They come to Dragonland in droves, often after a mass shooting. The phone begins ringing, and Melissa, the daughter, answers politely. Hello, Dragonman's… Rings again. This is Dragonman's… Ring, ring, like an emergency. Can we help you? She has preternaturally blue eyes, sitting before walls festooned with AK-47s and AR-15s—icons of American top-selling weaponry. Meanwhile, her father, Dragonman, is banging around out back in the metal shop, fusing metal joints, milling and lathing. Bolt, screw, rivet. He wears jeans, a baseball cap, and a tight tee, a bunch of faded tattoos punched on his Popeye forearms, over a hundred in all on his body. His hands are beefy: They're what built Dragonland in the first place.

Though Dragonman has been in Colorado for almost 40 years, he still talks in a busted-up Brooklyn street brogue. When the subject is guns, it's almost a rat-a-tat-tat. "We got da Kel-Tec KSG over here"—which looks similar to a weapon from Grand Theft Auto—"and dis Kalashnikov over here. Last week, I sold an AR-15 for $17,000…" And so on. As a Class-3 gun dealer, Dragonman buys and sells so many weapons each year he's become one of the largest independent purveyors of firearms in western America. On his Facebook page, where he has more than 60,000 followers, he claims that he specializes in "military style rifles…handguns, shotguns, silencers, and full-auto machine guns," or as he tells me, "people-hunting guns." He includes announcements for the annual Halloween pumpkin shoot and the 9/11 memorial machine-gun shoot and a bunch of goofy staged videos, featuring Dragonman ramming cars—belonging to gangbangers, stoners—with his front-loader. His property is a dead-car graveyard.

Dragonman is all about the show—hence, the name (his real one is Mel Bernstein). Owner of 200 machine guns, he calls himself "the most armed man in America," a free-market Hong Kong of weaponry, a sideways P.T. Barnum, a steroidal symbol of this trigger-happy American moment. And each time a customer comes through the door, he—or Melissa, or whoever is stationed at the front desk—stands between us and another potential mass shooter. That is, Dragonman and his employees act as a kind of judge and jury, weighing whether you're in your right mind and whether he, Dragonman, is going to sell you one of the guns off his wall, or bump stocks or flamethrowers.

Unlike Dick's Sporting Goods and Walmart—both American corporations that no longer sell AR-15s and semiautomatic weapons, nor to customers under 21 years of age, in the aftermath of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting—the independent gun dealer decides as he or she sees fit, according to his or her own conscience. There's a lot of gray here. Dragonman's oft-stated argument boils down to this: He doesn't control what people do with the weapons once they leave Dragonland any more than the soda company controls how much soda you drink, or the cigarette company controls the cigarettes you smoke.

"Well, if you get cancer, it's not their fault," he says. And laws are laws, no matter how lax. "As long as you pass the background check and pay for the gun and take two steps out of that door, I'm not responsible."

But can he sleep at night, wondering who lurks out there with one of his weapons, wondering if their name might join others like Eric Harris, Dylann Roof, and Nikolas Cruz in the mass-killer Hall of Fame? In announcing his company's new measures last week, Edward Stack, chief executive of Dick's, told The New York Times, "When we saw what happened in Parkland, we were so disturbed and upset. We love these kids and their rallying cry, 'Enough is enough.' It got to us…. We don't want to be a part of a mass shooting."