Book review, ARMS by A.J. Somerset

[flamin lib]

Wisdom from a gun-owning moderate
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/wisdom-from-a-gun-owning-moderate/2015/09/25/05f1e6b0-5256-11e5-9812-92d5948a40f8_story.html

The point of view of “Arms,” A.J. Somerset’s history of gun culture, might be more important than any of the stories he tells.

Somerset traces firearms history back to frontier times, through old westerns and battlefields (actual and, later, cultural), and onward to the National Rifle Association, mass shootings, fantasies of a zombie apocalypse and the white picket fences of suburbia, where housewives squeeze off rounds at the range with pink guns. (The color white plays an important role in this history: Somerset writes that “race war has long been the drunken uncle of American gun culture.”)

But what makes his book entertaining, often funny and ultimately an important addition to the limited canon on guns is that Somerset is a gun guy. He owns them, shoots them and loves them. And yet he is exasperated because gun owners, along with their culture and rhetoric, have increasingly “grown more radical,” leaving “anyone who breaks ranks” as a “traitor to the cause.”
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The loudest voices in the ensuing debates tend to be those at each extreme, leaving out the important middle, where solutions often emerge. “As the treetop squawking and screeching begins, the loudest monkeys take over, and the moderates find better ways to spend their time — partly because, as moderates, they don’t worry too much from day to day about apple pie, democracy and the AR-15,” Somerset writes. “And so the podium is left to the radical, the only one who really wants to stand at the mike and rant. The thing about living in a septic tank is the nasty stuff floats.”

My copy will arrive shortly and I'm looking forward to reading something from a moderate like myself. Available on Amazon for $15.00 in paperback.

I have to agree with the septic tank comment, see it all the time on gun forums.

[jimmy the one]

1. Bravo to author Somerset

The point of view of “Arms,” A.J. Somerset’s history of gun culture, might be more important than any of the stories he tells.

Instantly reminded me of Michael bellesiles (bell - ile) 'Arming America', which is a very good read with a few inaccuracies which the gun lobby made him pay dear for. It was also referred to as a 'history of America's gun culture'.
Will be interesting to see how the nra & gun lobby approach Somerset's book, whether they will attack it like the did Arming America.

A former soldier who is now a technical writer in Canada, he skewers the gun industry, particularly the NRA, for convincing many gun owners that the Second Amendment is “the single most important sentence in the entire Bill of Rights” and that any threat to expanding gun ownership — universal background checks, for instance — is “an attack on Mom, apple pie, democracy, and Jesus himself.”
(The color white plays an important role in this history: Somerset writes that “race war has long been the drunken uncle of American gun culture.”)

A recent Pew poll found that 49% of gun owners favor a ban on assault rifles and 61% favor a federal database of gun sales — propositions the gun lobby vehemently opposes. Of course, all of those numbers are even higher for non-gun-owners, but they show that at least half of gun owners are moderate — or as Somerset would say, sensible — in their view of gun laws. But when was the last time we heard from these people? Somerset has a harsh answer: “Culture war favors the blowhard, and by framing gun control as culture war, the NRA distracts us from the serious policy questions while silencing internal dissent.”

Somerset is particularly critical of the gun industry’s appeals to women, which he calls a strange nod toward feminism by the men in charge of the heavily male-dominated gun industry. The message is this: Women need a gun to be safe and strong, and it is their sovereign right to defend not just themselves but their rights. Somerset writes about Victoria Rutledge, a woman in rural Idaho who had a loaded handgun in her purse at Wal-Mart and was shot there with it by her 2-year-old son. “The finger of blame here points not at [her],” Somerset writes, “but at the armed-camp vision of America, the culture of complete preparedness that insists you must go armed, that you must at all times have a loaded weapon within reach, with a round in the chamber, ready to fire. Veronica Rutledge’s death was not the tragedy of a young mother’s negligence with a loaded handgun. It was the tragedy of a culture of negligence.”