Some Wisconsin gun owners believe it's time to put more limits on guns

PRAIRIE DU SAC - Jeff Recob is a gun owner, National Rifle Association member and small businessman who sells ammunition, gear and gun supplies to target shooters.    

He also thinks it’s time for his side to give a little in the gun debate.

“As far as I’m concerned, we’d better be ready to give something up now. I’m talking about us as NRA members and the gun-owner community,” said Recob, interviewed at his family business, Recob’s Target Shop, just weeks after a Florida high school massacre set off a new round in the country’s unflagging gun debate.

“Hopefully, the NRA will act like adults and let it happen,” he said.  

Gun enthusiasts are often depicted as uniformly hard-line on gun rights, in step with the NRA's lobbying positions. But in Wisconsin, where roughly half the electorate has guns at home, gun owners are a diverse group politically. They are disproportionately rural and Republican, but four in 10 voters with guns at home are Democrats (or lean that way), according to polling by the Marquette Law School.

Further, they aren’t monolithic in their views on gun laws, regardless of party. Almost 80% of Wisconsin voters in gun households support extending background checks to private gun sales. Almost half favor a ban on “assault-style” weapons, Marquette’s polling shows.   

In conversations after the Florida school shooting, gun owners' opinions ranged from blanket rejection of any new limits to support for numerous new restrictions.  

Many people passionate about guns could identify at least one or two new regulations they support.

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But which regulations — raising the minimum age for purchase, banning assault weapons, waiting periods, curbing high-capacity clips — was a highly individual matter. One person’s common-sense fix was another’s “gray area” or infringement. Torn feelings on the subject were plentiful.

In interviews, it was almost as if some gun owners were debating themselves.

 “I have guns — don’t take my guns away from me. But do we need the assault weapons out there? But how are we going to get them away? (And) if they don’t have a gun, they’re going to use something else,” said Sarah Tyler of Waterford, interviewed at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Sports Show early this month. “I guess we’re all feeling the same way, aren’t we? … I wish there was an answer.”

One core segment of gun owners views almost any new restriction as a “slippery slope” toward the loss of gun rights, promoted by people who at best are wildly impractical and ignorant about firearms and at worst have a political ax to grind.

“There are weapons. You can’t un-invent something,” said Ken Trumm, a customer at Recob’s Target Shop who sarcastically described himself as a “gun enthusiast, gun nut, ‘deplorable’ … typical middle-aged white guy.”

Trumm, who said gun owners have been “demonized” in the debate over mass shootings, supports arming teachers, noting that the authorities "all dropped the stinking ball" in the Florida shooting despite many warning signs. 

“I’d rather have a teacher in there with concealed carry if it’s my kids and my grandkids, rather than locking the door and hiding behind a desk. We entrust our children to these teachers ... but now we’re saying, ‘Oh, we don’t trust you that much,' ” he said.  

“They’re talking about the wrong problem,” said Roger Smith, who was interviewed at the Pine River Sports Association, an indoor shooting range in Richland Center. “All these problems are in the head. It has nothing to do with guns.”

But categorical opposition to new gun restrictions was not the prevailing sentiment among gun owners interviewed for this story, nor is it a majority view in polls of gun owners.

“If you take somebody like me whose other life is shooting — could I sit down with people and compromise and maybe give up some stuff I really didn’t want to (give up)? Probably, to make it work,” said Darrel Tennant, 80, who helps run the Pine River range and is a longtime shooting coach. 

Like many gun owners interviewed, he said he thought the biggest issues raised by school shootings were societal and cultural. He cited mental health treatment as a major issue.  

“I wish we could cut the crap, go to the core” of the problem, he said.

But Tennant also said he was open to some new gun regulations. And he expressed a hunger to find some common ground in the debate.

“Myself as a shooter, I don’t see any problem with limits on the magazine. Now my right-wing friends (disagree), but they’re so damn far right, just like the other ones that are so far left,” said Tennant. "Whether Darrel likes this (change) or not is probably beside the point. We’re getting too many people getting shot and something is going to have to happen.”

Arming teachers?

“This is the 21st century, guys. I’d hate to see it turn into 1880,” said Tennant.  

Party lines

Republican voters are less likely than Democrats to support gun curbs, and people who own guns are less likely than people who don’t.

But these lines are far from absolute, as Marquette’s polling in Wisconsin illustrates.  

For example, there is a huge gender gap within the Republican Party over banning assault weapons: 50% of women support it, just 21% of men. There is almost no gender gap among Democrats: 70% of men and 74% of women favor a ban.  

That’s not the only GOP fault line: half of Republicans who don’t have guns at home support an assault weapon ban, compared to just a quarter of those in gun households. The same gap doesn’t exist in the other party. Democrats overwhelmingly favor a ban, whether they have guns or not.

“There is more variation in Republican households than there seems to be among Democratic households in gun attitudes,” said pollster Charles Franklin of the Marquette Law School.

The polling also shows how politically mixed gun owners are in a purple state where guns are commonplace.

In six years of surveys by Marquette, 45% of registered voters say they have guns at home, ranging from 23% in Milwaukee to more than 60% in the state’s rural north and west. 

While voters in gun households skew Republican, there is a large minority that leans Democratic (39%), disapproves of President Donald Trump (41%), and disapproves of Gov. Scott Walker (41%). In 2012, Democratic President Barack Obama lost voters in gun households by just 7 points in Wisconsin. 

Jack Taylor, 72, is a retired teacher and Democratic-leaning voter who works part-time at Recob’s Target Shop in Prairie du Sac and has his own trap and skeet range for friends.

He said he is open to an array of gun measures: expanded background checks, limiting high-capacity clips, waiting periods on gun purchases and raising the age to 21 for any firearm purchases.

“I don’t want to ban guns. But to put restrictions on them I have no reason not to,” said Taylor, a lifelong bird hunter.

Taylor said he’d like to see schools teach gun safety to students but doesn’t like the idea of arming teachers because of potential mishaps and the time it would take to train them.   

He may be left-of-center for a gun owner, but his views aren’t wildly different from many Republican-leaning hunters and gun owners interviewed for this story.

“I think raising the age on (buying) assault rifles as well as requiring safety courses (for gun purchasers) would be a great step. If anything, it’s just going to be a deterrent to someone who might be pissed off that day,” said Zach Schultz of Menomonee Falls, interviewed at the Journal Sentinel Sports Show.

“I’m pro-gun. I own guns. I’m a responsible gun owner. What I would like to see is just encouragement of more responsible behavior,” said Schultz, who described himself as “mostly conservative.”

Schultz said he has liberal friends who aren’t informed or knowledgeable about guns. And he has other friends who belong to the NRA, even though he doesn’t.

“I don’t see myself becoming a member (of the NRA), but they’re entitled to their beliefs just as much as I am or you,” said Schultz.

Schultz expressed basic skepticism about whether more regulations will stop people with bad intentions — a common sentiment among gun owners. In a statewide poll released March 5 by Marquette, 75% of voters in gun households said that passing new gun control laws would have little or no effect on the number of mass shootings. But like Schultz, many of those voters were open to at least some new gun measures.

Jeff Recob, of Recob’s Target Shop in Prairie du Sac, is a good illustration. He doesn’t sell guns, but his family business sells almost everything else a target shooter might need, whether it's shells or shooting gear or reloading supplies. His livelihood and passion revolve around guns, which he said he views as simply a tool for recreation — “noisy golf clubs.”

He mistrusted Obama on gun rights. He is a member of the NRA, but “I don’t agree with everything they say.” Recob opposes a ban on assault-style guns like the AR-15, which he regards as a legitimate sporting and hunting rifle.

But he cited a number of changes he could live with — from limiting high-capacity magazines to tweaking the minimum age for purchase — even if some are anathema to hard-liners in the gun community.   

“I can get myself in trouble with my customers but that’s OK,” he said.

Recob said he thought it was time for gun owners to make some common-sense concessions — "something that actually works" — in the firearms debate that is renewed by every mass shooting. 

“We’re going to have to listen to common sense if we’re going to get anything done,” he said. “This has been going on forever.”