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.

Days 15 and 16 of our journey took us out of Yellowstone and into Cody, Wyoming. I have been looking forward to this stop since we began planning our trip last summer.

Cody is home to many things, but most important from my perspective is the Cody Firearms Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

I have been fortunate to know the former curator Ashley Hlebinsky for some years now (we first met in person at the 2019 SHOT Show), and I got to know her successor, Danny Michael, from my 2021 appearance on the History Unloaded podcast co-hosted by Danny and Ashley.

Danny was good enough to offer to give me and Sandy a tour of the museum during our visit. We spent 2.5 hours in the museum but could have spent 2.5 days, and I have so much information that I am going to put together 3 “Light Over Heat” videos when I get home.

In 3 posts for this travelogue series, I will preview the major points of those three planned videos.

First, Danny highlighted the reality that most of the visitors to the Cody Firearms Museum are actually visiting the Buffalo Bill Center of the West (which houses 4 other museums), and most of those are visiting the Center because it is on the way to or from Yellowstone. So, although gun nuts will enjoy the museum, the primary audience is actually those who are not necessarily familiar with firearms.

Consequently, when Ashley and Danny led a $12 million redesign of the museum, they did so with this audience in mind.

Rather than encountering a Gatling gun at the entrance to the museum, visitors are now greeted by a photo gallery of different “faces” of gun culture, including Chris Cheng (who I have argued embodies Gun Culture 2.0). They then walk past three display cases, one highlighting Abercrombie and Fitch, one Hillerich & Bradsby (Louisville Slugger), and one Henry Ford — all household names to those who know nothing about guns and gun culture.

After being greeted by a video of Ashley Hlebinsky and a fan of guns, visitors enter a room that presents important basic information about firearms.

This includes the different uses to which firearms are put, gun safety, the mechanics of firearms, action types, ammunition types, and shooting mechanics.

I love this section because these are the types of information *I* wanted/needed when I first got into guns. In fact, much of what is presented in this first section of the museum overlaps with an early chapter of my forthcoming book, Gun Curious.

While I was touring the museum and when I returned to film for “Light Over Heat” the following day, I saw the diversity of the visitors Danny told me about. A family speaking French and a couple from Australia, a man on the way to his 60th high school reunion, someone for whom it was a bucket list visit, and many others.

In my next post, I will highlight what’s in the museum for those more familiar with firearms.

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