When I was nine, my dad took me down to my grandfather’s basement. In one corner, the elder Gibbons-Neff had his desk, along with a painting of the submarine-hunting warship he had crewed in World War II and a locked cabinet full of guns.
Inside were some shotguns and my dad’s .22-caliber bolt-action rifle. The scarred wooden gun had been given to him in the early 1950s, when he was around my age.
After some pleading and safety training with the rifle, my dad let me shoot it at a paper target outside. I don’t know when he said it, but I remember it distinctly: It was the first time he had fired a rifle since 1966, when he served in the Vietnam War.
So began my complicated relationship with firearms.
When I was a boy growing up in suburban Connecticut, target shooting at my grandfather’s farm in Maryland felt a little rebellious. At one point, I thought it would be cool to sew an N.R.A. patch onto my sweatshirt, but like most teenage boys I didn’t know how to sew, or care to learn.
Shooting was a hobby that made me feel different, as if I had a skill few of my classmates possessed. When I was 18, I even used money from a summer job to buy an M-1 Garand, the semiautomatic rifle used by American G.I.s in World War II.
In 2007 I joined the Marine Corps, an institution where I memorized a boot camp creed that begins: “This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.”
That skill I had developed as a kid improved during training. It turned into my purpose; mastering weapons and small unit tactics would keep me and my friends alive. As an infantryman, killing our enemy in combat would elevate us to a revered institutional place.
Just before I left the Marines, in 2011, I purchased an AR-15. Having been welded to my rifle during two deployments to Afghanistan — it was no more than an arm’s distance away, at all times — part of me felt naked without it.
But for more than a decade, as I attended college and then started working as a reporter, the rifle sat at my grandfather’s farm. I rarely shot it.
In the early years of my journalism career, I covered mass shootings in California and Tennessee for The Washington Post. My personal knowledge of the weapons used in these shootings helped me report on them.
I joined The Times in 2017, where I have since reported from multiple conflict zones, including Iraq, Ukraine and Afghanistan. During those assignments, I watched as the same types of weapons I once carried were used to commit violence, in wars that looked like they would never end. While reporting in Ukraine, my experience on a Marine sniper team provided enough credibility for a cadre of Ukrainian snipers to take me and a colleague along on a mission to the front line.
Still, when I returned to the farm to see my aunt and uncle (my grandfather died in 2007), my rifle seemed like an artifact from another life, one that had both left me behind and remained relevant to my work.
After roughly four years spent covering wars, I am back in the United States. Last spring I started a new beat: reporting on America’s guns, its gun control policy and its gun culture; a complicated term, because there are many gun cultures in the United States, and around the world.
It’s almost intellectually impossible to write about the appeal and popularity of firearms here at home without also discussing the firearms-related crime and violence unique to this country. I thought, maybe naïvely, that I would be the right person to parse the scope of it all: I knew enough about the general culture, and could try to help explain a part of the United States where The Times doesn’t really have a cultural foothold. But much has changed since I first picked up my father’s .22.
Gun violence and mass shootings are now distressingly common, and law-abiding gun owners must live under that weight, just as the rest of the country does. They, too, are asked to reckon with these crimes. This tense climate has eclipsed coverage in the national media of the popularity of shooting, hunting, tactical firearms training and competitions, and the massive consumer and entertainment market that has grown alongside this important part of American identity.
I hope to change that, in part, by serving as a bridge between those who look skeptically at The Times’s coverage of gun ownership, and those who have never handled a firearm.
I had to start again somewhere. I drove to the farm, took my AR-15 from the safe for the first time in years and went to the range. As I started to clean the gun afterward, I separated the upper receiver from the lower receiver, and removed the bolt and charging handle. For a second, after I broke the bolt down, removing the firing pin and its retainer — something I once could do with my eyes closed — I almost forgot how to put it back together.
Almost.
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