A Crime of Ignorance
by Joe Howard

Gun enthusiast and local NOLAFugees associate Joe Howard violates his own rights at the Great Southern Gun Show.

Visiting the Ernie Bean Great Southern Gun Show on a crippling hangover sounded like a bad idea. Was that really the state of mind to hang out with hundreds of firearm aficionados eyeing their exotic weapons? I’d feel like everyone wanted to kill me; hell, I feel like that most Saturday mornings, anyway. And delusions be damned, these people would be thinking about killing someone, if only in the abstract, right? That’s no place for a hangover. The obvious way to solve this problem was to put on a good vodka buzz before I got there, and with the help of the NOLAFugees editors, this was accomplished. Besides, being a little tight might lighten up the grim venue that is Kenner’s Pontchartrain Center. Maybe then I could swagger down the isles of cheap card tables, lustily ogling their thousand-dollar killing machines. At the very least it would be more fun.

Turns out I was wrong. A gun show, I learned, is a pretty humorless place. In fact, most of the people, customers and vendors alike, look downright angry. And they’re holding guns. Not one person so much as cracked a smile when I asked simple questions like, “This is what you do for a living?” or “Do you think I could cut a tree down with that?” or “Can I get the Vince Marinello, bitch-done-me-wrong discount?” The only people there who seemed to really be enjoying themselves were the children, and there were plenty of children, running around like it were any Saturday in the park.

There is nothing funnier than a little girl with a gun.

Speaking of children, one child in particular was an accessory to what was undoubtedly the one genuinely funny thing that happened all day. Walking along, I saw a young girl, about nine, playing with a shotgun. For reasons I still don’t understand, I thought I needed to take a picture of that, and I did. Shortly thereafter the cops were upon me. Apparently it’s against the rules to take pictures at a gun show. I didn’t know this, and I told the cop so as he ushered me into the lobby.

Out in the lobby, he told me there were big signs everywhere explicitly stating that no cameras were allowed. I asked where they were, and he pointed to one “big” sign about the size of the Hitler posters they were selling inside. That was funny. I take a picture of a nine year old girl playing with a shotgun taller than she is, and I’m the one who gets thrown out. I was ready to leave anyway, so I motioned to get the camera from the cop.

Apparently, it's illegal to take pictures at a gunshow.

But no. He told me I couldn’t have the camera back because it was being confiscated as evidence. Evidence. Apparently it’s illegal to take pictures at a gun show. And this guy was doing all the calisthenics (radioing his buddies, etc.) that cops do right before they arrest you. A camera. That’s what I’d be telling some guy down at JPP’s central lockup. I’m in for a camera.

But on the bright side, it was only JPP. A few years ago, while sitting in OPP, I was told by a seemingly reliable source that JPP wasn’t a bad place at all to be locked up. “Shit,” he told me, “I was glad to be there.” And wouldn’t it be funny if this were the second time these very NOLAFugees editors would have to bail me out of jail?

Funny as that may have been, I tried to resist. I threw up my arms like an Italian soccer player and protested that my crime was merely a crime of ignorance. There was no malicious intent. Ignorance! I repeated the word as though summoning a guardian spirit, but the officer would have none of it. So I was going to jail, at the very least for the afternoon and evening. Never mind that I didn’t know why, still don’t know why; I was guilty; the evidence was apparently right there on the camera. I mean, what the fuck! It wasn’t even my camera, so I was probably going to have to buy a new one on top of everything else. What I didn’t know was that on that small fact, that it wasn’t my camera, the whole day hinged.

Evidently I don’t know much about digital cameras because when the cop scrolled through the photos, the one I took inside the show wasn’t on there. No evidence, no crime. I didn’t know how to use the fucking camera and that’s what kept me out of jail. The cop reluctantly gave the camera back and told me never to try anything like this again.

*

Later that night, as I sat in a bar with all of four people in it, including the bartender, yet another French Quarter bar was being held up a few blocks away. But I felt safe and still do because there are a tons of people out there who go to gun shows. And as any one of them will tell you, guns are for protection, but if you can’t believe that believe this: ignorance will set you free.

Joe Howard is a writer working in New Orleans.