I'm no gun nut. When I think of shooting, I'm transported back to a corner thicket of poison ivy at Camp White Mountain where the riflery range was slapped together with two-by-fours and twine. I think of Hans, our Dutch instructor, who seemed more interested in chatting up 14-year-old girls—complimenting the gimp-work of their lanyards—than checking the safeties on our .22's. I think back to those summers when I imagined I might become a marksman but instead was only able to think of DEATH—of the one goof-up, the one hormone-induced slip of the finger that might, at any moment, cancel me out.

So it was with some trepidation that I walked through a bag checkpoint and then a firearms checkpoint into the Cow Palace of the Maryland State Fairgrounds last spring for the Maryland Arms Collectors Association's Baltimore Antique Arms Show. When my eyes adjusted to the gymnasium-style lighting, I looked out across a cramped field of visitors who, judging from the license plates outside, came from as far away as Maine and Oregon. Most of them could have sat comfortably camouflaged in a deer stand, the only hint of flamboyance coming from the security detail: Arms Collectors Association workers in burgundy sport coats.

And then I saw the guns: hard lines in brown and gray, barrels laid over a thousand vendors' tables—a flea market of armament. These weren't "guns" as I had thought of them. There were rifled muzzle-loaders and smoothbore muzzle-loaders and cartridge repeaters and percussion breech loaders and antebellum cap-and-ball pocket pistols—guns designed to such tiny proportions they could disappear in your hand, so that, threatened, you might reach up to scratch your forehead and shoot a scoundrel in his.

Antique weaponry is not cheap, but for $100 you can buy an air gun so simple (a squared off butt, tawny and rough as a peanut shell) it looks almost like a toy. When I asked Doug Flowers—the smiling, cylindrical man standing behind the table—if these were the guns of boyhood Christmas presents, his eyes went wide with concern. "Oh, no, no, no," he said, launching into a history of his product with the exuberance a parks director might use in describing man-made pondwork.

Leonardo da Vinci is said to have invented an air gun, Flowers told me. "In Napoleon's time, an air gun could kill a man." The great emperor was so scared of them (they could send projectiles flying at 1,100 feet per second) that an enemy caught with one was executed as an assassin. Even Lewis and Clark strapped them along on their expeditions.

Flowers had air guns dating from the turn of the century with cast iron receivers, rare due to their propensity to break. He sold Quackenbush rifles once used to fire darts at targets in parlor games. (Beer and shooting evidently have old ties in our country.) When I asked him why he was selling his collection, he told me, "Well, you feed your habit."

That's the kind of "gun nut" this event attracts: fundamentalists who don't necessarily believe the world started with a Bible story, but with the invention of their weapon of expertise. Collecting is both a passion—something purposeful—and an addiction—an impulse verging on recklessness. After all, who today drops $9,525 on a Revolutionary War-era flintlock officer's pistol?

"People love this stuff," said Warner Sumpter, the show chairman and a retired brigadier general. "When you're in here, you're seeing history."

He sent me over to Ed Kemp and Elsie Hoch, a couple in their 60s who stood in front of one of the more regal rifle displays. They were the event's de facto humanitarian honorees, having interviewed former World War II and Korean POWs, self-published their "complete wartime stories," and donated the books to the families at considerable personal cost.

Talking to Kemp, it became clear that it was his love of the tale that spurred him to the role of thankless oral historian. A fresh story, too, is a form of collectible, something not lost on me as I stood nodding my head, my hand held out with a recording device. "I'll tell you what," he said, "some of these guys, they've never told this stuff to anyone. When they get to be about 80 years old, they start talking. Their families are surprised about what they went through."

Most of the vendors behind the tables that day seemed a lot like those POWs: people bursting to sight their understanding of the world from behind the vintage barrel of a gun. For them, the love of arms is both personally nostalgic and critically important to the way civilization has broken along the lines of "freedom." And the finer points matter. In my walk through the tables, I heard ardent discussions concerning what constitutes "military brass," haggling (in the thousands) over sales of Civil War uniforms, and ardent projections concerning global military strategies.

When I think of an arms show, I think of woodsy militias rubbing palms together over doomsday plans, but the people gathered at the show were about as militant as my Uncle Murray, an incorrigible shelterer of stray cats who buys his antiques (pitchforks and toothy old saws) to tack to the side of his woodshop.

I'd expected standoffishness but encountered only one hostile approach. I was taking notes on a table of beautifully engraved powder horns when a man stuck a finger in my face. "Got a license?" he said. When I told him I was writing a magazine story, he walked off with an admonition to the powder horn vendor: "Caution," he said, shaking his head. "Caution."

It seemed an impotent volley for a man with a battalion's worth of rifles—after all, I only had a pen. But as I walked out of the Cow Palace, zipping my notes safely into my backpack, I felt I was protecting something precious, a new collection of stories I'd already begun shaping into the hard lines of sentences. Imagine, letting some nosy editor paw through them, questioning, rearranging what I'd thought was proper.I'd rather take up arms.

—Benjamin Warner

The 2010 Baltimore Antique Arms Show is March 20–21. For more information, go to www.baltimoreshow.com.