In honor of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America, I am keeping my eyes open for clues about America’s gun cultures as Sandy and I travel from our home in North Carolina to Yellowstone National Park and back. My inaugural post on this series can be found here.

On the second day of our trip to Wyoming, Sandy and I drove from close to the middle of nowhere in Ohio to the crossroads of America: Indianapolis. Specifically, we stopped in the Broad Ripple neighborhood on the city’s north side to visit our friend Tamara Keel.

Broad Ripple Village is a funky area with a lively cultural scene (picture a vinyl record store and music venue, coffee shops and farmers market). This includes a number of very good restaurants, Petite Chou among them. After stressfully navigating Gatsby the Chevy Colorado and Airstream Joy through the road construction plaguing all of Indiana and the narrow neighborhood streets of Broad Ripple, we found parking and caught up with Tam just after she stepped off the Red Line IndyGo bus.

I’ve known Tam so long that I don’t even remember when we first met, but I have always found her to be a guiding light in gun culture, defensive gun culture in particular. She maintains a Patreon and I am a patron.

Tam is a full-time gun writer, freelancing for various publications and serving as the Handgun Editor for Shooting Illustrated, an official publication of the National Rifle Association. Pick up any issues of the magazine — like the July 2023 issue I happen to have in my New Yorker canvas tote bag right next to me — and you will likely see an article by Tam.

She is also a long-time and regular blogger on guns, culture, gun culture, and other topics at her “View from the Porch” site, a.k.a., “Books. Bikes. Boomsticks.” Her site tagline says a lot about where’s she coming from: “I only regret that I have but one face to palm for my country.”

Tam is simultaneously at the heart of mainstream gun culture — serving as an editor for an official NRA publication — and a square peg because she is a complex and nuanced thinker in a world that oftentimes privileges simplistic absolutes.

Tam knows A LOT about guns, but that’s not all she knows or is passionate about. Over lunch, she generously shared her knowledge of cameras with Sandy. She is also an astute observer of culture, politics, technology, and their intersections. Among other things, we share an appreciation of The Atlantic and Tom Nichols in common, notably his books The Death of Expertise and Our Own Worst Enemy.

I’m sure if we talked long enough, we would find some things to disagree about, in and out of gun cultures. But life is short and 90 minutes talking about important things on which we agree was time well spent.

I’m glad to know Tamara Keel, and I’m glad Sandy and I got to spend some time with her on our travels in search of America’s gun cultures — and not just because of the amazing croque madame I had for lunch.

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