They come to Dragonland in droves, often after a mass shooting. The phone begins ringing, and Melissa, the daughter, answers politely. Hello, Dragonman's… Rings again. This is Dragonman's… Ring, ring, like an emergency. Can we help you? She has preternaturally blue eyes, sitting before walls festooned with AK-47s and AR-15s—icons of American top-selling weaponry. Meanwhile, her father, Dragonman, is banging around out back in the metal shop, fusing metal joints, milling and lathing. Bolt, screw, rivet. He wears jeans, a baseball cap, and a tight tee, a bunch of faded tattoos punched on his Popeye forearms, over a hundred in all on his body. His hands are beefy: They're what built Dragonland in the first place.
Though Dragonman has been in Colorado for almost 40 years, he still talks in a busted-up Brooklyn street brogue. When the subject is guns, it's almost a rat-a-tat-tat. "We got da Kel-Tec KSG over here"—which looks similar to a weapon from Grand Theft Auto—"and dis Kalashnikov over here. Last week, I sold an AR-15 for $17,000…" And so on. As a Class-3 gun dealer, Dragonman buys and sells so many weapons each year he's become one of the largest independent purveyors of firearms in western America. On his Facebook page, where he has more than 60,000 followers, he claims that he specializes in "military style rifles…handguns, shotguns, silencers, and full-auto machine guns," or as he tells me, "people-hunting guns." He includes announcements for the annual Halloween pumpkin shoot and the 9/11 memorial machine-gun shoot and a bunch of goofy staged videos, featuring Dragonman ramming cars—belonging to gangbangers, stoners—with his front-loader. His property is a dead-car graveyard.
Dragonman is all about the show—hence, the name (his real one is Mel Bernstein). Owner of 200 machine guns, he calls himself "the most armed man in America," a free-market Hong Kong of weaponry, a sideways P.T. Barnum, a steroidal symbol of this trigger-happy American moment. And each time a customer comes through the door, he—or Melissa, or whoever is stationed at the front desk—stands between us and another potential mass shooter. That is, Dragonman and his employees act as a kind of judge and jury, weighing whether you're in your right mind and whether he, Dragonman, is going to sell you one of the guns off his wall, or bump stocks or flamethrowers.
Unlike Dick's Sporting Goods and Walmart—both American corporations that no longer sell AR-15s and semiautomatic weapons, nor to customers under 21 years of age, in the aftermath of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting—the independent gun dealer decides as he or she sees fit, according to his or her own conscience. There's a lot of gray here. Dragonman's oft-stated argument boils down to this: He doesn't control what people do with the weapons once they leave Dragonland any more than the soda company controls how much soda you drink, or the cigarette company controls the cigarettes you smoke.
"Well, if you get cancer, it's not their fault," he says. And laws are laws, no matter how lax. "As long as you pass the background check and pay for the gun and take two steps out of that door, I'm not responsible."
But can he sleep at night, wondering who lurks out there with one of his weapons, wondering if their name might join others like Eric Harris, Dylann Roof, and Nikolas Cruz in the mass-killer Hall of Fame? In announcing his company's new measures last week, Edward Stack, chief executive of Dick's, told The New York Times, "When we saw what happened in Parkland, we were so disturbed and upset. We love these kids and their rallying cry, 'Enough is enough.' It got to us…. We don't want to be a part of a mass shooting."
"Yeah, I sleep good," says Dragonman.
Ring goes the phone again. Everything is lit up and alive in Dragonland the day after a mass shooting. Business hums. The TEC DC-9, an AK-47 or Uzi... Yes, we sell it, barks Dragonman. Everything here is for sale!
To get to Dragonland, you travel east out of Colorado Springs, on Route 94, a ribbon of cracked pavement that rises and falls. From the shadow of Pike's Peak to where the city unhitches its structure—past the pawn shops and medical-marijuana dispensaries, the Wrangler Motel and Calvary Chapel—you find yourself at what feels like the exact geo-location of the long-ago lyric, from the mountains to the prairies. Except here is Garbage Hill, named for the landfill, and monuments of shipwrecked rusted cars, empty beer cans, and trailer homes. About 15 miles from town on the left, another strange wonder: full-size mannequins arranged behind a chainlink fence, what at first glance seem like real bodies in all of that personless expanse. The exhibit changes, but mostly it's in honor of our armed forces, four dummies dressed in the garb of the four branches of the military. Such marks the southerly edge of Dragonland, 260 acres of scrubland heath.
The entrance is just around the corner, a dirt drive where visitors are greeted by another brigade of dummies, this time seemingly bloodied and bullet-riddled, standing near more rusted cars, some of them flipped, each scene including a sign:
This guy gave Dragonman a bad check!
Don't piss me off! I am running out of places to bury the bodies.
This guy was a registered Democrat!
This gang-banger was playing his rap music too loud!
Through a gate is the dirt parking lot, and to the right a low-slung prefab structure, the nerve center here, the gun store with the machine shop out back. Beyond it is another warehouse, Dragonman's 65,000-square-foot military museum with, by his count, 900 uniformed mannequins and separate rooms for most of the major countries with whom the U.S. has warred, a more than $5 million investment, he claims, packed with weapons and memorabilia spanning many of the major American wars of the 20th century and stretching into the wars of this one.
If Dragonland is a kingdom built on a buffalograss scrub hill, with Dragonman's brothers living near the property, it's much more than a family business. Dragonman gives his provocative interviews to most anyone who washes up; customers come and go down the long dirt driveway. They come to Dragonland like it's gold in times of instability, rushing to invest—partly out of fear, partly to feel safe again, partly for the thrill of shooting and blowing things up. Dragonland is a state of mind, too, full of loud explosions and flamethrowers to combat a deeper, gnawing feeling. What is that feeling?
Today Dragonman is 72, though he moves as if he were 20 years younger and sometimes acts as if he were 60 years younger still, a kid blowing stuff up. He wears slightly goofy glasses with big frames and has patches of white hair on either side of his bald head. If he claims to be among the most heavily armed in this country, he also appears to be one of the hardest working. He says he never takes vacation. "My goal was to have my own business," says Dragonman, "do good, make money, and just keep getting a little bigger, and bigger, and bigger. And that's what happened."
Until, as fairy tales sometime go, there was a terrible price to pay for his success.
I first arrived in Dragonland about two years ago, in 2016, in the aftermath of the shooting at San Bernardino and one at an abortion clinic in Colorado Springs. It was also right around the time an Uber driver took six lives seemingly at random in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I'd already immersed myself in the anatomy of a number of mass killings, focused on the shooters and victims, the response of law enforcement and the left-behind families. I'd been at Columbine in 1999, in the hours immediately after the high school massacre of thirteen people, and returned five years later to understand the lasting effects of the shooting. I'd visited the sites and players in more than a half-dozen others, including Newtown, where I spoke to shattered parents and where the house of the killer had been razed while a new elementary school was built. If we couldn't erase the guns, or the laws that made them so easy to procure, then we were left trying to erase the landscape of killing, the bullet holes and bloodstains, in hopes of forgetting.
At an impromptu street-corner memorial in San Bernardino the day after the shooting there, I found myself talking to another journalist on the massacre beat who'd just reported on the shooting at the Bataclan nightclub in Paris. She talked, as others have, about Australia as an example of what happens when gun sales are curtailed. In that case, the government bought back and melted down more than 600,000 guns after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, halving the number of households with weapons over the next decade, and lo and behold, mass shootings diminished to nearly zero. As long as the spigot was on in America, the randomized death toll of everyone from children to retirees—the unsuspecting in malls, churches, and movie theaters—would continue as the ongoing cost of our alleged freedom. Or dysfunction.
Which got me to thinking about gun dealers—and the nearly 120,000 licenses held by dealers in the U.S. alone—not just as businesspeople looking to profit on the $3.1 billion in annual revenue from the sales of weapons and ammo but as gatekeepers, and humans at risk, too. Beyond the usual scrutiny that came when authorities tried to figure out who was to blame for the killer-du-jour attaining his weapons, I wondered what a gun seller's life looked like, who they were—their motivations, mentality, and day-to-day living—and how the selling of weapons, in all varieties and degrees of killing power, had become the hottest of political buttons, cast by some as a civil rights issue. To sell guns, then, was more like a political act, if not a moral one. Why not sell doughnuts instead?
In the U.S., gun shops outnumber Starbucks, McDonald's, and all grocery stores combined. Dragonman seemed among the loudest of his kind, with an honesty verging on what might be construed as offensiveness. Often, his sense of humor—the wisecracking that filled his days—seemed to double as provocation. Still, he was a human being, a father who loved his children, as he was seemingly loved by them. On his Facebook page was a photo of the roses he'd bought Melissa and her sister, Melanie, the three of them posing with big smiles. And he came with his own dark tragedy, too. So I chose to drive up the dirt road past his mangled mannequins, to enter his world and take him on his own terms. If Dragonman wanted us to trust him, if he really was the one who stood between us and the next mass shooter amassing his arsenal, shouldn't we at least know a little about what went on in his kingdom?
At that time—during which the country was averaging more than one mass shooting per day—there were the usual futile cries for gun control, which stirred indignation in Dragonman. The phone was ringing, the sweet jingle of money, because in a country with roughly 300 million guns already in circulation, customers wanted even more of their own "people-killing" guns before Obama, and the threat of legislation, curtailed sales. "He's been great for business," Dragonman said, referring to Obama at the time, though his antipathy was palpable. "Well, I don't know nobody that comes in here—thousands of people," he said in his Brooklyn brogue, "and nobody even admits that they voted for him, you know, so how did he get in? It's probably pretty crooked, all that voting."
The themes seemed familiar, the outsider's distrust of the systems and structures of the state, a more bilious paranoia. And yet, there was one great thing he was willing to admit about Obama's historical presidency: Gun sales had spiked 158 percent during his time in office, making Dragonman that much richer.
On that initial visit, my then 16-year-old son tagged along. He'd yet to experience anything quite like Dragonland: the bloodied dummies, the walls covered in automatic weapons, Dragonman motormouthing. Later, friends asked why I would bring him there, but it seemed important that he see, too. (On Facebook, meanwhile, there were other parents who claimed they couldn't wait to bring their kids to Dragonland, ostensibly to show them a place that was America incarnate.) My son's eyes grew wide as we toured behind Dragonman through the military museum. "Here's the British, here's the Russians, here's my Russian motorcycle," he said. "Here's Hitler's room, the Nazis, you won't see a better collection than this. Here's stuff from the Holocaust, all original, Zyklon B gas canisters. I've got soap from Auschwitz made out of human fat, original Holocaust uniforms, and bread baskets from Buchenwald."
Dragonman's pride and passion for his collection was unmistakable, and contagious. But at some point, after the long recitation of guns and bombs and tanks within—after Dragonman said he collected all these in honor of those in the military who'd given their lives, to memorialize them—my son's keen interest turned to something else, realizing we were in a place beyond his imagination and thinking perhaps we were sitting atop a powder keg that might blow at any moment, memorial or not.
If the fiery rhetoric of gun owners and reactionaries could create a physical space, then Dragonland was it as well, id-ic and uncensored. Dragonman told us that standing anywhere on the property, he was ten feet from a loaded weapon, for his own protection. A lot of gun sellers packed, wearing holsters, he said, but he was always moving, working. He didn't want to bind himself like that. Between the AKs and ARs on the wall, and everything else visible and hidden, he had all kinds of threat responses at his disposal. In his bedroom alone, he had eight machine guns. Back in the shop, the phone rang; Dragonman went to answer, speaking in his loud rat-a-tat-tat.
"Dad," whispered my son, "don't do anything stupid. I don't want to get killed."
So, this must be how the ancient impulse of us-versus-them begins: with boylike fear. Fear heightened by difference: rich vs. poor, black vs. white, educated vs. less educated, strength vs. weakness, guns vs. no guns, tribe vs. tribe, etc. Colorado, a purple state balanced between Democrats and Republicans, is striated with difference. Towns like Boulder and Denver are counterbalanced by Castle Rock and Colorado Springs. But even in Colorado Springs, in the ideological heart of Jesusland, where you have Focus on the Family, the Air Force Academy, and two other military bases—all conservative bastions—you also have legal pot and klatches of hippies and progressives.
Journalist Bill Bishop and sociologist Robert Cushing have written about this striated Colorado: As the two major parties in the state inch closer to each other in voter share, the social and political divisions deepen, which is a microcosm for the country as a whole. A Republican candidate for office, appealing to his or her base, can win a local election by rejecting background checks for guns, or a ban on silencers or bump stocks, but may not be able to win a wider election on the same platform. Both sides feel threatened and beleaguered, though "both" again is a misnomer. It's multiple, myriad. Difference is exponential and mutable. We find our own image in a cracked mirror, looking for reflection, finding distortion.
If you'd passed Dragonman's highway-side tribute to our military in August of 2016, just prior to the presidential election, you'd have found his own political statement in an extravaganza of new dummies.
Behind the chainlink was one, a woman, shackled and dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit, and a second one, a black man sporting a suit and tie. The sign on the left read, We all know that Hillary belongs in jail. She is no good for our gun rights. She is no good for America. While the sign on the right read, Goodbye Obama. You are the worst president we ever had. On either side, too, were female dummies, one black and one white, with signs: The one next to Obama said, Goodbye Michelle you did nothing for our country but spend taxpayer money. Next to Hillary was another reading, Melania Trump, a first lady we can be proud of. Above the Dragon-crafted spectacle rose the last, most omnipotent dummy, perched on a platform high above the others, white with gold hair, suited with red tie, surrounded on either side by American flags, identified in bold red letters affixed to the platform: T-R-U-M-P.
Photos of it delighted most of his Facebook followers. "This display is so friggin’ ACCURATE and COOL!!!" wrote one. "Mel, you're one crazy son of a bitch but we love you," wrote another.
When I asked him later if he was happy now with how his vote turned out, he said, "Oh yeah, Trump. He's a New Yorker, he's tough. I grew up knowing him." Knowing him the way most had prior to the presidency, through his relentless self-promotion. They were roughly the same age, and Dragonman liked that he was going to legalize silencers. Hillary would have "ruined the gun business," he said.
I turned to Dragonman's daughter, Melissa, and asked whether her views reflected her father's. "I'm not for Trump," she said. A graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder, Melissa, who is 29, had worked for an energy company before being drawn to the family business. Dragonman looked at her once, blinked. This is how it went, the rhythms of each day, the occasional uneasy silence eventually interrupted by a ringing phone or more customers at the door, or Dragonman taking refuge back in the metal shop.
A couple entered. "We're the ones from Nebraska," said the man.
"Oh, you didn't see the sign NO NEBRASKANS?" said Dragonman, letting out a big laugh. The couple talked about getting a little lost from Denver. They'd been on Dragonman's Facebook page and were determined to find him out here. "Those mannequins on the road that you passed," said Dragonman, "they all got kicked out of the museum. We found out they were gay."
"Oh no," said the man. "Yeah, that's a better place for them."
"Yeah, we have a good time out here," said Dragonman. "Did you see my Dragon motorcycle?"
As much as selling guns today in America makes you a public figure, and a political one—and as much as the decision to sell certain guns to certain buyers may now, or may not, involve a new moral imperative—the gun dealer finds him- or herself at the center of weird, fraught orbits, especially when you have 4,000 weapons on your own property. "You know what scares me?" says Dragonman in all seriousness. "ISIS." Because of the military presence in Colorado Springs, he wonders if they might be coming. "If they get all my stuff," he says, "they could take it over."
Dragonman likes to itemize—mythologize?—his near-misses with evil, much of it non-verifiable. For years, motorcycle gangs came through, he says, until one tried to bribe him for off-the-book weapons. He says he told them to get lost. Then, supposedly, there was the Texas Seven, a bunch of murderers and a rapist who escaped a Kenedy, Texas, penitentiary in 2001, who, he says, staked out Dragonland, needing guns for their crime spree. Just recently, he says he helped the ATF nab a bunch of gangbangers. And then there was a theft last summer, 57 guns allegedly stolen by his own family, a smash-and-grab said to be orchestrated by his stepdaughter, involving a stepgrandson from a previous relationship.
Even back in 1999, he says, the kids from Columbine came here to buy their weapons. Afterward, he gave a statement to the FBI, telling what he knew. He had them on tape, he says, the kid shooters and a blond woman. However, having reviewed the tape at the time, an officer from the local sheriff's department told The Washington Post that they "were not able to recognize any of our suspects on the tape." Nonetheless, Dragonman claims CBS called and offered $8,000 for that tape. He had his wife, Terry, call the authorities to try to get it back, as they'd taken it as evidence, but they never got it back. Eight thousand bucks out the window!
"That was scary," he says. "But I didn't know who they were then. A month later, I seen them on TV and…wow, they were here! They came in here with a big roll of money. The stupid haircuts, the raincoats. It was the end of the day, and I almost just about threw them out. They wanted a MP-5 and a M-60 machine gun. [The woman] didn't know you have to wait eight months to get approved. Imagine if I sold them that? No matter how legal it would have been, I would have been on the shit list with the families because I sold them the gun that killed their kids."
When he'd heard about the carnage, how had he felt? "I couldn't believe they had the balls to do something like that. Shoot teachers and kids. Cold blood. Really all the teachers should be armed, to tell you the truth."
Beginning to end, an American can buy a gun in less than ten minutes, and Dragonman isn't exactly a psychologist. Maybe this is the American gun dealer's Teflon defense in 2018, that random shootings should always be blamed on the user, not the supplier, that it's wrong to cast the gun dealer as gatekeeper in the first place. Blame the laws that make the weapons readily available, the same laws that many sellers fight tooth and nail to defend, because gun control would otherwise be bad for business, just as arming schoolteachers would be very good for business.
As it is, we know most buyers aren't mentally ill; they're collectors and enthusiasts, which partly explains why three percent of American adults owns 50 percent of the guns in America. But on some occasions when he's not sure, when something nudges him to think twice, Dragonman will pretend he can't run a background check. "I make an excuse or something," he says.
"We tell a lot of people no," says Melissa, later adding that she herself is even more persnickety about whom she sells to.
"The gangbangers," Dragonman says, "you can tell right away: the way they talk, the way they walk, the way they dress. When they pull up with the loud radios." Sometimes a friend, someone with a clean record, tries to buy for them. Then it's a judgment call.
"We have people that come and want to buy the AKs," says Melissa. "You can tell that they're buying them for the cartel and bringing them to Mexico."
"Yeah, they want to buy five to 15 guns at a time," says Dragonman. "Then I go, 'What do you need the same gun for?' 'Oh, we collect them.' Meanwhile, we got them on tape. Sometimes if they're really bad, I send somebody out to get their license plate number, and we report them."
Every day on a front line, and with every new customer a lingering question—Is this a potential shooter? In the end, though, it seems as if it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy: If you're selling "people-hunting" guns in the first place, won't the people who want to hunt other people come and buy their weapons from you?
Before you can answer whether Dragonman is encouraging or discouraging people with dangerous ideas, take those Obama targets Dragonman made when Obama was in office, pieces of cardboard bearing the president's picture, by the hundreds. Hilarious, he says. "They were selling like hotcakes, too, and somebody"—probably a Democrat, he believes—"called up the Secret Service and said there are people practicing at Dragonman's for an assassination."
Maybe Dragonman didn't want Obama in the White House, but, he says, that doesn't mean he was actually plotting to kill him! If you ask him whether his grievance was with Obama's skin color, he says, "I'm sure there's people like that." Then shuts up.
"But he's asking you about race," says Melissa. As with Trump, she doesn't seem to want to let him off the hook—or seems to want to make a point of her own. "Does it matter if he's black or white?"
"Didn't really matter," Dragonman says to his daughter. "Look at all the people down south. I'm sure they didn't want a black president. With that name."
Melissa shakes her head, but—anyway—Dragonman continues his story.
Two of those Secret Service guys showed up at the time, in a black car, wearing black suits, with black suitcases. Just exactly like on TV. They had a warrant for the Obama targets.
Dragonman knew not to fuck around. You gotta play nice with the feds, but his logomania got the best of him, the rat-a-tat-tatting, the blunt ka-plunk of his words. Even when he tried to joke, they remained stone-faced. On their way out, Dragonman said, "Is it okay if we shoot Bill and Hillary?" But they didn't laugh at that, either; they just got in their black car, kicking up sparkles of red dirt as they accelerated out past the buffalograss and eviscerated dummies.
"No fun" is how he characterizes them today.
In Jesusland, the gun has always been its own religion, too. The Winchester rifle became a symbol of the West; the Gatling gun, an iteration of the machine gun perfected by an Indiana inventor who opposed the Civil War, changed the landscape of armed battle. The pre-fab warehouses of Dragonland are a church to the gun, a fort on its knoll looking over Garbage Hill, to Pike's Peak. America the Beautiful, America the Trash Heap. Ring goes the phone again, Melissa answers. Her father talks and talks—and she often does the opposite: Over the clanking and hammering, the automatic gunfire and explosions, she listens. Dragonman's…yes, he's here. Wait one sec, please… Daaaad!
Dragonman appears from the back, wiping grease from his hands, harrumphing a little. Another day, this time in the 2017 aftermath of the shooting deaths of five at an airport in Fort Lauderdale. And another locally, a man who lost it and apparently killed three people living with him, including two children, and then himself, in Colorado Springs. Whadda they want now?
"Dragon!..." he barks into the receiver. After a mass shooting, it tends to be one of three types calling in: customers, the media, or ATF. The big thing for a gun dealer is keeping good records, and it sometimes feels to Dragonman as if the ATF's all over him. At least two, three times a month, they call, trying to track a gun, often for an armed robbery. The files alone will bury you, dozens upon dozens of binders on the shelves. Kept forever. Just in case. Each gun, and its application with serial number and background check attached, everything by the book. He leaves most of it to Melissa.
In the parlor of his gun shop, Dragonman speaks into the phone. "… It's about time you called me. You busy? The Glock 23s, the 9-millimeter, you have those? Yeah. Really? I want to order, like, six of them."
He hangs up. More customers sift through the front door. Show time for the ringmaster. He tells them about the 9/11 memorial machine-gun shoot. ("Fired 800,000 bullets. Blew up 30 cars.") Shows them his flamethrowers and new Russian tank. He tells them about all the media he gets, from local stations to newspapers as far away as England, and the videos he posts on Facebook, in which he plays that lo-fi action hero, rooting out the bad guys, then tipping over their cars with his front loader. It's hilarious. He goes on and on, as if to fill a vast emptiness underneath.
Now he shows them a special gun. "Want to hold it?" he says to the man. "But it's loaded, don't touch the trigger."
"Oh man, that's heavy," says the customer, palming it.
"It's made out of plastic," says Dragonman. "It'll pass through the metal detector at the airport. Pretty cool, huh?"
I only know he says that last bit when I play back the tape, because I sort of do a mind-switch at It's loaded. And the thing about not pulling the trigger. I'm thinking about the morning after at Columbine, when the fine spring weather had turned to a sudden Colorado snowstorm, everyone in thin jackets and how cold it was, breath turning to ice crystals in the air, and how the governor stood before the school at dawn doing a press conference before bright lights, informing us that the dead were still inside, bodies of children found starred around the killers in the library, who took their own lives after taking all the others.
If you live in a house with a loaded gun, says common sense, eventually it might go off. In Dragonland, what happened was worse than that.
It was Terry, his second wife, who wanted to keep the business manageable, so she could take time away from Dragonland; it was Dragonman who kept pushing for bigger, bigger, bigger. The more public he became, the more he seemed to want.
Then the reality-TV people came around. This was in 2012. Dragonman says they told him that once he was a star, he'd sell more T-shirts and baseball caps than guns. There'd be lines out the door, the instant monetization of third-rung American celebrity, the Hard Rock Cafe–izing of an outlying gun dealer. For the opening credit, the idea was for them to walk through cascades of smoke, bearing weapons, all dramatic like: Dragonman, Terry, their older daughter Melanie, and Dragonman's two brothers, for a series to be called Brothers in Arms.
Let the record show it went horribly wrong. In the civil suit that Dragonman brought, one that was later dismissed, the complaint partially laid out his claim against the production company as such:
Two of the smoke bombs tipped over and became projectiles moving at 150 miles per hour toward the group. One passed through her body, and Terry was probably dead before she hit the ground.
The next day, Dragonman held a press conference. He was in shock, but his mouth never stopped moving. He held her picture, brown curls falling to her shoulders. "She was the backbone," he said. Out on the road in front of Dragonland before the cameras, while investigators pored over the property, Dragonman held flowers in his hands and told the assembled that the projectiles were 10- to 12-inch-long pipes. "They went right through her body," he said, "she didn't suffer or nothing. She just dropped." Fighting back tears, he said, "All I wanted to do was lock up and go out to eat."
Even now Terry comes in and out of conversation as if she were just in the other room. If Dragonman was the public face of the business, Terry, according to her husband, was the brains of the operation, acting as the safety catch on her husband, the self-proclaimed most armed man in America. After her death, Dragonman disappeared into his work. Bolt, screw, rivet. Buy and sell guns.
Meanwhile, the centrifugal force of grief pulled the family apart. Dragonman says he stopped talking to his brother, who he claims packed the explosive that malfunctioned, though his brother, in turn, denies it. According to a 2017 profile that ran in the Colorado Springs Gazette, he married a woman with whom he'd previously had a child, before Terry. Which left him at odds with Melissa and Melanie, who wouldn't talk to him. He divorced the woman, his father died, as did a son from a previous marriage, from cancer. Business was booming, while everything else in Dragonman's life imploded. When Melissa finally confronted him about his detachment from everyone over the phone from college, before she came back to help with the business, he said, "I'm a crappy dad, I said it. I have customers up front. I have to go."
How could you forgive that?
Does a gun seller need the empathy gene, or a deeper moral prerogative, if he abides by the law? Does a daughter need a father, even as he rat-a-tats on his heath, a flow of stagey, arguably bigoted, gun-obsessed patter? And what does all the noise hide underneath?
The phone is ringing again, piercing urgently, the day after another mass shooting—26 dead and 20 injured, this time at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Soda doesn't kill people this graphically, or indiscriminately. Not even cigarettes. The victims deserve more is what I think when I first hear the news. As I do, again and again, most recently after the Parkland, Florida, shootings. They deserve more than the first days of mourning and consideration, obviously more than our politicians' "thoughts and prayers." More conversation, more truth, more complexity, more action. When even the high school kids who are being stalked in our schools plead for our help, and take it upon themselves to march and protest, you could say we've given up reason for the obfuscations of organizations like the NRA, and those who profit most like the gun dealers and manufacturers. But if you want empathy like that, you won't get it here from Dragonman, in the parlor of the gun shop at Dragonland, because this is more than just a physical place after all. It stands for a kind of freedom that now terrorizes us. And if Dragonman hasn't met a camera he doesn't like, this time he really seems to put his foot in it, on a segment for ABC News, with almost 700,000 views the last time I checked.
It's less than five minutes of Dragonman blurting and opining, peacocking and shooting his weapons. Look at this! His tanks and flamethrowers, the AK-47s and M-16s, the bump stocks and Russian tanks—look upon all of it! Here are the network cameras, and for a fleeting moment, Dragonland in its glory again. Except it looks like something else on TV. Between the edit, Dragonman's monomania, and the fact that the pre-recorded interview is aired in the week after the Sutherland Springs shootings, he seems particularly unhinged from reality, as if he doesn't understand the nuance of the bigger moment, and our national grief, at all. In the segment, as images flash from the recent mass shootings, he plays up the "most armed man in America" bit with Barnumesque swagger, he fires automatic weapons, drives his vehicles. Mortars, bazookas, tanks, half-tracks, attack Jeeps, etc.: four thousand weapons in his name!
Why do three percent of American adults own over 50 percent of the guns? You get addicted, says Dragonman.
Why do people want to buy the weapons used in these shootings? They want to feel the firepower, have a gun just like that, says Dragonman.
"This is just like the AR-15 that the shooter used in Sutherland, Texas, in the church." He snaps in the magazine, then demonstrates a bump stock. "This is the same type of gun that was used in Vegas." He grabs another. "This is the 12-gauge pistol grip just like the kids used in the Columbine massacre over there." It's macabre, selling guns by murder brand and carnage. "We sell real-man guns," he says, and laughs. It's the laugh, the dry weirdness of it at the end, that echoes hauntingly.
Even when asked about Terry dying, he clinically describes how the smoke bomb turned into a rocket. "It went right past me and through her, and killed her. So, they canceled—and threw away—the whole show." There's no flash of vulnerability, no flicker of emotion. She got killed, thus the show was canceled.
What do we want our weapons dealers to be, prognosticators, priests, therapists? Do we want them to tell us a fairytale, that it's alright, that what they do, especially when they sell AR-15s to unstable 18 year olds, has nothing to do with the carnage caused by guns in America right now?
The day after the ABC video gets released, a post goes up on Dragonman's Facebook page, possibly Melissa working damage control. "First, all of us at Dragonman's share the hurt and sadness America feels after recent events in Las Vegas and Texas," it reads. Then it goes on to clarify some things that Dragonman said, reminding the world that everything at the gun shop is done legally, and that all of Dragonman's personal weapons have been collected legally, too. It concludes as follows: "Dragonman's will always be a unique establishment, but it will also be controversial in these times to any of those who do not know Mel and his family, and only see it from a distance."
On Facebook, Dragon Nation rallies their support, slamming Fake News, blaming the liberals, covering the usual talking points. "Just the agenda of anti-gun people trying to connect all gun owners to those of unstable mindsets," reads one comment. Others mention "cherry-picked statements" and "loaded language," about how 50 percent of America will never get it. "I stand with you all at Dragonman's. You all are a loved part of our community!!!" reads one of many expressing support.
For his part, Dragonman has already turned the page, out working in the machine shop, greeting new customers, showing off the weapons and museum, his Dragon Bike. Just another day in Dragonland. "When you're in this business," Dragonman tells me, "you gotta be one hundred percent good, or else you're gonna get caught. And why be bad anyway? Look how far I got in life being good." Customers arrive and he shows pictures of his Jeep, with a 50-caliber machine gun on top. He likes to drive it into town to pick up his mail. The cops give him a thumb's-up, give a siren squawk, he says.
"You know, they like me."
"They feel protected," says one man.
At the front desk sits Melissa, doing paperwork, filling her mother's shoes. Black Friday is coming, and with it the largest single-day number of background checks (203,086) on record in this country.
"After I die," says Dragonman, pointing to Melissa, "she'll inherit the entire business." The guns, the tanks, and the museum, the 60,000 Facebook followers and all the weekend pumpkin shooters. She'll inherit the gangbangers and possible mass shooters walking through the door at closing time. On her father's Facebook page is a photo of them together at the shop, Melissa brandishing one of the new Shockwave 12-gauge shotguns for sale. "If you're interested in getting your concealed carry permit," he writes, "she gives the classes in her own schoolhouse and private shooting range." Perhaps she'll be in Dragonland someday when there's another casualty. Or perhaps she'll be a new breed of gun seller. On her Facebook page, she's written life rules for her friends: Quit your day job. Pursue your dreams. Travel the world. Take a risk. Be self-sufficient. Never settle. Indulge in humility. Fall in love. Three days after the Parkland, Florida, shooting, she posts a link to Change.org, urging friends to share and sign a petition for the inclusion of a mental-health-check test in the gun-licensing process.
"This isn't about losing our 2nd amendment right, this is about keeping guns out of the hands of those with a history of mental illness," she writes. "I don't have time to look everyone up on social media or google names to search for a red flag. I've had exposure to the gun buying process for many years, and most buyers are intelligent, law-abiding citizens. We don't need to ban guns, we need to give the bureau of investigation access to an individual's mental health history. I know this seems like an invasion of privacy, but if you want change, this is it."
Meanwhile, Dragonman motors on. Do you want to know what all the noise hides? We don't belong to ourselves anymore. There are limbs on our body that we don't recognize—and are fearful of. The scene in the Tarantino movie, where we're all pointing our guns at each other: That's us. Best to be the most heavily armed in that room. Best to go in full fire at the end.
When dusk falls on the prairie, and Dragonland disappears in shadow, he walks from his shop to his little house nearby—one decorated with ’50s and ’60s paraphernalia and outfitted with four female mannequins to keep him company. Sometimes Dragonman talks to the dummies, watches the History Channel. He loves the World War II documentaries, Vietnam. People don't know the cost. He's rich, too. And having made it, he still feels hunted. Years ago, the boy Mel, living in an apartment above a Jewish deli, got beat up by bullies, grew up, saw New York turn mean, and eventually lit out for the territories, Colorado. Built a world on a scrub hill, looking one way at the beautiful Rockies and the other at all that prairie. People came, and bought, and believed.
Their leader is Mel Bernstein, Dragonman. Self-professed, self-proclaimed. He says it over and over again—Dragonman—named after an imaginary beast. Dragonland is his legacy. It's all he has in the end, and everything's for sale. Listen to the explosions and gunfire. It's just another American success story. What's there to be afraid of?
Michael Paterniti is a GQ correspondent.