from Wyoming Tribune Eagle

Find out why Wyoming loves firearms through stories from our governor, a 16-year-old girl, Laramie County’s deputy district attorney and the Cheyenne Regulators club.

By Michael Van Cassell

Dave Faas pulls the weathered and worn long rifle out of a case and walks to the back of the small studio.

The gun’s stock is repaired with brass screws and still shoots after 115 years.

His friend Bill Capozella, dressed in a cowboy getup, with a six-shooter on his hip, asks him if it’s a ’97.

“How many you got now?” Capozella asks.

“Ninety-sevens? Seventeen, I think,” Faas responds.

“He started collecting those things,” Capozella says.

“This is a ’92 Winchester,” the gray-haired Faas corrects his friend.

“His wife said we can use them for the fence around his grave when we bury him,” says Rusty Woodward, a retired Marine sergeant. “There’s enough of them to do it.”

Faas, Capozella and Woodward are members of the Cheyenne Regulators, a group that holds cowboy shooting

competitions at a range west of town.

They love guns.

And so does Wyoming.

There aren’t any studies on the exact number of guns in the state, which would probably be impossible anyway because many believe it’s no one’s business.

But the North Carolina State Center for Health Statistics conducted a survey in 2002 that said Wyoming led the country in respondents who said they kept firearms in and around their home at 63 percent.

When asked, Wyomingites will say guns are a rite of passage, part of their heritage, recreational, tools or a means of protection.

Even our Democratic governor has a gun or two.

Gov. Dave Freudenthal, wearing a light-colored suit and tie, sits in his residence holding an 1894 patented Winchester rifle. He isn’t sure when it was built, but he inherited it from his father.

“It was an old gun, frankly, when I remember seeing it as a boy,” he said.

It has what Freudenthal described as old farmer/rancher repairs, much like the one Faas owns. He called it a good utility gun.

“There aren’t any sort of heroic stories about it,” he said. “It’s a utilitarian weapon, used as really just another piece of equipment.”

Now all it does is sit above a fireplace to be on display.

Growing up on a ranch in Thermopolis, Freudenthal was exposed to firearms at an early age. He received his first gun, a Stevens .22-caliber single-shot, when he was in grade school.

“(My father) was determined that you were going to learn to shoot on a one-shot model so that you didn’t follow that sort of TV model where they’re just throwing out a lot of lead,” he said. “The idea was you’ve got to aim.”

There wasn’t much recreational shooting, as it was considered a waste of money and ammunition.

The governor owns a few shotguns, an assortment of .22-caliber rifles and a recent gift from his family – a .454-caliber Casull handgun, made by Freedom Arms in Wyoming and engraved with his name and term as governor.

“Nancy had to fill out the questionnaire the other night from the Marshal’s Service wanting to know how many guns and of what nature in the house, and I said ‘none of their business,’” Freudenthal said. “So we didn’t tell them.”

Freudenthal said buying a son or daughter their first gun is an important step.

“It’s an activity around which you do things with your kids,” he said.

He said it is a right to own and bear a firearm, but that isn’t the first part of the discussion.

“The first part about it was, if you’re going to use this, here’s how you do it,” he said. “You’re going to do this right. Here’s how you handle the ammunition.”

Freudenthal said there is concern the younger generation isn’t hunting as much.

“Our license numbers are not holding the way we’d like them to for us to maintain the revenue anymore,” he said.

And he sees an increasing divide in attitudes about guns between urban and rural communities.

He cited his son attending school in Iowa, where his biochemistry classmates had different reactions when he told them he was going back to Wyoming to hunt.

“I think they were generally perplexed about it,” Freudenthal said. “Some of it is there’s a hostility toward firearms, but a lot of it is people don’t understand them. And they see them misused so much on TV and in shows that they don’t see them for what they are.”

Wyomingites’ frame of reference for evaluating a handgun is different from someone in an urban area, he said.

“If you’re in western Michigan, you don’t feel a lot different about guns than we do,” he said. “If you’re in Detroit, you probably don’t feel a lot different than they do in Chicago and New York, where they don’t see a firearm as sort of a recreational or family activity. It’s seen in a different light.”

Payton Blackwell

Payton Blackwell turns 16 years old today.

She has been a hunter for half of her life.

Born in Cheyenne, Blackwell is a captain of Cheyenne’s Central High cheerleading squad.

Blackwell started bird hunting at age 8 with her father and grandfather.

“I love taking the dogs with us,” she said. “I thought that was so much fun.”

There’s an adrenaline rush, she said.

At the age of 12, she decided she wanted to hunt big game. In her first year, she took a deer and an antelope. In her third year hunting, she took an elk, two deer and two antelope.

The girls she attended school with didn’t hunt. They thought it was weird, she said.

But that has changed.

Some of her friends’ parents aren’t into hunting. But the girls go over to Blackwell’s house east of town and shoot .22-caliber rifles in the backyard.

“Now all my friends want to go with me,” she said.

Blackwell’s knowledge of hunter safety began around 6 or 7 years old.

Using a BB gun, her parents taught her how to handle a firearm. She then attended hunter safety and learned more.

Safety is constantly on her mind because she was taught the basics at such a young age. Now it’s more of a habit.

Her first gun was a 20-gauge Ruger shotgun. She now uses a .243-caliber Ruger rifle.

And her family shares guns for hunting.

Blackwell said it’s a good way to bond with her parents, who have busy work schedules.

“That’s kind of our time of the year the four of us all go out and do that together,” she said.

It’s an activity she sees herself doing for the rest of her life. And if she has children, she’ll teach them.

“It teaches you responsibility and ethics and keeps you outside instead of inside playing video games,” she said.

Regulators

Capozella, Faas and Woodward all came to Wyoming at different times in their lives. All three are retired military men.

Faas and Capozella began to develop an interest in guns early in life while hunting with family members. Woodward said it was when he joined the Marines that his appreciation started.

Capozella’s father taught him how to hunt while growing up in Ohio, shooting squirrels, rabbits and pheasants. Once he joined the Air Force, he got into deer, antelope, ducks and geese.

As a boy, Faas hunted squirrels on the banks of the Mississippi River in Wisconsin and deer.

While the three have extensive gun collections, they don’t consider themselves gun collectors.

“Every gun I have, I shoot, and if you’re a collector, you buy a gun that is of high value and you don’t do anything but take care of it and keep it clean,” Capozella said. “And you don’t shoot it.”

Buying guns, however, is a sound investment for them.

“Guns do not lose value,” Capozella said.

And family members, like Freudenthal’s father, often hand down firearms generation to generation.

“Almost any of the historic families here will tell you they have some guns that came from the ranch or came across when the family came to Wyoming,” Faas said.

“I don’t think you can go to a ranch around here without somebody having an heirloom,” Capozella said.

Faas suggested the pioneer stock and ranching culture of Wyoming could contribute to why firearms are so popular here.

“They had to take care of themselves,” Capozella said.

“There wasn’t a sheriff down the street,” Faas said. “Sometimes justice was done by whoever was available.”

Becket Hinckley

Laramie County deputy district attorney Becket Hinckley carries a small LCP .380-caliber Ruger in the small of his back.

“I love it,” he said.

As a former Wyoming state representative, Hinckley said he promoted lax legislation on guns.

Hinckley, a Republican, pushed for a dual concealed weapon carry law that would allow residents to have a permit for reciprocity with other states but the ability to carry in state without regulation.

Hinckley said the 27 words of the Second Amendment mean something to him.

“The thought of somebody, the government or a bureaucrat or something, could say that I cannot have the right to protect myself, it’s just intellectually impossible for me to understand,” he said.

A copy of the U.S. Constitution, pro-firearm slogans and even a signed poster from Hunter S. Thompson’s campaign for sheriff in Aspen hang on his walls. Thompson often derided the Republican Party but was openly supportive of firearms.

Hinckley grew up in the northern part of the state. His paternal grandfather and father exposed him to firearms at an early age. By 5 or 6, he had his first pistol, and by 7, he had a .22-caliber bolt-action rifle his grandfather built for him.

“He loved guns,” Hinckley said. “He loved their simplicity, he loved their beauty. So I grew up around a lot of firearms, and it started at an early age. They weren’t this big demon.”

During the summer, there was Little League at night. But during the day, his parents, both attorneys, would be gone to work. He and his friends would take their firearms and ammunition out to shoot rabbits.

“And my parents were completely OK because my dad taught me at an early age that if you’re going to put one of those things in the chamber, the business round, you better make sure what you’re pointing at you’re going to shoot and kill it, and it better not be a human,” he said.

Hinckley said he’s not a guy who goes out with every extra penny of his savings to buy a cache of firearms.

He works with police and said they do a great job, but they are not there at all hours.

The gun he carries on him is for protection, he said. To him, it’s a tool.

“I would rather trust my life and my family’s life to me and my ability to protect them and then call the police later or maybe at the same time,” he said.

The idea of life without guns is incomprehensible for Hinckley.

“When somebody says for a Wyoming guy who’s a gun guy who just believes he wants to protect his family or friends or whatever that we’re going to restrict, that really, really offends the sensibilities of Wyomingites,” he said.