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RINGGOLD, Ga. — It was a summer weekend in Northwest Georgia, and two young men were getting together to talk about how to be good guys with guns.

Evan Honeycutt was 18, saving up for a semiautomatic rifle, and the one his teenage brain was dreaming of was an AR-10. His cousin Skylar Honeycutt was 23 and had some questions about that.

Only a few weeks had passed since a young man with a semiautomatic rifle killed 10 people in a grocery store in Buffalo and another young man with a semiautomatic rifle killed 21 people at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., and among the concerns raised by mass shootings in America was whether anyone should have easy access to a semiautomatic rifle such as an AR-10, much less an 18-year-old.

Skylar watched as Evan pulled up to the house and headed to the door. It had been a while since they’d spent time together. In Skylar’s mind, his cousin still existed somewhere between being the skinny kid who had gotten blown flat on his back the first time he fired a shotgun, and the teenager learning to control his adolescent temper. Now he scanned him for signs of burgeoning adulthood: aviators, khaki T-shirt, leather wristband, cowboy boots with engraved silver spurs. Skylar lingered on the spurs.

“What’s up, cowpoke?” he said. “You look like a hick.”

“This town’s not big enough for the both of us,” Skylar continued, and so began a conversation about guns in a part of America where within a 10-minute drive of Skylar’s house there were six gun stores, two firing ranges and a warehouse-size shop specializing in ammunition. Others stocked tactical gear and accessories such as Hell-Fire triggers that could push a semiautomatic rifle toward what was advertised as “full-auto fun.” There was a shop that specialized in custom-painting ARs with designs such as camouflage and red splatters. And up and down rural highways were signs for politicians who blamed mass shootings on everything except the roughly 20 million AR-style rifles circulating in America, especially in places such as Northwest Georgia, where Evan set his pistol on a side table.

His father had bought it, since federal law sets the legal age for purchasing a handgun at 21, as opposed to the legal age for purchasing a rifle, which is 18. But in Georgia, an 18-year-old could legally possess a handgun, and Evan thought of the pistol as his own.

“Did you clear that thing?” Skylar asked now.

They sat in the living room, where a painting of Clint Eastwood in a cowboy hat hung over the fireplace, and Evan began telling Skylar about what he’d been up to.

“I went to see a buddy in the sticks,” he said. “He’s got an arsenal. Has submachine guns, handguns, shotguns, any other kind of long guns you can think of, almost. Got his own range. Big field he owns. Nobody for miles. He brought out all these guns for me to shoot — I shot everything but a sniper.”

Skylar listened. He’d always taken on the role of big brother with Evan, and now he considered it his duty to make sure Evan was ready for an AR-10, a heavier version of the more ubiquitous AR-15 that also fired bigger rounds. It wasn’t that he was worried about Evan becoming some sort of bad guy with a gun; it was that Evan was 18. The part of his brain associated with rational decision-making was still forming. He was impressionable.

“I’m thinking, if I was in this scenario, what would I do?” Evan continued. “How fast could I pull my weapon and fire at this target. Mom’s always worried about my hero complex, but I’m not going to be a peon if there’s an active shooter.”

“That’s what’s so dangerous about a gun though,” said Skylar, finding a chance to make his first point. “You never know how you’re going to react. You might freeze up in that kind of situation. You can’t say for sure.”

“Yeah,” said Evan. “All I know is, me and my friends joke that if there’s a mass shooting, I’m going to be the one that gets him.”

“I’ll be honest,” said Skylar. “If I’m in Walmart, and I’m concealed carrying, and someone starts shooting? Unless they’re near me, I’m not going after him. As much as I’d like to be the hero and save people, I’m trying to get the person I’m with to safety. Plus, I got to think about I may have to kill somebody. And am I prepared to do that? Am I going to miss because of nerves? You got to think about all that kind of stuff.”

“It’s why it’s better to get trained,” Skylar said.

He mentioned a gun safety class he wanted Evan to take.

“I already took classes,” said Evan, who had been commander of his high school Junior ROTC rifle team.

“There’s nothing wrong with learning more,” Skylar said. “You can never know enough. You can never be fully prepared.”

Michael S. Williamson

That was Skylar, the cautious one in the conversation, the one whose memories of guns began with seeing rifles mounted on a wall in his grandfather’s house, and the voice of his father, so stern it could scare him, saying don’t touch a gun, don’t go near a gun, guns are not for children.

He remembered being a young boy, and seeing a gun on the carpet behind the couch at his uncle’s house, and a baby crawling toward it. “I just thought: ‘Danger,’ ” he said, recalling the moment a few days before Evan’s visit.

He remembered scenes from westerns he watched in darkened rooms with his dad and starting to believe that men with guns could do good: Clint Eastwood drawing a gun to save a little girl, or pretending to hand over his pistols to a villain only to spin them around and kill him, or his favorite, Lee Van Cleef shooting Eastwood’s hat cleanly off his head and into the night sky, the hat blowing higher and higher as he shoots it again and again.

He remembered being 10 years old and hearing his mother scream so loud that he thought an intruder was in the house, grabbing a steak knife and running to her room, only to learn that she was screaming because a beloved relative had killed herself with a gun.

He remembered a certain level of violence becoming ordinary. The active shooter drills in middle school, when he sat in the corner of a classroom as an administrator wiggled the door handle. The kid who accidentally shot another kid in the head, killing him. Another kid who shot and killed someone during an argument. “I probably know 10 kids who got killed because they were idiots,” Skylar said.

He remembered wanting a gun, and his dad saying no until the Christmas after he turned 18, when Skylar opened a long, white box containing a lever-action rifle called a Golden Boy.

“Brand spankin’ new,” he said, recalling the walnut stock and brass highlights. “My eyes lit up. I remember sitting down with my dad and him talking to me. He said I love you. He said I want you to have it. He took me shooting and made sure I was safe with it. I fell in love with it. I remember the feeling when I first shot it. It was one of the happiest moments of my life, to be honest. I was like, holy crap, I’m a cowboy now.”

He remembered how else he felt being 18, uncertain and full of wild emotions, listening to extreme metal one day and Dean Martin the next. He sweated when he got mad. He had a strange desire to be punched in the face. He got frustrated and smashed his gaming console once. He remembered his mom and dad paying close attention to his moods, and his dad saying, “Buddy, if you ever get depressed, I want you to tell me,” and his mom saying, “Skylar, are you happy?” He remembered turning 19, and 20, and feeling such things less and less.

He remembered the day he and his dad were stopped at a red light in a rough part of town, and his dad grabbing his pistol from the console, cracking open his door and pointing the gun at a man he thought was about to carjack them but who, it turned out, was just trying to close the door to the gas tank his dad had left unlatched.  As they drove off, Skylar remembered thinking how quickly things can escalate, and how in control his dad had seemed, how capable of making him feel safe.

He remembered wanting to be that kind of man, too, so when he turned 21, he used his pandemic stimulus check to buy a Smith &amp; Wesson 9mm at a pawnshop down the road. He started watching YouTube videos of men shooting guns at blocks of soap and dummy torsos that exploded in slow motion. He wore the pistol around the house to get used to how it felt, and now it was two years later, and he still wasn’t used to it. He still wouldn’t take it out of the house.

He confined himself to shooting groundhogs with his dad’s hunting rifle from a second-story bathroom window. The backyard sloped down into a bowl, and was surrounded by other houses, and Skylar allowed himself to fire only if the groundhogs crossed into an imaginary square of grass.

“I don’t want neighbors to think I’m some young guy willy-nilly popping off,” Skylar said. “I don’t want people to fear me.”

He was sitting on his front porch, thinking about how it felt to be 23. He had a job working at a RaceTrac gas station. He was preoccupied with learning a trade, buying a house, having a family. He thought about how different he felt from when he was 18, and he thought about how young Evan could still seem at times, and about Evan in the world with an AR-10.

“I don’t feel that I know enough yet to go out in public with a gun,” Skylar was saying to his cousin now, trying to lead by example. “I don’t think I’m trained well enough to know how to shoot. I don’t think I’m ready for that kind of situation.”

Evan was swiveling in the recliner. “I’m in a house with my mom? And someone’s threatening her? For the love of God, they’re going or I’m going,” he said.

“But you have to think, are you mentally prepared to do that?” Skylar said.

They started talking about mental preparedness, and mental maturity, and soon, they were talking about the minds of young men who carried out mass shootings.

“If you ask me, the problem is mental illness,” Skylar said. “I think of all the kids who do these killings, that’s involved. They’re depressed. They’ve been bullied. Who knows? They lose their mind because no one pays them any attention.”

“I think we have societal blinders on,” said Evan.

“Think about us,” Skylar said. “One of us gets depressed? We voice it. We have support. But most people don’t get to know people. There’s red flags.”

Skylar mentioned that he’d just heard about a former classmate who’d killed himself. Evan mentioned a friend who had attempted suicide, who still called him up sometimes.

“He’ll just say, ‘Dude, I’m spiraling,’ ” Evan said. “Mostly I just listen.”

“It would not bother me to have a mental evaluation before you could own a gun,” Skylar said. “If you ask me, it makes perfect sense.”

They thought of questions they’d ask a hypothetical 18-year-old in such an evaluation.

“I think there should be questions about real-world scenarios,” Skylar said. “Like, should you pull out a gun here? Do you think it’d be okay to pull a gun here? Do you think it’s legal? If you were armed, would you shoot this guy? How’s your temper? Like, if someone pushed your girlfriend, are you going to shoot them? Are you just going to walk into Wendy’s with it?”

“It raises a certain alertness,” Evan said. “I mean, I’m not going to walk into Bass Pro with an AR-10 strapped to my chest but —”

“No, that’s not helping,” Skylar said. “You’d look like a pretentious asshole.”

“I’d ask about their home life,” Skylar continued. “Do you enjoy going to school? Do you enjoy life? Are you an angry person? If you had a gun, how would you feel? What do you know about this weapon? What is your purpose with it?”

He sensed an opening to talk about why Evan wanted an AR-10 and his purpose with it.

“What I like is you can basically do what you want with it,” Evan began, referring to its adaptability. He pulled up a photo of an AR-10 on his cellphone.

“See, if I wanted, I could get a longer mag or a fatter one,” he said, referring to the magazine, one of the many modifications that AR-style rifles are designed to enable. “Or I could get an angle grip, or a side grip, or a smaller grip. I can get a longer barrel. I could turn that into a hair trigger and make it easier to fire.”

“There are laws —” Skylar said. “Just like you can’t saw off a shotgun.”

“I could get a flash suppressor,” Evan continued, talking about what else he wanted. “My dream rifle is a Diamondback chambered in 6.5 Creedmoor,” he said, referring to another AR-10-style rifle. “I just like big guns. Monkey brain in male body. Ooga-booga. Like, if I got a truck? I’d take out the muffler. For me, it’s the presence. Like, ‘Look at me! I’m big and bad, and I got a car that goes grrrrr. I’m a special boy, listen to me!’ It’s the dopamine surge.”

He returned to the AR-10 and his plans for it.

“I’ll take it to the range when I have time or money to go,” Evan said. “Have some fun with it. And, I mean, even so, there’s the point that in case it ever needs to be used in a militia, I need to know how to use it.”

Skylar listened; it was an interest of Evan’s they had not discussed very much.

“You can’t ever not take all the scenarios into account,” Evan continued. “What if the government takes over? What if we’re invaded by some other military? In situations like that, you’re not going to take a pistol out against what could be an army.”

That was Evan, full of bravado, whose first memory of guns was seeing them in the westerns he watched with Skylar, hours upon hours of Clint Eastwood coolly dispatching the bad guys against a spare desert landscape. That was roughly third grade, which was 10 years ago.

He remembered firing the shotgun that blasted him backward and a boyhood obsession with weapons of all kinds. He shaved down sticks to make little spears and carried rocks in his pockets, and when his mother went into a gas station, he’d follow with some homemade armament, scanning the place for danger.

He remembered becoming infatuated with ancient Western civilizations. He learned the runic alphabet, and old Norse phrases such as “I’m going to tear you to pieces,” and around middle school, started dreaming of “a warrior’s death.”

He remembered having access to his first gun around that time, which was after his parents split, when he and his mother moved to an isolated area and she handed him a pistol and said, “You know more about this than I do,” and he put it in his bedside table.

He remembered how it felt becoming a teenager, and having surges of anger and frustration he had trouble controlling, and partly because of that, moving in with his father as he started high school.

He remembered wanting an AR-10, a gun he said “spoke to me.” He joined ROTC because he wanted to learn responsibility and feel a larger sense of purpose. He started playing a game called airsoft, in which he shot plastic beads from a mock AR-type rifle in various fake combat scenarios. Some of the players introduced themselves as Boogaloo Bois, whom experts describe as a loose network of anarchists interested in sparking civil war, and whom Evan saw as “the minutemen of their times” and “overweight guys with lots of tactical gear.”

He remembered being more impressed with one of his closest friends, who told Evan he was part of a group called the Georgia III Percent Martyrs, which experts describe as an anti-government militia, and which Evan understood to be “kind of like justice warriors.”

He started watching Tucker Carlson, trying to make sense of a confusing world. He discovered an app called iFunny, which is Russian-owned and has been used as a recruiting tool for extremist groups, and which Evan described as full of disturbing videos, soft porn and people who are “Biden haters, Trump haters, authoritarians, left wing, right wing, sideways wing, nothing-wing.” He found videos that convinced him the 2020 election was stolen. He found what he described as “a lot of enthusiastic people in the community of the right wing, talking about ‘Man, I can’t wait for this revolution to happen,’ ” and found himself wondering what that was about.

He also learned about a subculture of hypermasculinity in which men tried to be “Alphas” and “Sigmas” and “Giga Chads,” which Evan said was partly a joke — “Like, a Giga Chad wakes up and shaves with a hunting knife, waterboards himself, does 5,000 push-ups and is ready for the day at 2 a.m.,” he said — and partly serious.

“The serious aspect would be just having as much testosterone as you can,” he said.

It was within that context that Evan turned 18, a day he celebrated by going with his dad to buy the Taurus 9mm pistol that would become his when he turned 21.

“I felt like a kid who got a new PlayStation,” he said. “I had it with me the whole day in the house. When I went upstairs to play games, I had it on the bedside table with me. When I was in the kitchen making a bowl of cereal, I had it in my pocket with me. The barrel was kind of digging into my hipbone. I felt tougher. I know that’s the adolescent answer, but I felt tougher.”

He remembered spending the rest of the day planning the cheapest way he could get the AR-10 he could now legally own. He decided he would buy it piecemeal from an online dealer. He could get what’s called the upper receiver, which included the barrel, for as little as $550. He could get the lower receiver, which included the serial number, the magazine well, the trigger mechanism and the safety, for as little as $220, and he could accessorize from there.

As the months went on, he started saving up, first from a job at Publix and then from his summer job building fences. He tried getting used to the idea that he was supposed to be an adult now, even as he sometimes wished for a boyhood that was only a few years ago. He got the spurs. He got steel-toed boots and brass knuckles. He got his first tattoo, a cross stamped with a Proverb that read, “The wicked flee when no man pursues but the righteous are bold as a lion.” He worked on his temper — tried walking it off, taking a deep breaths, although managing it was still sometimes a challenge.

“You get to the point where you get frustrated, then you get angry, then you reach a certain level,” he said. “It’s not a fun feeling.”

And that was who Evan Honeycutt had become by the summer weekend he pulled into Skylar’s driveway. He had saved up $1,100, more than enough.

2018 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for coverage of Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore

2020 George Polk Award for Political Reporting for stories from Georgia

2020 Scripps Howard Foundation Ernie Pyle Award for stories from Georgia

2018 George Polk Award for Political Reporting for coverage of Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore

2018 Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting for coverage of Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore

2016 Mayborn Institute Best American Newspaper Narratives, First Place for "An American Void"

2015 Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Reporting for "A Father's Scars" and "Behind the Yellow Door"

Columbia University, MA in Journalism

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, BA in History

Stephanie McCrummen is a staff reporter who travels the country writing long-form stories about people and situations that help illuminate the national conversation.

Stephanie McCrummen

washpost

Should 18-year-olds be able to buy semiautomatic rifles? In Georgia, two young men try to decide.

the-washington-post

A Pair of Cousins Want To Be The Good Guys With Guns

Staff Photographer

The Washington Post

staff

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Young guns