This is a long article from today's Washington Post, and only the first few paragraphs are posted below. BTW, Stephen Hunter (Post film critic) has written many fictional books featuring guns, including three with Bob Lee Swagger as the former Marine sniper ("Black Light," "Time to Hunt," and one other).

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14195-2001Nov25.html

Dressed To Kill

From Kabul to Kandahar, It's Not Who You Are That Matters, but What You Shoot

by Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 26, 2001; Page C01

These days, we Americans fight our wars with weapons that seem to come from Industrial Light & Magic. Our planes are sleek and characterless, our professionals more cleanshaven technicians than warriors, their faces lit by the phosphors of a glowing screen, their language of battle techno-crisp and parsed.

It's all too Tom Clancy to be that interesting. Only a few of our thousands of men in and around Afghanistan even bother to carry rifles; the rest carry cell phones, Berettas and credit cards.

But the guys we are fighting are different.

They don't have night vision or missiles or even air power. Screens? They don't have no stinking screens. They have one thing: guns. And our few hundred Special Forces operators on the ground -- they're gunmen too. And that's why the front page of this or any other newspaper, or the richly detailed color sections of the newsmags, all look like photo spreads in Shooting Times. Guns are everywhere: knobby, wooden, all pipes and welded joints, ugly, oily, ungainly, battered, dusty, dinged and bent, festooned with straps and blades and bipods and scopes but somehow -- if you read the postures of the men who carry them -- totally comforting.

And not without meaning. Guns are like anything else; they don't exist in a vacuum but in a context -- historic, cultural, political, mechanical -- so if you know your guns and ammo, you can take a reading as any critic can from any art form, and learn some stuff.

much more on the url......

Edited to say I used "]" before and after the url and STILL couldn't get it to link.  Spider, I need more help!

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14195-2001Nov25.html

Not too bad of an article.  He does persist in calling the soviet submachine gun round a 9mm, and the M4 carbine the 4th modification of the M14, thus its name.  What else did I forget?

These are understandable, but technical goofs.  

I might even consider the author sympathetic to my veiw of assault rifles.  Hopefully, more of them will think so in 2004.