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direct impingement versus piston, and competition triggers—none of which meant a thing to me. After he’d called me “sir” about five times, I asked whether he was ex-military. “Yes, sir. Marine Corps.”
    “Iraq?”
    “Afghanistan.”
    “And you like these?”
    “It’s the only rifle I’d carry into combat, sir.”
    “But I’m not going into combat. Why would I want it?”
    “Accuracy. Shootability. Compared to others, the ammo is cheap and available.”
    From over my shoulder came a rumbling whisper: “Don’t do it, man.”
    I turned, and there stood Mutt and Jeff—one slight and compact in a short high school athletic jacket and pressed jeans, the other an unshaven giant in open galoshes, an earflaps hat, and a quilted, olive-green coat over coveralls. “Excuse me?” I said.
    “Don’t do it,” the big man said quietly. “That eight hundred bucks is just the beginning. Once they got you, they got you.”
    “Yeah,” said his wiry friend, gazing raptly into a case full of gun parts. “It’s like heroin; the first taste is cheap.”
    The clerk laughed nervously. “Yeah, there’s a lot of cool pieces-parts to buy, that’s for sure.”
    The big guy snorted. “I bought that same rifle right here in this store back in September for eight hundred dollars,” he said. “I’ve spent, what, another two thousand? Three?” His friend nodded. “I’m not saying I’m sorry. I’ve got a very cool rifle, and I love to shoot it. But you open
Guns & Ammo
, or just walk in here, and every month there’s something else you gotta have.”
    “Like what?” I set the rifle on the counter, and the big guy launched into a techno-rap like the kid’s.
    “What’d I do?” he asked his friend, and began bending back carrot fingers. “First it was the Magpul stock; that was like a hundred and a half. Then the Command Arms grip—another forty. Then the forearm with the Picatinny rails, another hundred and something …”
    “And then you’re in real trouble,” said the friend, getting down on one knee to peer into the case.
    “Right. Because then it’s all the stuff you can hang
on
the rails. Your lasers, your lights. There was that SureFire Universal WeaponLight I saw in
Blood Diamond
and had to have …”
    “It fucking never stops.”
    “It fucking never stops. Scopes, trigger packs, sights. You get one on there, and the next week they come out with something even cooler, and you have to get that.”
    “Wait,” I said. “You’re saying you change the
stock
?” The stock is the body of a gun—on a traditional rifle, it’s the wooden part. The idea of modifying a rifle that way seemed as bizarre as customizing a car by replacing the chassis.
    “The stock, the barrel, the trigger, the grip—anything,” the little guy said, his face still pressed to the glass. “I even changed the caliber on mine—bought a 6.5 Grendel upper so I could hunt deer. That cost me, shit, almost seven hundred before I was done.” The red-haired clerk turned to the rifle on the counter and began snapping it apart. In about ten seconds, using no tools, he’d reduced it to six or seven components, a disassembled Lego toy.
    “It’s like that small-block Chevy,” the clerk said. “You could take and use it for almost infinite applications by changing the intake manifold, the cylinder heads, the pistons, and the cranks.”
    As they chattered on, I couldn’t tell whether they were describing an undiagnosed gear addiction or merely a reasonable affection for a device as versatile as a Leatherman pocket tool. Shooters could not only trick out ARs, they explained; they could turn them into entirely different guns. Swap this part and that part, and your basic .223-caliber AR-15 could shoot everything from a diminutive .22 rimfire up to a deer-killing 6.5 Grendel. Swap parts again and the AR could shoot the AK-47 round favored by every third-world army and guerrilla movement from Venezuela to the Congo. Swap again and