Ladies and gentlemen, Our future leaders. You’re gonna love these kids.

and yes, it’s the New Yorker.  Go figure.

Gun Country

March 26, 2018 issue

Gun Country

A new generation of American kids embraces firearms.

Photographs by Sharif Hamza

Text by Dana Goodyear

Nicole Van Blarcom, 14. Stewartsville, New Jersey.

All but one were born in the decade after Columbine; like the student gun-control advocates activated by the recent massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, most are in their teens. But the children depicted here—hunters, target shooters, competitors in trap and skeet—occupy a parallel realm, where guns signify not danger, alienation, and the threat of death but safety, discipline, and trust.

Joaquin Elizondo, 9. Edinburg, Texas.

Several years ago, while on a road trip, Sharif Hamza, a British-born photographer who lives with his wife and two daughters in Brooklyn, met a grade-school kid with a shotgun in the Arizona desert. Watching the boy’s father patiently instruct him in safety procedures, Hamza was struck by how different the interaction was from the culture he grew up in, where soccer was the game in the park and the rich kids might golf or ski, but shooting was practically unheard-of.

Shannara McDunn, 17. Helena, Montana.

Matt Kirby, 11. Billings, Montana.

Lane Bequette, 11. Laurel, Montana.

Nathan Dierenfield, 12. Billings, Montana.

Curious, Hamza reached out to 4-H clubs—which

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