THE GUN.

Today was the book launch for THE GUN, and it was busy. NPR’s Terry Gross broadcast the Fresh Air interview that was taped yesterday, The New York Times set aside space on the At War blog for readers to ask questions and Popular Mechanics published a long Q&A. (And my job beckoned, too.) This is the beginning. Esquire’s piece and another in The Daily Beast will be out any day, I’ll be answering questions on At War for a few days this week, and by next week I will similarly be fielding queries at the website of Field & Stream, where Anthony Licata, the magazine’s editor, has asked me to begin a conversation with David Petzal, a.k.a The Gun Nut. Wired’s adaptation is also not far off. Tomorrow morning (Wednesday) I’ll be live on NPR’s The Takeway, and on Thursday I’ll be en route to Texas for appearances in Dallas and Austin, for the Texas Book Festival, and then on to San Francisco. Along the way I have to stop in D.C. for a New York Times story in works into arms dealing.

As of this writing, the book had moved onto the top one hundred Bestsellers in Books list on Amazon.com, to #79 #66, and onto the top ten list for best sellers in the History category, to #8 #6. Thank you to each of you who have supported THE GUN. I worked for years on this, in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Asia and Africa, and in the United States, too. I am gratified by your interest. Feel free to send any questions to At War. I will do what I can to answer.

On the subject of At War, once I return from the road I will be posting several items on the site that should interest a range of readers. THE GUN covers so much time and so many places and people that many of the sources I gathered over the years were excerpted briefly in the book’s pages, but might have broad interest on their own. Many of the sources were very hard to find, and were passed along from sources or dug up in archives in many countries. It would be a shame for them to be lost for follow-on researchers. I filled my garage and a few hard drives with a diverse collection, from obscure ballistic reports and bizarre Pentagon tests to a detailed insider’s intelligence profile of Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, to the records of the now defunct Colt’s Firearms Division of Colt Industries, which show some of what the company’s officials knew as they distributed faulty M-16 rifles in Vietnam. And my photo archive is almost bottomless. I’ll keep posting images here as I travel, and will work with At War to get many other materials on-line in the weeks and months ahead, between the work trips back to Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Tyler Hicks and I have been arranging our calendars to work together for a busy set of months ahead, deep into 2011. We just left Afghanistan a few days ago. But we will be back soon enough, after wrapping a pair of stories from the human rights beat.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

A statue of a soldier holding aloft an Egyptian Kalashnikov (known as the Misr) at a memorial for members of Egypt’s armed forces, near Hurghada. Photo by the author. January 2007.