At the Gun Range

There are more guns in the United States than there are people. More than 30 percent of adults own one. (I’m one of them.)

Every day, thousands of people travel to indoor ranges across the country — to learn to shoot, to hone their shooting skills, to compete against other shooters, to have a good time.

Safety measures abound at ranges. Shooters wear eye and ear protection. They generally stand in a booth, separated from others by bulletproof walls.

But they still face an overlooked hazard: the concussive blast waves set off by the firing of weapons indoors, which can damage the brain.

A revelation

Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a domestic correspondent for The Times, has experienced those blast waves. He’s a former Marine infantryman whose beat is guns, gun policy and gun culture. Going to the range is part of his job. Among other things, it’s a way to meet sources while keeping his skills up. You can learn a lot at a gun range.

Some months ago, T.M., as we call him, drove to his local range to fire his AR-15 rifle. When he was done, he told me, he felt “distinctly weird.” It took him a long time to pack up his gear. “I’d had lunch,” he said. “I wasn’t dehydrated. I didn’t have a headache. But it took me forever just to raise my wrist to look at my watch.”

He wondered: Can you get a brain injury at the gun range?

T.M. teamed up with Dave Philipps and Jeremy White to find out. Dave, who covers the military and veterans, has written extensively about how firing some weapons can damage brain cells, and how exposure to concussive waves of energy may cause permanent injuries. Jeremy’s a graphics editor who has covered gun culture in the United States on and off for years.

They were eager to find out what happens when people fire civilian weapons indoors. “Guns are just such a big part of our culture,” Jeremy told me yesterday.

The team members did their own testing and gathered their own data. They measured the blast waves of several popular civilian guns at an indoor range, using the same sensors the military uses to study larger weapons.

The data showed that smaller-caliber guns can pose a danger pretty quickly, and that large-caliber civilian rifles delivered a blast wave that exceeds what the military says is safe for the brain. Indoor ranges, designed to make shooting safe, can worsen blast exposure, they discovered.

Jeremy and his colleagues brought the data to life. Using a high-speed camera, they captured what happens when a person fires guns at an indoor range. Jeremy illustrated what happens when those waves reflect off the hard surfaces of a shooter’s booth.

And to show what happens when you fire a large-caliber rifle, he hung a sheet of silk chiffon fabric alongside the prone body of the shooter. (“I spent way too much time in fabric shops in the garment district looking for that,” he said.) Seen in real time, nothing really happens. When he slowed the film, though, the illustration tells a whole story: A powerful wave runs through the fabric when the firing pin hits the cartridge, all but enveloping the shooter’s skull in 7.6 pounds per square inch of concussive pressure.

Here’s what that looks like:

How harmful are those concussive waves on the body? Scientists have yet to answer that clearly, though the military considers some of them unsafe. A recently retired Army blast safety researcher told Dave that repeated blast exposures, however small, may cause damage. “Stretch a rubber band a hundred times and it bounces back, but there are microtears forming,” he said. “The 101st time, it breaks.”

See how the blasts can affect your brain in their investigation. I’m looking into archery, myself.

Now, let’s get you caught up.

THE LATEST NEWS

Dick Cheney

• Dick Cheney, widely regarded as the most powerful vice president in American history, died at 84. He was George W. Bush’s running mate in two successful presidential campaigns.

• He died from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement from his family.

Election Day

• This week is a major test of Trump’s power and influence. He’s facing an Election Day that will offer a sense of voters’ moods, as well as a tariffs case at the Supreme Court and pressure from the grinding shutdown.

• The president endorsed Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayor’s race. “Whether you personally like Andrew Cuomo or not, you really have no choice,” Trump wrote. Zohran Mamdani, the leading candidate, mocked Cuomo for it.

• Trump is imploring Republicans to redraw their congressional maps. Democrats have responded in kind. It’s a nationwide scramble for control of the House before the midterms.

• Mamdani isn’t shy about talking about faith — his own or others’. In Believing, some experts say the Democratic Party should pay attention.

• The most-clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about the polls for New York City’s mayoral race. They still show Mamdani ahead.

Food Stamps

• The Trump administration, ordered by a judge to fund the federal food stamp program during the government shutdown, says it will offer partial payments.

• Another food aid program, for low-income women and children, received more temporary funding.

More on Politics

Other Big Stories

• The consumer products giant that owns Kleenex and Huggies will acquire the maker of Tylenol for about $40 billion.

• Diane Ladd, who died at 89, was a three-time Oscar contender who shape-shifted into strikingly different characters over a career of more than six decades.

ESCAPE FROM HELL

“There were bodies of men and women everywhere — some people were run over by vehicles,” Saeeda, a 28-year-old woman, said. “While we were on the road, they took girls from our group — choosing them and dragging them away.”

Hundreds are arriving with bullet wounds and many bear the signs of torture, according to local medics. Children — presumably orphaned in El Fasher or along the way — are often being deposited not by their parents, but by other escaping strangers. “I’m here alone,” said one young boy with a broken foot. “At night I find places where people gather and sleep on the ground near them,” he added. “I hope someone helps me.”

The civil war in Sudan has displaced 12 million people and may have killed about 400,000. It is, as Declan Walsh, our chief Africa correspondent, called it, “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” Experts call it a genocide. Read more about the escapees from El Fasher.

OPINIONS

If data centers limited their electricity use just slightly, households wouldn’t have to pay so much for energy, Tyler Norris argues.

We usually associate healthy eating with cooking at home. But food can be convenient and healthy at the same time, Julia Belluz writes.

Baby Shark (danger remix): In news from the world of apex predation, a pod of killer whales in the Gulf of California hunts juvenile great white sharks, flipping them onto their backs to stun them and then eating their nutrient-rich livers — and only their livers. “It’s sort of like they’re going for the cheeseburger surrounded by a bunch of celery,” a marine biologist told The Times.

Search query: Dating apps have run into a hurdle the industry calls “the cycle of despair.” That’s when people download a dating app, burn out on swiping and getting ghosted, and then delete it, only to redownload it months later. Can A.I. matchmakers break the cycle and set you up with the right people? They’re trying.

Fare thee well: Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay, a singer who helped shape the sound of the Grateful Dead in the 1970s, died at 78. She and her husband Keith Godchaux, a piano player, joined the band after she approached Jerry Garcia at a club and petitioned him for a tryout.

TODAY’S NUMBER

$360 billion

— That’s about how much Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon have spent on capital expenditures in the last 12 months, mainly to meet consumer demand for artificial intelligence.

SPORTS

N.F.L.: The league’s trade deadline is this afternoon. What happens when players gets traded? Players explain what goes down.

N.B.A.: A former Atlanta Hawks finance executive was charged with embezzling nearly $4 million from the franchise to buy a Porsche, among other things.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

I came up with this recipe for slow-cooker pork tacos with hoisin and ginger years ago, riffing on a classic recipe from the cookbook author Corinne Trang. The braising liquid is a mixture of hoisin and fish sauces that breaks down the pork into a shredded tangle, best accompanied by a bright, crunchy cabbage slaw. Warm flour tortillas nod to the softness of Chinese bao. Set everything up before work in a slow cooker so it can burble away all day on low heat. Or hurry things along with a pressure cooker — about an hour on high. Leftovers make for fantastic banh mi.

10-MINUTE CHALLENGE

The Dutch artist Margareta Haverman painted “A Vase of Flowers” (above) in 1716. Today we’re asking you to spend 10 uninterrupted minutes looking at it to discover what you see and think along the way.

Questions you might ask yourself while you stare: Are they flowers you recognize? How does the artist use color to guide you through the bouquet? After spending some time with the painting, do you feel differently from the way you did before?

If you click here, you’ll be able to explore the painting — making it bigger, for instance, and exploring its contours. Challenge accepted? I hope so!

More on culture

• Tejal Rao was in Miami recently to review Sunny’s, a relaxed and relaxing steakhouse in the Little River neighborhood. “It isn’t a dark, gilded man cave,” she writes. “There’s a softness here, an effervescence and even an abundance of natural light, if you arrive before the sun goes down.” Razor clams, rib-eye, creamed spinach? Yes, please.

• After a troop of macaques escaped an American facility, some activists are demanding that all lab animals be set free, Ava Kofman writes in The New Yorker.

• Do you know how to pronounce Godot, the character who never shows up in Samuel Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot,” currently on Broadway? GOD-oh? Guh-DOH? Opinions vary, as this terrific story about the question shows. Is Godot God or godlike or neither? Beckett, for his part, is tired of answering. “If I knew,” he told a director once, “I would have said so in the play.”

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …

Watch the prolific television writer and producer Ryan Murphy’s new streamer, “All’s Fair,” on Hulu. The show’s about the world of divorce lawyers and stars Sarah Paulson and Niecy Nash, with plenty of Kim Kardashian, Naomi Watts and Glenn Close to keep things interesting.

Clean your bathroom grout, using a TikTok hack tested by the smarties at Wirecutter.

Listen to (or watch!) Wesley Morris talk about Dwayne Johnson and vulnerability on “Cannonball,” his culture podcast. Vulnerability! That’s a new look for the Rock.

GAMES