Last September, Church was in Las Vegas to headline the Route 91 Harvest festival... Two nights later, Church was back home when he got a text: active shooter in Vegas. He turned on the news and started seeing the horror.
“It’s selfish of me,” he says. “But my first thought was, ‘I hope it’s not our fans.’ We had a lot of fans there. We even promoted online travel options to make it easier for people to come. I felt like the bait: People come to see you play, then all of a sudden they die? That is not an emotion that I was prepared to deal with. It wrecked me in a lot of ways.” In the end, 58 people were killed and more than 800 were injured that night. Several members of Church’s fan club were among the victims. One fan, 29-year-old Sonny Melton, who’d come all the way from Tennessee with his wife, was buried in an Eric Church T-shirt. “It got dark for me for a while,” Church says. “I went through a period, a funk, for six months at least. I had anger. I’ve still got anger. Something broke in me that night, and it still hasn’t healed. There’s a part of me that hopes it haunts me forever.”
“It was a motherfucker on him,” says Church’s manager, John Peets. “Really hard. I think it just opened up an awareness of how fragile all this really is.”
Church isn’t a gun nut, but he does own about half a dozen: rifles, shotguns, pistols – no AR-15s, though. I ask if Vegas changed his feelings about guns. “A little,” he says. He takes another sip of whiskey. “I’m a Second Amendment guy,” he says. “That’s in the Constitution, it’s people’s right, and I don’t believe it’s negotiable. But nobody should have that many guns and that much ammunition and we don’t know about it. Nobody should have 21 AKs and 10,000 rounds of ammunition and we don’t know who they are. Something’s gotta be done so that a person can’t have an armory and pin down a Las Vegas SWAT team for six minutes. That’s fucked up.”
With his wife, Katherine, in 2015. Photo: Christopher Polk/Getty
Church says he supports a few common-sense reforms. Closing gun-show loopholes. Improving background checks. Banning bump stocks. “As a gun guy, the number of rounds [the shooter] fired was un-fucking-believable to me,” he says. “I saw a video on YouTube from the police officer’s vest cam, and it sounded like an army was up there. I don’t think our forefathers ever thought the right to bear arms was that.
“There are some things we can’t stop,” he adds. “Like the disgruntled kid who takes his dad’s shotgun and walks into a high school. But we could have stopped the guy in Vegas.” As for why nothing’s been done? “I blame the lobbyists. And the biggest in the gun world is the NRA.”
Church says he’s not a member of the NRA and never has been. “I’m a Second Amendment guy,” he emphasizes again, “but I feel like they’ve been a bit of a roadblock. I don’t care who you are – you shouldn’t have that kind of power over elected officials. To me it’s cut-and-dried: The gun-show [loophole] would not exist if it weren’t for the NRA, so at this point in time, if I was an NRA member, I would think I had more of a problem than the solution. I would question myself real hard about what I wanted to be in the next three, four, five years.”
Church knows he’ll get blowback from some fans for this. “I don’t care,” he says. “Right’s right and wrong’s wrong. I don’t understand why we have to fear a group [like the NRA]. It’s asinine. Why can’t we come together and solve one part of this? Start with the bump stocks and the gun shows. Shut a couple of these down. I do think that will matter a little bit. I think it will save some lives.”
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