Lessons Of Boyhood

Eli Saslow: Chanse Mullinix arrived home from fourth grade on the school bus, carrying a Cherry Coke and a plastic bag of his classmates' handmade valentines. He shouted goodbye to the bus driver – "See ya!" — and ran down the sidewalk, because a youth football coach had recommended once that he run everywhere. He climbed the steps to a two-story townhouse — the only home he had ever known, and the place he sometimes referred to as a "great gun museum."

He dropped his camouflage coat into a pile of hunting gear at the entryway and fired an imaginary bullet with his finger at a buck mounted on the living room wall. "Bang!" he said. There were replica guns on the floor, video-game guns on TV,…