Meanwhile, an avowed anti-gunner decides that she will arm herself, using all deliberate ignorance and irresponsibility, in hopes of showing that knowledgeable and responsible gun-wearers must be as ignorant and irresponsible as she.  Follow the continuing saga of stupidity here: http://msmagazine.com/blog/2013/06/12/my-month-with-a-gun-week-one/

I haven’t checked the new DSM-5 to see if they’ve categorized neurofeces (shit for brains). However, we seem to already have a couple of poster children for a prevention campaign.

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Beck has, I believe, done exactly that in his new paperback, “Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns.”  His powerful message begins at the very front with its dedication: “To Martin Luther King, Jr., who preached nonviolence but knew that passive resistance could not be relied on for his own family’s protection. King owned several guns but was subjected to the worst kind of gun control – and deprived of his basic right to defend himself and his family – when police in Alabama denied him a concealed carry permit in 1956. When will we learn? The right to bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Glenn Beck assembled an all-star panel for his research: Dan Andros, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, Stephen Halbrook, David Kopel, and John Lott, supplemented by Sharon Ambrose, Cam Edwards, Joe Kerry, Tim McGinnis, Skip Patel, Meg Storm, and Jacob Sullum. That list includes some of the finest minds that have ever researched the complicated issue of “gun control” and the civil rights of firearms owners.  The result is an excellent short compendium of proof that destroys many of the bogus arguments now being wielded against us.

“We’re experiencing an epidemic of mass gun murders?” “No one needs a fast-shooting, high-capacity firearm?” Beck presents the solid statistics which show otherwise. “A gun in the home is 43 times more likely to kill the occupants than protect them?” Beck’s new work gives the best layman’s explanation I’ve yet seen as to why that figure, from a deeply-flawed and long-discredited study, is totally bogus.

Glenn Beck is a best-selling author. His work reaches people the rest of us can’t reach. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen one of my books for sale at an airport newsstand; “Control” is there conspicuously. He simply gets the message across to folks who won’t be reading or listening to the rest of us. For those of us who are activists in this fight, “Control” is the handiest digest this side of Gun Facts 6.2.

Strongly recommended.

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He captured the nation’s attention again a few months ago when, home stateside and working hard to help vets who came back damaged, Kyle and a friend took a PTSD-suffering veteran to the range at his request. They became victims of cowardly murder at that man’s hands.

At the time of his death, Chris Kyle was working on a second book which celebrated his life-long understanding and appreciation of firearms. His wife and friends finished the job, and “American Gun: A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms” came out this week. The partial manuscript was completed by a team that loved him and understood him: his young widow Taya, and his friends William Doyle and Jim DeFelice.

I was in a Barnes & Noble this past Monday, and even though they had cases already in stock, they adamantly refused to sell me one until Tuesday, the scheduled release date. So, on Tuesday, in another city, I got to another book store and bought a copy.

It lives up to its title.

“American Gun” smoothly weaves firearms development with the history and needs which drove that development. Though it focuses on ten iconic firearms, each is set into the context of generations of development before and after that specimen.  Kyle and company make clear how the guns were used, by whom, and for what purpose. Famous battles and shootouts are described, not to revel in morbid bloodshed, but to illustrate how understanding of human conflict led to the creation of better fighting tools.

Like Kyle’s first book, this one does not appear to be written so much for the specialist in the field, though that reader will certainly appreciate it.  It seems to have been written more for the person new to the topic.  It clearly shows that the gun is a tool, its effect driven by the people who use it. The Thompson submachine gun favored by Al Capone and John Dillinger was considered a life-saver by the Americans of The Greatest Generation who used it to help defeat the Nazis on one side of the world and simultaneously avenge Pearl Harbor on the other.  The book makes clear how the duality of the gun, in that respect, is simply an allegory for the duality of Man.

I hope this book becomes a huge best-seller, too.  More Americans need to understand what Chris Kyle was trying to tell us when he died, a message I thank Taya Kyle and William Doyle and Jim DeFelice for finishing and bringing to a nation which desperately needs to understand it.

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