asked.
“Everything!” he said. “I wanted to take the next step—feel the recoil and pull the trigger.” He cocked his head, studied me for a moment, and seemed to realize that it sounded a little odd. He dropped his voice a manly octave. “In a world of stuff you throw away, firearms are something you can hand down for generations, right?”
The day after he bought the Hi-Point carbine, he went to another pawnshop and bought a Springfield XD pistol, also in nine-millimeter; it seemed cool to own two guns of the same caliber. “I still wasn’t telling my parents I had these.” He giggled and sipped his Sprite. “I kept them in my closet.”
He was home alone again one day, bored, playing with the pistol in his bedroom. He was dry-firing, pulling the trigger on an empty chamber, which normally is a fine way to practice a trigger pull. With a loaded magazine in the gun, though, it’s textbook stupid. He pulled the trigger and racked the slide to recock the gun. Alas, racking the slide scooped a cartridge from the magazine into the chamber. He pulled the trigger again.
“It took me about ten seconds to realize what had happened,” he said. “I was completely deaf, but I could smell the powder. I’m running around in a total panic, looking for the bullet. Then I stop, take a deep breath. I go upstairs and I can see the drywall punched out of the floor of my parents’ dressing room. I go back downstairs, and I can see that it’s gone through a vent in my ceiling, missing the ceiling fan by this much. Ultimately, it lodged in a wall stud.” He laughed and sucked at the ice at the bottom of his Sprite. “I explained to my dad when he got home. I told him, ‘I just had a negligent discharge. This is for you—it’s a pistol, and a bag with forty-nine rounds.’ He was like ‘Oh, okay, thank you.’ He didn’t show any emotion. That was it. My mom still doesn’t know.” His face burned scarlet; he looked like a pomegranate. Equally sodden with gun fantasy as a kid, I might have made a similar mistake—but for my rigorous range time with Hank Hilliard.
“And the AR-15?”
He sighed, relieved to be back on that subject. “I started building that after getting into the game
America’s Army
, which is released by the Army for recruiting purposes. I liked it. You’ve got to go through basic training, marksmanship, and an obstacle course before you can actually play.” In that game, he’d used the shortened, commando version of the M16—the M4. And once again, he’d set down the gaming console and gone to the gun store—this time, to buy a real AR-15. In his telling of the story, he was switching back and forth from virtual gun to real gun so quickly that I had trouble keeping track. I wondered if he sometimes had the same problem.
Pushing aside the detritus of our lunch, he told of the parts and accessories he had swapped on and off of his AR-15 in the year since he’d bought it. He kept lapsing into such phrases as “At that point I got the new railed hand-guard from LaRue Tactical, which made me replace the gas block.” I found the details hard to follow. In my experience, about the only things you could change on a rifle were the sights and the sling that hung it from your shoulder. But I gathered that he had changed something on the rifle about every four days since he bought it, the way I’d swapped derailleurs and hubs on and off my ten-speed bike back in the seventies. “I like the shooting,” he said. “I like shooting as cleanly as possible. But I really like the engineering—the springs, the detents, the catches. I sometimes think,
Hmm, this piece hangs a bit
, or
This roller pin wobbles
. I like taking the whole gun apart in my room. Whenever I shoot, I roll out my cleaning mat and take it all down. I take the bolt apart every time, cut off small pieces of patch, and run them through the firing-pin channel.” The kid kept talking, losing himself in the arcana of direct
“Everything!” he said. “I wanted to take the next step—feel the recoil and pull the trigger.” He cocked his head, studied me for a moment, and seemed to realize that it sounded a little odd. He dropped his voice a manly octave. “In a world of stuff you throw away, firearms are something you can hand down for generations, right?”
The day after he bought the Hi-Point carbine, he went to another pawnshop and bought a Springfield XD pistol, also in nine-millimeter; it seemed cool to own two guns of the same caliber. “I still wasn’t telling my parents I had these.” He giggled and sipped his Sprite. “I kept them in my closet.”
He was home alone again one day, bored, playing with the pistol in his bedroom. He was dry-firing, pulling the trigger on an empty chamber, which normally is a fine way to practice a trigger pull. With a loaded magazine in the gun, though, it’s textbook stupid. He pulled the trigger and racked the slide to recock the gun. Alas, racking the slide scooped a cartridge from the magazine into the chamber. He pulled the trigger again.
“It took me about ten seconds to realize what had happened,” he said. “I was completely deaf, but I could smell the powder. I’m running around in a total panic, looking for the bullet. Then I stop, take a deep breath. I go upstairs and I can see the drywall punched out of the floor of my parents’ dressing room. I go back downstairs, and I can see that it’s gone through a vent in my ceiling, missing the ceiling fan by this much. Ultimately, it lodged in a wall stud.” He laughed and sucked at the ice at the bottom of his Sprite. “I explained to my dad when he got home. I told him, ‘I just had a negligent discharge. This is for you—it’s a pistol, and a bag with forty-nine rounds.’ He was like ‘Oh, okay, thank you.’ He didn’t show any emotion. That was it. My mom still doesn’t know.” His face burned scarlet; he looked like a pomegranate. Equally sodden with gun fantasy as a kid, I might have made a similar mistake—but for my rigorous range time with Hank Hilliard.
“And the AR-15?”
He sighed, relieved to be back on that subject. “I started building that after getting into the game
America’s Army
, which is released by the Army for recruiting purposes. I liked it. You’ve got to go through basic training, marksmanship, and an obstacle course before you can actually play.” In that game, he’d used the shortened, commando version of the M16—the M4. And once again, he’d set down the gaming console and gone to the gun store—this time, to buy a real AR-15. In his telling of the story, he was switching back and forth from virtual gun to real gun so quickly that I had trouble keeping track. I wondered if he sometimes had the same problem.
Pushing aside the detritus of our lunch, he told of the parts and accessories he had swapped on and off of his AR-15 in the year since he’d bought it. He kept lapsing into such phrases as “At that point I got the new railed hand-guard from LaRue Tactical, which made me replace the gas block.” I found the details hard to follow. In my experience, about the only things you could change on a rifle were the sights and the sling that hung it from your shoulder. But I gathered that he had changed something on the rifle about every four days since he bought it, the way I’d swapped derailleurs and hubs on and off my ten-speed bike back in the seventies. “I like the shooting,” he said. “I like shooting as cleanly as possible. But I really like the engineering—the springs, the detents, the catches. I sometimes think,
Hmm, this piece hangs a bit
, or
This roller pin wobbles
. I like taking the whole gun apart in my room. Whenever I shoot, I roll out my cleaning mat and take it all down. I take the bolt apart every time, cut off small pieces of patch, and run them through the firing-pin channel.” The kid kept talking, losing himself in the arcana of direct
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