Outside the world’s largest gun show the flag flies at half-mast, but it’s unclear for which catastrophe. The most recent mass shooting, at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, California, was on a Wednesday and Wanenmacher’s Tulsa Arms Show is three days later, but the shock of mass shootings and the periods of mourning which follow ebb more quickly now than even a few years ago.

The nightmare has woven itself into the everyday informational stream: the stock market rises and falls, one team beats another team, restaurants open and close, Apple announces a new phone, a man enters a public place with artillery and massacres a bunch of strangers. It’s news but not shocking news. There is a mass shooting – more than four people not including the shooter – nine out of 10 days in America.

Inside Wanenmacher’s Tulsa Arms Show, the sheer scale amazes. The event fills the Expo Center on the Tulsa fairgrounds, all 11 acres of it, with more than 4,200 tables. It takes five and a half minutes, at a brisk pace, to cross from one end to the other, eight hours simply to wander through the stalls. You could argue that the annual Shot Show in Las Vegas is bigger, but that is strictly for industry professionals, law enforcement and dealers. Wanenmacher’s is where the ordinary American gun culture is on its most expansive display.

The guns are as varied and as beautiful as human experience itself, in every shape, color, price point and for every purpose. There are rifles and pistols and semi-automatics, by brand, by type, by cost. There are worn old .22s you might give a kid to shoot squirrels. There are long-barreled old Colts out of westerns, and neat little Glocks that possess the slick smoothness of MacBook Airs. There are new concepts in barreling, targets, silencers, laser sights, armor, customized hearing protection, triggers that are not in violation of the ban on automatic weapons. And those are just the dealers’ wares: individual sellers wander the stalls with little flags on sticks, detailing what they offer for sale or trade: a left-handed Sig Sauer or a Ruger EC9s, say.

At the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, near Los Angeles, ex-marine Ian David Long used a .45 Glock 21 with an extended magazine when he murdered 12 people. In the history of mass shootings in the US, the Thousand Oaks massacre is not just one among the now hundreds a year. At least 30 people at the bar that night had survived, a year earlier, the mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas, in which a man with no criminal record or mental health issues or apparent motive, armed with 10 AR-10s and four AR-15s modified with bump stocks among other weapons, killed 58 and left 851 injured.

A mass shooting is no longer a once-in-a-lifetime event in the US.

The morning after Thousand Oaks, Lonnie Phillips woke his wife Sandy with the news. They were in Long Beach, working with grassroots organizations supporting survivors of gun violence. “We don’t have far to go for the next one,” he told her. By noon they had arrived at the scene.

Since their daughter Jessica Ghawi, a young sports journalist, was murdered in the 2012 Aurora, Colorado, shooting, Sandy and Lonnie have lived out of a 26ft-long tagalong trailer, a Rockwood Ultralight that’s somewhat worn. “Quite honestly, we need a new one,” Sandy admits. They’ve put the machine to good use. Thousand Oaks is their 11th shooting, if you include their daughter’s at Aurora, which Sandy calls “our shooting”.

“We kind of got it down to a loop,” Sandy says. “We’ve done the west loop several times.” They’re working on an east loop. “That’s what we do. We keep moving.” How did Sandy and Lonnie decide to do this with their lives? “That was easy. That was so easy.”

In July 2012, Jessica was killed, and in December of that same year, there was Sandy Hook, where 20 children and six adults died. “We walked into the community center and some of the families were walking in,” Sandy says. “And I turned to my husband and said: ‘Oh my God that’s what we looked like five months ago.’ And I wanted to run up to every one and put my arms around them and say, ‘You feel like you’re not going to live through this but you will. Honest, you will.’”

In the past six years, Sandy has spoken with more than 1,000 victims of gun violence. Mass shootings have become so common in the United States that they now have regulars. “We do see the same Red Cross people, and sometimes the same Billy Graham people.” Sandy says Greg Vanis, an Illinois man, sets up “crosses for losses” at the memorials for the victims. They’ve come to know him, too.

At the Santa Fe, Texas, school shooting in May, they ran into several reporters who had been at Parkland, Florida, prompting a reunion of sorts. “I’m glad to see you but I’m so sick of seeing you this way,” Sandy told them.

There are two gun cultures in America now, not just one. The first is a celebration of weapons and of the freedom weapons promise, a culture of resistance to government, of revolutionary individualism, a culture as old as the country itself, and the other, much newer, a perpetual caravan of mourning for senseless death. These cultures coexist but do not coincide. The political divisions in Washington, as vicious and irreconcilable as they may be, are not accidents of process. They are only signs of the far more profound divisions that lie beneath.

The beauty of the guns for sale at Wanenmacher’s is undeniable. The Barrett .50 caliber with night vision and thermal scope is iconic, pure power in physical form. “He’s light there. Pick him up,” the dealer purrs. She’s right. He is surprisingly light. The Winchesters from the 1880s are more distinctly American in their design than the Capitol building, and more refined, more elegant. The presentation boxes from the 19th century are simply fabulous works of craftsmanship and art, like Wes Anderson made a violent lunchbox set.

Everywhere at Wanenmacher, there are the conversations one hears among collectors, gun people telling gun stories to other gun people. “I told him if you come to the gym with me, I’ll go to the gun show with you,” says a long-suffering wife to the equally long-suffering friend she meets only at events like these. A wry smile passes between them. “We all know the gun guy who never fired a gun because getting to the range is a pain in the ass,” says a customer to a dealer from whom he has just made an extravagant purchase, as a kind of justification, to demonstrate that he’s not the kind of gun owner he’s describing. A sign in a display case makes a cute in-joke: “For an additional $4.95 I will provide a receipt that matches what you told your wife you paid.”

Suddenly, it strikes me who the gun people remind me of. They remind me of readers, book people, my people. Half of these guys, it seems to me, are out here buying guns they’re never going to use, buying them just to have them, just like book people buy books to be around books. They possess the same crazy passion, the same sense of community, the same belief in the sacrosanct nature of the product. And just like book people, the crowd at Wanenmacher’s believes the product is good in itself.

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