I still get e-mails asking which one was Charles Askins, which one was Elmer Keith, and that sort of thing. So I had fun with that. The new book, “I, Sniper,” is also based on a lot of characters out of politics and, particularly, out of gun culture. If you know your gun culture, you will understand who the antecedents are, and I hope that provides an extra level of pleasure for people inside.

Keefe: In “I, Sniper,” you set what really is the classic gun culture against technology. What was your inspiration?

Hunter: Well, I’ve always been attracted to snipers. I will say this was a peculiar book because Simon & Schuster wasn’t interested at all. They wanted me to go back into a classic Bob Swagger book. From my e-mails and from comments on Amazon, and on all the Web sites, I realized that people were really hungry for me to do a classic sniper book. So I took up an idea that I had 15 years ago. I thought it was a very good premise, and could never figure out quite how to end it. And every ending I came up with was lousy. So I took that premise, and finally 15 years later I figured out where it could go and what would be interesting about it.

Suddenly at that point, it took off, it became very vivid for me and, of course, you’re always looking for a dichotomy. And 15 years ago, there never would’ve been the issue of mil-dot versus computer chip. It just didn’t exist. But suddenly I saw that as a dichotomy, as a way of distinguishing the two sides and contrasting the wisdom of a veteran, and the savvy and experience against the high-tech gizmo of the bad guy. I saw that could make a really interesting sort of way to set the book up. And also, it expressed my fear and loathing of the complexity of long-distance shooting.

Keefe: Working at The Baltimore Sun and at The Washington Post, you were in an environment that was obviously very much in favor of just about any kind of gun-control. Where do you come down?

Hunter: I’ve always loved guns, and I always want access to guns. Guns have provided me with a life of the imagination, they’ve provided me with a financial life, and they’ve provided me with a life of recreation. They’ve also provided me with a political life. When I began, I was a very conformist little twerp in my twenties. I probably went through a period of about five years where I was the typical snarky anti-gun liberal. This was back in the 1960s. Even then I was aware that at some level I was lying; I was not being true to my self.

I was trying to fit into a culture. I will say that everybody was always good to me in newsroom culture. They were wonderful to me on the Sun; they were wonderful to me on the Post. I have no personal animus toward any newspaper person or any colleague or anyone who was snarky to me because, as I grew older, I became more honest about what I was. It became known that I was an NRA member and, to many of them, that is totally inconceivable.

I always saw myself as an ambassador. I always wanted them to say: “Hey, here’s a guy who knows the difference between a .30-’06 Sprg. and a .308 Win., and yet he’s OK. He’s a decent guy, he works like a dog, he contributes to the paper, he’s funny, he’s ironic. He shares our sense of humor; he shares our sense of this or that.” I never wanted to be an unpleasant proselytizer. I said to them, “Look, if you have any questions on gun issues or technologies, I’d be very happy to answer them no matter what.” And as we all know, with the exception of the pieces that I write, the definition of a gun story in a newspaper is a piece of writing with a big stupid technical mistake in it. And that continues to this day.

One of the themes in “I, Sniper” is how an extremely sophisticated news organization can make a really stupid gun error and have no idea that they’re doing it. And the larger question that I’m asking, that I want people to take away from it is: How can you be so certain of your politics if you have such an infirm grasp of the reality of the instrument? You know, maybe if your grasp of the reality of the instrument is ludicrously incorrect, maybe your grasp of the politics of the instrument is ludicrously incorrect, and you want to re-examine both issues. Don’t mix a Remington up with a Winchester, and don’t tell me that banning .223 is going to save lives.

But so much of it is so stupid, and so driven by ignorance. One of the things I wanted them to see was that gun people weren’t a tribe of troglodytes and Neanderthals but are in fact human beings just like themselves. And that the gun world (and even NRA) wasn’t a monolithic battalion of marching robots. But there were disputes within as well as outside of gun culture: There are politics and cliques, there were personalities. And that gun culture wasn’t different than the world, but that gun culture was the world. There are really good people, and there are some people who make everybody a little nervous, but that’s true, that’s the bell curve of human reality. And if we could only see that, instead of thinking stereotypically, then our tolerance, our forgiveness, our willingness to accommodate other points of view and our ability to all get along together without anyone imposing anything on anybody, all that becomes possible.

So that was one of my missions as a journalist for 38-odd years. Whether I accomplished that or not, I don’t know, but that was what was really important to me.

Watch Hunter try out a variety of firearms on the NRA Range.