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.

Day 3 of my Travels with Sandy took us from Mahomet, Illinois through the hazardous smoke from Canada enveloping the Great Lakes region past the massive Rivian truck factory in Normal, Illinois across the Mississippi River to Kellogg, Iowa (population 600). On the way, we stopped in Grinnell, Iowa.

“Grinnell, Iowa” means something very different to me today than it did 15 years ago. Before I got into gun culture, it conjured images of an elite liberal arts college, Grinnell College. Since I got into gun culture, it brings to mind one of America’s largest gun companies, Brownells.

Bob Brownell founded the company in 1939 as a gunsmithing shop and by 1947 published his first catalog. For obvious reasons, I appreciate that he was a bowtie-wearing, pipe-smoking nerd.

Today, Brownells claims to be the “world’s largest supplier of gun parts, firearms accessories, and gunsmithing products.”

The Grinnell, Iowa facility includes a sizeable retail store that takes up just a small portion of a huge building housing their offices and products (the darker-colored structure in the photo below). We obviously appreciated the fact that they had several parking spaces marked for RVs so Gatsby and Joy felt welcome.

One neat feature of the retail stores is that if you don’t find something you want on the shelves, you can go to a computer and find the product (they claim to stock some 100,000) and have it delivered from the warehouse to the retail store while you wait.

The image of the Dali sheep that is Brownells logo suggests its Gun Culture 1.0 origins, and that is still reflected in the displays and some of the products on sale at the retail store.

However, Gun Culture 2.0 firearms and accessories are abundant today. Not to mention firearms that cross-cut hunting, recreation, collecting, and self-defense purposes like AR-15 style rifles and pistols, pistol caliber carbines, and all of the accessories that go along with them.

Of course, there are plenty of products available to those who live the tactical lifestyle, like Magpul products and Black Rifle coffees.

Sandy and I spent some time looking at handguns, as I (semi-jokingly) talk about needing a big-bore revolver to take with us into Yellowstone. The young man who helped us was typically passionate about guns and unusually knowledgeable for a gun shop.

Of course, he had to throw in a gratuitous “who would want to live there?” comment when Sandy mentioned seeing a particular gun in California. My usual response to this is “every place has its plusses and minuses.” Having visited 48 of the 50 states and lived in 5 states plus the District of Columbia, I wholeheartedly believe this. But I didn’t want to get into a discussion, for example, of the Iowa government’s passing a 6-week abortion ban (overturned by the Iowa Supreme Court).

Speaking of culture wars, Brownells is part of the 2nd Adventure Group Holding Company which is owned by Pete Brownell (Bob’s grandson) and Frank Brownell (Pete’s father). It includes Crow Shooting Supply*, W.L. Baumler Co., Big Springs Range, and the popular website AR15.com (“ArfCom”).

Prior to visiting Brownells, I had been warned that earlier this year there was a mini-culture war on ArfCom over LGBTQ+ people with allegations of hate speech and Brownells siding with the hate side of the equation. I did not have time to investigate these claims and had not heard about the kerfuffle previously.

To be totally honest, I spend almost no time in online gun forums, Reddit sites, or anything like that. As useful as they can be, the worst parts of American culture reside in these spaces, and so not surprisingly do the worst parts of America’s gun cultures. I realize that this creates a somewhat curated perspective on gun culture, but I prefer to experience gun cultures IRL (in real life) as much as possible.

Out of an abundance of caution, I chose not to buy any Brownells-branded clothing so I did not unintentionally virtue signal in the wrong direction. But, full disclosure, Sandy did drop a couple hundred dollars on a nice pair of Leupold binoculars that were on sale for bird watching out west.

*My friend John Richardson pointed out that Crow Shooting Supply is actually headquartered in Sandy’s hometown (and my adopted hometown) of Mocksville, North Carolina.

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