage boyfriend my parents hated.

“It’s an AK 47 pattern pistol,” says Mark, the young vendor with twinkling dark eyes. He’s either impossibly earnest or flirting with me.

“It looks like a rifle, but it’s a handgun. It’s sold to shoot only one bullet at a time, but you can legally convert it to semi-automatic.”

“How fast will it shoot?” I ask, lusting in my heart.

“As fast as you can pull the trigger,” he replies. Mark tells me it’s legal to own a machine gun in 33 states.

Uncle Sam Bank. Image from What's it Worth.
I pick the gun up. I nestle it into my left shoulder blade. Wrong. I’m right-handed. I change hands, balance the gun in my left hand and place my right finger on the trigger.

“Nah,” Mark says, “Hold it straight out in front of you. It shoots like a pistol.”

“How much?”

"$829.00”

“What do you use this kind of gun for?"

“Target practice.”

“Thanks,” I tell Mark. “I need to think about it.”

On my way out, I spot an Uncle Sam Bank. It’s 11 inches tall, made of cast iron with "BANK" painted in gold on all four sides of a red base. Uncle Sam stands erect. He wears black tails, striped white pants and a blue top hat with stars. You put a coin in his metal hand, press a metal nail and ‘"fwump," the coin ends up in a red suitcase that, if it weren’t metal, could double for a carpet bag.

I disdained such items in the 1970s as patriotic artifacts of the war-mongering ruling class. In 2011, I buy it for $20. Given the financial crisis, bank bailouts, and profit-seeking patriotism of the arms industry, an Uncle Sam Bank feels like the perfect gun show souvenir.

I was 26 years old in 1968. I’d not yet experienced the death of a loved one or the birth of a child. My late husband Stew Albert and I, the late Abbie and the late Anita Hoffman, the late Jerry Rubin and Nancy Kurshan, plus a few thousand fellow Yippies, coughed our lungs out in Chicago from acrid tear gas lobbed at us for protesting the Vietnam War at the Democratic National Convention.

The following year, in that same city, Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered in their beds. This reality gave birth to my gun fantasies; yet I never used my gun against a living being. Our movement managed, without assault weapons, to end a war and help change lives of people struggling for equality and justice.

Today I wish I had a magic bullet to stop gun violence. And I worry about the big-bellied men I saw at the gun show who claim semi-automatic weapons are just for target practice. It seems obvious to me that their ultra-right-wing fantasies are closer to becoming real than my youthful Yippie romanticism ever was.

I departed the gun show at peace with my past, but very much aware it felt like Tucson never happened.

[Judy Gumbo Albert is completing Yippie Girl, an insider’s memoir of love and friendship among the Yippies and other romantic revolutionaries of the late 1960s. In addition to publishing two books, her work has appeared on CounterPunch, and The Rag Blog. Contact her on Facebook or at her website, www.yippiegirl.com.]

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Tom Hayden : The Right and the Shooting in Tucson

Image from Jesse Kelly's website (now removed). The article about Kelly's appearance in Sierra Vista originally appeared in the Sierra Vista Herald.
Getting on target:
The Right and the shooting in Tucson

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / January 12, 2010

It appears that Arizona is ground zero in a right-wing war against the democratic process.

Rep. Giffords was on Sarah Palin's "target list" of 20 2010 incumbents, a list which featured a graphic showing the crosshairs of a gun. Giffords' office was was one of those vandalized by the right-wing in March 2009 in a protest against national health care bill. [Judge John Roll, killed in the incident, also was subject to significant threats due to his positions on immigration.]

As recently as June 12, 2010, leaflets appeared in Giffords' district proclaiming: "Get on Target" and help remove Gabrielle Giffords. "Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly."

Jesse Kelly is a Marine veteran, and right-wing Republican who lost to Gifford November 4, by 48.8%-47%. Kelly was strongly supported by the Tea Party.

Salon.com named Kelly the Number 1 "most terrifying candidate" in the 2010 Congressional elections. He was criticized for taking funds and support from Americans for Legal Immigration [ALIPAC], an anti-immigrant group once denounced by Sen. John McCain's office as "white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and anti-semites." [The Hill, campaign blog, Oct. 26, 2010]. The Anti-Defamation League shared McCain's office view of ALIPAC.

Kelly's campaign site favored 10,000 U.S. troops being sent to the Arizona-Mexico border "in an active enforcement mode." Gifford supported the president's overall immigration reform legislation.

Image from Talking Points Memo.
The anti-Gifford campaign generated a climate infected by hate and violent rhetoric. But who pulled the trigger? Little has been released about Jared Lee Loughner, but at first look he seems to fit the profile of an individual prone to far-right rhetoric. Here is an apparent excerpt from Loughner's diary:

You don't have to accept the federalist laws.

Nonetheless, read the United States of America's Constitution to apprehend all of the current treasonous laws.

You're literate, listener?

If the property owners and government officials are no longer in ownership of their land and laws from a revolution then the revolutionary's from the revolution are in control of the land and laws.

The property owners and government officials are no longer in ownership of their land and laws from a revolution. Thus, the revolutionary's from the revolution are in control of the land and laws.

In conclusion, reading the second United States Constitution, I can't trust the current government because of the ratifications: The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar.

No! I won't pay debt with a currency that's not backed by gold and silver!

On the evidence so far, this is not a case of an "isolated psychopath." Nor can Sarah Palin and the Tea Party excuse themselves from responsibility by expressing best wishes for Giffords' recovery. There is a connection between the politics of vitriolic hate, symbolized by crosshairs and calls to "lock and load" or "shoot an automatic M16," and the outcome in Tucson Saturday morning.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. This article was also published at Progressive America Rising.]

Thanks to Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog

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Tom Miller : When Jerry Rubin Came to Tucson

Yippee Jerry Rubin addresses a crowd at a park in Tucson, Arizona in 1970. Photo by David Lee Guss / Flickr.
Yippie activist Jerry Rubin brought
His psychedelic oratory to Arizona

By Tom Miller / The Rag Blog / January 25, 2010

Writer Tom Miller will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Tuesday, January 26, 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin. They will discuss Tom's adventures as an author, journalist, and world traveler -- and as an activist and underground journalist in the Sixties. For those outside the listening area, go here to stream the show.

[Tom Miller is an old friend of ours and a fellow graduate of the underground press. In this article he remembers his friendship and adventures with Yippee Jerry Rubin -- especially one eventful day in Tucson, Arizona, in 1970. It was first published in the Tucson Weekly in 1995.]

My houseguest was the first to notice. Every hour that night a car would pull up to the curb outside my rental near Grant Road and Tucson Boulevard, dim its lights, and shift into neutral. We'd hear a brief murmur of muffled conversation, and another car would silently drive off. Very quiet. Very discreet. And to my guest, very conspicuous and amusing.

They were FBI cars, making sure that Jerry Rubin, recently convicted for conspiring to incite riots at the Chicago '68 Democratic convention, wasn't plotting the same for Tucson, Arizona. That explained the occasional clicks and wheezes that punctuated the obvious echoes on my telephone line.

We expected some sort of surveillance -- deep down, we looked forward to it -- and J. Edgar Hoover's men didn't fail us. "It really works to my advantage," Rubin said. "It keeps the right-wing vigilante goons away from the door no matter where I'm staying."

Thirty-two-year-old Jerry Rubin --short, skinny, matted curly hair -- was at the peak of his notoriety. He had risen to prominence in Berkeley's Free Speech Movement in the mid '60s, and, with Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner and a few others, used television advertising techniques to bring a disparate and disorderly constituency into the anti-war fold.

Their letterhead said YIPPIE! -- Youth International Party -- and white, middle-class apolitical kids who puffed the occasional joint made up their primetime audience. The Yippies successfully linked an unpopular war overseas with the burgeoning counter-culture at home and made uniformed authority the enemy on both fronts.

They used guerrilla theater, inventive slogans and confrontational tactics to ridicule antiquated laws and the police who enforced them. Rather than preach the evils of capitalism, they gleefully exploited their contradictions. Bands like the Jefferson Airplane and the MC5 played their benefits; politicians such as Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond proved their foils.

In public, Rubin & Co. were appealingly offensive clowns whose names could draw thousands to a rally as they shouted rehearsed hyperbole and spontaneous rhetoric. To the straight press they were terrific -- they spoke in soundbites, wore colorful clothes and had a well-crafted sense of spontaneity.

Unlike orthodox Marxists, they flashed an aura of psychedelic oratory and tie-dyed eloquence. To those of us in the underground and anti-war press they were supportive and respectful, often contributing articles and, if they were passing through a city near deadline, helped with layout or distribution.

I had gone to the Chicago convention as a demonstrator and reporter -- objectivity has never been a high priority with me -- but instead of joining the pack of journalists trailing the Yippie circus, I traveled with a medical van that treated demonstrators bloodied by Chicago police.

That fall, back in Washington, I covered the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on the anti-war movement, and Rubin responded to his subpoena wearing a revolutionary war uniform. We had lunch at a fancy Capitol Hill restaurant one day and became fast friends.

Rubin lived with his girlfriend Nancy Kurshan in a small walk-up at 5 St. Mark's Place on New York's Lower East Side. Radical publications were strewn about the place, posters of Janis Joplin, Che Guevara, and Jimi Hendrix hung lopsided on the walls, and an oddball assortment of young hippies, middle-aged activists and aging bohemians touched base at all hours of the day and night.

"Jerry, Eldridge telephoned from Algiers; he wants you to call him back this afternoon." "Hey, Jerry, you just missed Phil Ochs a half-hour ago; said he'd be back to confirm the rally in Gainesville next week." "Rubin, that ladies' club on Long Island wants to give $500 to the Yippies. What should I tell them?"

Anyone who was near the door or the phone became part of the Central Committee that swirled around Jerry and his ego. He himself, in private, was an inquisitive fellow, dedicated to social justice and ending the war, and addicted to his persona. He was far more a doer than a thinker, but he usually bounced his plans off the thinkers before going out and doing.

He moved to another, larger apartment on Carmine street in the West Village, and one Saturday afternoon we loaded all his possessions into a borrowed car for the schlep across town. Four of us carefully carried his prized 21-inch color television down the front stairs, when suddenly all the deadbeat junkies on St. Mark's place started clapping and whistling.

Jerry thought it was for him, and waved amiably to the crowd. "Psst, Jerry," I whispered. "They think we're ripping off some guy's television in broad daylight. They're applauding our audacity; they don't know who you are."

We stayed in touch through his 1969 conspiracy trial, by which time I had moved to Arizona, and when he and his cohorts were found guilty after one of the most bizarre and riveting courtroom tribunals of this century, he went out on the lecture circuit.

His book Do It! [ghost-written by The Rag Blog's James Retherford] had just been released. Student groups at some universities paid him a handsome honorarium to come and provoke anti-war activity, other ad hoc groups simply hoped they could scrape together enough expense money to bring him in for a speech, feed him and send him on his way.

That's what brought Jerry Rubin to my Tucson couch, and the FBI to my doorstep, a quarter of a century ago this week.

Tucson had a fairly active anti-war movement. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) shared a storefront on Sixth Street with a militant pacifist group. UA student government leaders took part in anti-war demonstrations. Renegade airmen from Davis-Monthan spoke out publicly against their commander-in-chief, Richard Nixon. The arrest of some demonstrators in a picket line at a Wildcat-BYU basketball game -- we were protesting the Mormon position on blacks -- galvanized the city's progressive forces.

A low-profile but active arts and literary scene nurtured the more politicized crowd and, for a while, proximity to Mexico made the Old Pueblo the Price Club of America's marijuana trade. Into this milieu a few other recent arrivals and I rented a storefront on Fourth Avenue and called it the Yippie Free Store.

We published an underground newspaper that lasted two issues, took in and gave away used clothing, and put on Sunday afternoon rock concerts at Santa Rita Park on 22nd Street at Fourth Avenue. Local bands volunteered to play, we handed out anti-war propaganda, and earth mothers prepared huge cauldrons of red chili and brown rice. Bikers and students, full-time drop-outs and off-duty servicemen, foothills floozies and the best of the barrio all mixed easily.

No one said boo to the city; we simply made bare-bones plans, spread the word on the street and through sympathetic radio stations, and hoped for the best. When it came time to arrange for Rubin to come to town, however, we responded to a standing invitation from the city's parks department to formalize our efforts. Secretly, Eddie Cohen, a fast-talking, rambunctious working class Brooklynite, and I met with Parks Director Gene Reid. He offered us two sites; we chose Palo Verde Park, not far from Broadway and Wilmot Road, and plastered the town with fliers.

That April 1970 day started in Tempe, where the ASU administration had grudgingly approved a student group's request to use Goodwin stadium for a Rubin rally. His appearance there provoked the anticipated First Amendment mutterings; Morris Starsky, a tenured and vocal ASU professor who, in the spectrum of anti-war groups, took the orthodox Trotskyite position, called Rubin a "lunatic," but defended his right to speak on campus.

Rubin's Tempe hosts and I greeted his flight at Sky Harbor Airport; he was almost impossible to find among all the burly, DPS plainclothesmen who surrounded him. By the time we got to ASU, close to 3,000 students were waiting. Anti-war whoops greeted Rubin as he took the stage and adjusted to the Arizona sun. The obligatory joints passed through the audience and up to their speaker.

Rubin's speech, a succession of one-liners, Yippie slogans, and provocative patter geared for Arizona, was a big hit. "We're going to take the Pentagon," he yelled, "and turn it into an LSD factory. Then we'll turn the White House into a crash pad."

Privately I was somewhat embarrassed at how silly Rubin sounded, but I loved the response he got, all the more so because he was so good at converting apathetic students into constructive activists against the war in Vietnam. "You are all inmates at Arizona State Penitentiary," he shouted, and the laughing, Sunday afternoon crowd cheered in response. As a parting shot he thanked the ASU administration for its hospitality.

We raced to the airport for the short hop to Tucson before Goodwin stadium had completely emptied. On the flight down we talked about friends in the anti-war movement and about the Weather Underground, a militant group that broke away from SDS to form clandestine cadres of saboteurs.

The Tucson airport didn't have jetways then, and we had to walk down the mobile stairs and across the tarmac to get inside. Through the glass we could see more DPS plainclothesmen waiting for us. Also waiting was James R. Hood, news director at KTKT radio, whom I had agreed could get an exclusive interview with Rubin in exchange for a lift to Palo Verde Park.

Driving the car was a very straight-looking fellow named Marshall who read the weather report on Hood's station. I motioned to him and turned to Rubin. "He's a weatherman," I said in a low voice. "What?!?" Rubin bellowed, falling for the gag.

Rubin was as offensive and obnoxious in Palo Verde Park as he'd been up north, and the gig went just as smoothly. The park was filled with eastside teenagers and lots of the regulars from our Sunday rock concerts at Santa Rita Park. A layabout California biker named Brother John appointed himself Rubin's security force.

The news that weekend told of another Tucsonan killed in Vietnam; this time a Chicano marine. President Nixon mentioned that the U.S. had a stake in Cambodia, carefully setting the stage for bombing that country a week later.

"We're going to make Arizona unsafe for Barry Goldwater!" Rubin shouted halfway through his Tucson soliloquy, and the crowd, even larger than the Tempe gathering, laughed its approval. He came down heavy on heroin pushers, inhaled joints tossed on stage, and urged his followers to protest the war in Vietnam by every means possible. According to my FBI files, which I obtained a few years later through the Freedom of Information Act, "spectators were using marijuana and were in possession of wine."

Rubin held a press conference at the Yippie Free Store after the rally. Of the dozen or so newshounds shoehorned into our storefront, I remember only Arizona Daily Star photographer Jack Sheaffer, whose smelly charoot and sharp elbows assured him unobstructed access. We ate dinner at a Mexican joint on South Fourth Avenue, with Rubin constantly checking his watch. He didn't want to miss the 10 o'clock news that night.

As an outside agitator Rubin performed a valuable service. His appearance in town was the buzz of the street for days, and even the orthodox anti-war groups reported a surge of interest. Then in swift succession Nixon starting bombing Cambodia, the Ohio National Guard killed four at Kent State University, and more than 100,000 Americans converged on Washington to protest the expanding war against Southeast Asia. On the University of Arizona campus, students and outsiders took over Old Main, which then housed ROTC. We were a glorious sight.

Rubin continued his role as a "Yippie leader," a contradiction if ever there were one, and his federal conspiracy conviction was eventually overturned. His next book, an embarrassing tome called We Are Everywhere, was a flop; I had a hand in writing and editing it, but it was nothing to be proud of. Over the next few years we remained close; when Nancy left him for another man, he and I -- both in Washington for a short spell -- would go on long all-night walks in which he emptied his soul.

He never returned to Tucson, but at some point, a cleaned-up Jerry Rubin moved to California with his considerable promotional abilities, and dined out on the west coast smorgasbord of therapies and feel-good workshops. Back in New York he set up networking salons in which youthful white-collareds paid lots o' bucks to rub elbows with each other. From there his entrepreneurial spirit led him into a Wall Street venture capital enterprise, and finally back to California to set up a pyramid, Amway-type of distribution scheme for WOW -- a powdered drink that contained bee pollen and ginseng.

Over the years I felt increasingly distant from him; our contact became limited to a lame "say hello" through mutual friends. Yet whenever I want to be reminded of that day 25 years ago, all I have to do is pull out my heavily censored FBI file, which speaks of "the visit of [DELETED] to Tucson." In a memo to their boss from his Phoenix office, Hoover learned that I "spent considerable time with [DELETED]." When Rubin died last November after being hit by a car on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, I recalled with whimsy my good times with [DELETED].

Fact is, I liked him much more as an obnoxious asshole.

Tom Miller.

Tom Miller is a veteran of the underground press of the 1960s. His writing, much of it about Latin America and the American Southwest, has appeared in Smithsonian, The New Yorker, LIFE, The New York Times, Natural History, and many other publications. His six books include Revenge of the Seguaro (his latest), The Panama Hat Trail, On The Border, and, most recently, Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels through Castro's Cuba.

His collection of some 80 versions of “La Bamba” led to his Rhino Records release, The Best of La Bamba. His book On the Border has been optioned by Productvision for a theatrical film. He has appeared on NBC, NPR, CNN, HBO, XM, and CSPAN, among other broadcast outlets. The University of Arizona Library acquired Miller’s archives and mounted a major exhibit of the author’s papers.

Tom Miller has lived in Tucson, Arizona, near the Mexican border, since 1969.

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